Going your way
by James Rutherford
May 1, 2009
The new Casino Journal looks forward to joining you for the "ride" that is the current gaming industry
Welcome to the new Casino
Journal.
If you’ve turned to this page you’ve already noticed our
new look — the bold flag on the cover, a cleaner, more readable typeface, the
splashes of extra color — and you’ve scanned the Table of Contents so you know
we’re expanding our coverage to keep you abreast of what’s going on from the
Las Vegas Strip to the Cotai Strip and everywhere in
between.
“All Gaming, All the World,” our new logo states. Really
it’s nothing more than an acknowledgement of the obvious. As we know, decisions
are being made today in Vegas, in Ledyard, in London, on Wall Street and in
Washington, in Beijing, in Santiago, in Hong Kong, in Brussels, in Moscow and
in Sydney that will play out tomorrow in profound ways in Illinois and Atlantic
City, in Saratoga and Sentosa, in Ontario, in Aragon, in Nova Gorica, in Altai,
in Macau and Malaysia and Taiwan. If there was any doubt that we’re all in this
together, for better or worse, the travails of the last year have assured us
otherwise. No one is under the illusion anymore that gaming is immune from the
forces affecting the larger economy. We’ve learned, not without some
discomfort, that when it rains we all get wet.
At Casino Journal
we’ll be keeping a weather eye on how it’s all connected and how it’s all so
different, where it ties together and how it often unravels, how the welfare of
each of the seemingly disparate sectors of this industry impacts them all.
We’ll be tapping into the insights of an Editorial Advisory Board comprised of
some of the best minds in the business. They hail from every corner of the
globe and from just about every one of those sectors. Our aim is that you’ll
come away from the magazine each month with some fresh insight into the trends
that could affect your stake in this fabulous and fabulously peculiar industry
of ours and in the process become better acquainted with the people and ideas
that are driving it headlong into the 21st century.
Speaking of leadership, at the 2009 Southern Gaming
Summit in Biloxi this month we’ll have the honor of toasting Isle of Capri
Casinos President & COO Virginia McDowell, our “Gaming Executive of the
Year”. At Isle they’re going toe to toe with this bear of an economy, and if
you don’t know the extraordinary Ms. McDowell already it would be worth your
while to get to the Gulf
Coast to meet
her.
We’re excited as well about the sack full of awards
we’re presenting later this month at the seventh annual Gaming Technology
Summit in Las Vegas.
They’ll be placed in the deserving hands of some very creative people, the
developers behind our “Top 20 Most Innovative Gaming Technology Products” of
the last year.
In the pages that follow, our partners Clear Seas
Research take the pulse of hundreds of casino marketers in an exclusive new
feature we call “By The Numbers”. In our expanded “Games & Technology”
section you’ll get a peek at the show floor of next month’s G2E Asia. In
“Talking Points” we pick the very astute brain of the man leading the
Mississippi Casino Operators Association through these difficult times, IP
President Jon Lucas. In “Property of the Month,” another new feature, we go up
the Mississippi the other way, to Vicksburg, to discover
once again why no gambling joint is quite like any other.
Unprecedented challenges lie in wait for our
industry in the months ahead. The journey will be nothing if not interesting.
We look forward to joining you for the ride.
James Rutherford
is a New Jersey-based freelance writer.
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