Greg Blake Miller
Managing Editor
Contact: 868-4514 • Email
Miller has helped lead Vegas Seven’s editorial team since 2010, during which time the magazine has received more than 40 state and regional honors. Named Nevada’s Outstanding Journalist for 2011, he is interested in both Las Vegas’ grand myths and its quiet spaces. “Sometimes our city’s indefensible,” he says, “but in the end it’s unsinkable. There’s strength in our sense of difference here—that chip on the shoulder keeps us fighting.”
Las Vegas is Miller’s hometown, but his career has taken him to Seattle, Los Angeles and Moscow, Russia, where he was a staff writer for the Moscow Times. He has also taught journalism, communication studies, literature and writing at the University of Oregon and UNLV.
Miller holds a doctorate in international communication from the University of Oregon, and has spoken at national and international communication conferences, often focusing on the unexpected connections between nostalgia, media and social progress. He sees these connections both in his work on Russian cinema and in his closer-to-home writing on the history of UNLV basketball. A Rebel fan since childhood, he admits the one thing that can pull him away from a good Russian movie is an even better UNLV basketball game.
Recent Articles
Who We Are
March 15th, 2012
For insight into the recent opening of The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, we turn to the erstwhile NFL coach Dennis Green.
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'Play Hard Exceed Expectations, Never Quit'
The first year as UNLV's head coach has been a long, strange journey for Dave Rice. But his childhood—and his father—prepared him well for just this moment.
March 8th, 2012
With a 25-7 record, the inaugural edition of Dave Rice’s Rebels had made themselves not only a Goliath worth felling but a team worth believing in. And at this darkest point of a bright season, Rice would be the last man to stop believing. He may have picked up some of that confidence from his old mentor, Jerry Tarkanian, but long before he played for Tark’s 1990 national title team, Rice had learned the art of calm and perspective from another coach—his father, Lowell Rice.
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The Clotted Artery of Interstate 15
March 1st, 2012
On first glance, what California gas prices beget from a Nevadan is this: HAHAHAHAHAHA! A more reflective take might be this: Oh, shit, we’re next. And on a higher level of discourse—that’s “interdependence,” for you Stephen Covey fans out there—the response would be this: If it costs ’em a fortune to get here, maybe they won’t come.
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Miles Dickson
The Connector
January 26th, 2012
When Miles Dickson was 16 years old, he got a job answering phones for Billy Walters’ small empire of Las Vegas golf courses. By the time he was 20, he had made himself into the company’s resident specialist in revenue management, developing customer profiles, creating special pricing programs and figuring out “how to make more money by doing what we were doing anyway.” At 23, he was making $80,000 a year. Then he quit to go to law school.
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Craig Morganson
Mr. Inside
January 26th, 2012
The sun is shining on Craig Morganson, on the lean face, the open collar, the deep-set blue eyes. You can see the clockworks within each iris. He is atop his perch behind a tall table at the Red Velvet Café on Sahara and Buffalo. The plate-glass window is his spotlight. He tells me the value of vegan food. It is, he says, clean energy for the body. “Garbage in,” says the travel-tech pioneer, “garbage out.” He bites into a vegan panini, looks out the window, sees someone snooping around his candy-apple red, all-electric Tesla.
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January Blues
January 5th, 2012
I drove down a residential street in the south Valley and found a private home with a decorated mailbox where kids could put their letters to Santa. (No word yet on the response.) I went to UNLV’s basketball game against the University of California at 2 p.m. on a Friday and found more than 15,000 fellow fans in a festive holiday mood, which the Rebels’ stellar performance only intensified. Afterward, I took my son on a long walk on the UNLV campus, culminating at Einstein Bros. Bagels on Maryland Parkway. On our way back, the sky had gone deep purple behind the Lied Library, and for a moment I was sure that there wasn’t a more beautiful place in the world. For those of us who long to believe, the holiday soil is rich indeed.
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To Run With the Pac
UNLV should dream big and do everything it can to get into the Pac-12 Conference. Here’s why.
January 5th, 2012
In the hallowed tradition of unrealistic New Year’s resolutions, I am proposing the following gem for UNLV: Win admission into the Pac-12 Conference. In fact, take a friend, or even an enemy along with you—say, that biggest-little-city school up north that calls itself simply “Nevada,” or that freshly minted beast of the Big East, San Diego State. Call it the Pac-14.
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The Real Las Vegas
December 22nd, 2011
We’ve spent a year relishing what we were and defining who we are. Now it’s time to gather whatever wisdom we’ve gained, take a hard look at the present and get to work.
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The Rebel Rise
December 1st, 2011
The night of Saturday, Nov. 26, at the Orleans Arena, where the survivors of Boomageddon huddled together and greeted the dawn. Sports do not heal socioeconomic distress, and even their emotional salve can be overrated—we all have to come home from the stadium at some point. But when UNLV’s basketball team defeated the top-ranked squad in the nation, something enduring was afoot.
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The Rebel Rise
November 30th, 2011
Here in the second decade of the third millennium A.D., the quickest way for a Las Vegan to sense the grand sweep of history is not to Google the words “Decline” and “Rome” but to go house-hunting down the street. When the weather is fine, as it certainly was over Thanksgiving weekend, and the stores are full, which they certainly were, it’s easy to forget that we live among ruins.
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