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Jane Ann Morrison worked for four newspapers over 48 years and 44 of those years she was based in Las Vegas, reporting on everything from the mob to gaming and politics.
She arrived in Las Vegas in 1976 to work for the Review-Journal, where she reported on-and-off for 38 years. She started as the night cops reporter, wrote magazine features and became the newspaper’s federal court reporter around the time the FBI began focusing on bringing down the Las Vegas mob.
Morrison wrote about then-Gaming Commission Chairman Harry Reid during this period, when Reid publicly beefed with mobsters like Frank Rosenthal. She also covered Oscar Goodman when he was a lawyer for mob enforcer Anthony Spilotro and wrote many columns about his mayoral days. She was the first to confirm that Rosenthal was a government informant, although Goodman consistently denied it.
Writing about political corruption and gangsters like Spilotro and Rosenthal turned out to be perfect training for becoming the Reno Gazette-Journal’s Las Vegas bureau chief in 1986. She also covered the 1987 and 1989 Nevada legislative sessions for the Gazette-Journal, which prepared her to become the Review-Journal’s political reporter when she returned to the paper in 1990. In the early aughts, she reported on Clark County Commissioner Dario Herrera’s shady dealings and juicy contract with the Las Vegas Housing Authority even before it was revealed the FBI was investigating him for taking bribes.
Morrison became the Review-Journal’s first female general interest columnist in 2003 and wrote about everything from politics, the mob and corrupt politicians to hoarders, cookies and coloring her hair the first time.
Her columns were deeply reported; when she found a topic that interested her she stuck with it. One of her crusades led the Nevada Board of Medical Examiners to put disciplinary actions against doctors back on its website after the board had removed that information.
Sometimes she failed. Her advocacy for appointing rather than electing state judges didn’t persuade voters.
In 2014 she cut back from three columns a week to one before completely retiring in 2018.
Morrison began her career in 1971 as a “copykid” for the Christian Science Monitor in Boston. Two years later she moved back to her birthplace, Fort Smith, Arkansas, to work for the Southwest Times Record, where she covered everything from cows killed in the road to Bill Clinton’s failed run for Congress.
She was also the only one in the newsroom the day former South Vietnam Prime Minister Ng Cao Ky was spotted eating lunch at a hotel coffee shop by the paper’s publisher. She rushed to interview Ky and ended up accompanying him to Fort Chaffee.
