During his career, Howard Stutz has occasionally taken jobs in public relations.
But always, he’s found journalism to be his true calling.
“I kept going back to it,” Stutz tells CDC Gaming.
Stutz, former CDC Gaming executive editor and presently a reporter with the Nevada Independent, recently announced his retirement at the end of the 2026. It will cap more than 40 years in the journalism, starting with covering high school football during the early 1980s while at San Diego State University, to witnessing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina while with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, to being a jack-of-all trades reporter with the Nevada Independent.
“It was my six-year mark with the Indy in May, and that includes my year of freelancing,” Stutz says. “I just thought that it was the time to do it, and to wait (to retire) till the end of the year. I wanted to give them time to figure how they wanted to fill my position.”
Stutz was working at the Las Vegas Review-Journal when Hurricane Katrina ravaged Mississippi and Louisiana in 2005. He remembers then American Gaming Association President Frank Fahrenkopf at G2E saying it was the worst disaster for the gaming industry because casinos from Biloxi to Gulfport were wiped out. Stutz insisted the Review-Journal had to cover it, and soon after the hurricane hit he found himself in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Stutz came back to Las Vegas with six stories and subsequently returned for the first and 10-year anniversaries of Katrina.
“That’s the kind of stuff I was able to do that I was really proud of,” he says.
Stutz also visited other gaming hotspots, traveling to Macau; Washington, D.C.; and Virginia. But when he started with CDC Gaming (then CDC Gaming) in 2018, it was the first time Stutz was able to cover gaming nationally.
It was just after the sale of the Las Vegas Review-Journal to magnate Sheldon Adelson, and Stutz was seeking work that challenged him.
“I bounced around a couple of PR jobs that didn’t really work out,” Stutz says. “And then (former publisher) Jeffrey (Compton) brought me in as the executive editor, and it was fun to be able to grow CDC. I’m so happy to see where it is now.”
“I’ve always been impressed by Howard’s depth of knowledge about the gaming industry and the perspective he brings to covering it,” said Cory Roberts, publisher of CDC Gaming. “We were fortunate to have someone of his reputation and experience at CDC Gaming, which helped establish us as a more prominent and credible voice in the industry.”
The siren call of newspapers beckoned Stutz again in 2021, where he became senior reporter for the Nevada Independent, working with his longtime friend, CEO and Founder Jon Ralston. At the “Indy,” he’s covered a variety of topics, including tourism and business in addition to gaming.
“There’s a great team and a young group of journalists,” Stutz says. “I love collaborating with them.”
In July, Stutz was notified he’s one of the newest members into the Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame. Along with former colleagues and friends Mary Hynes, Ron Kantowski, and Mike Smith, Stutz will be inducted September 26 during a ceremony at Springs Preserve in Las Vegas.
It’s a long way from spending Friday nights covering high school football games when all his collegiate friends were at parties. It’s miles away from the sometimes drudgery of public relations work.
But it’s the sweetest reward for a guy who was never more engaged than when he was writing stories about the gaming industry.
“It’s a really a fascinating industry to cover,” Stutz says. “That’s what I found so much fun about it, having watched all the growth from the beginning, and being in Las Vegas, being in the center of it all. That really drove me.”
