Today in MoroniaBy David Sarno
(LATimes) In the wake of the transition to digital television, Southland viewers are finding they can get nearly three times as many channels as they once could with an antenna. And rather than the erratic, fuzzy reception of yesteryear, today’s rabbit ears are capable of delivering a surprisingly clear high-definition picture.
Read the rest: Rabbit ears make comeback in digital TV era — latimes.com.
By Motoko Rich
(NY Times) William Styron may have been one of the leading literary lions of recent decades, but his books are not selling much these days. Now his family has a plan to lure digital-age readers with e-book versions of titles like “Sophie’s Choice,” “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and Mr. Styron’s memoir of depression, “Darkness Visible.”
But the question of exactly who owns the electronic rights to such older titles is in dispute, making it a rising source of conflict in one of the publishing industry’s last remaining areas of growth.
Mr. Styron’s family believes it retains the rights, since the books were first published before e-books existed. Random House, Mr. Styron’s longtime publisher, says it owns those rights, and it is determined to secure its place — and continuing profits — in the Kindle era.
via Authors and Publishers Argue Over Digital Rights to Older Books – NYTimes.com.
(News Cycle) Nielsen data shows that Newsday.com drew 1.7 million unique visitors in November, well below the 2.1 million total for October. Page views were down to 18.6 million in November, which is a 34 percent drop from the previous month.
The year-to-year comparison showed a 43 percent decline in unique visitors in November.
Newsday is the first major newspaper in the United States to construct such a pay wall charging $5 a week for unlimited access to its site. The charge equals a weekly subscription for the paper. Newsday print subscribers and Optimum customers have total free access to the website.
via News Cycle: Newsday Web Traffic Down 21 Percent Since Paywall Was Built.
By Michael Massing
I propose that Google set up a Journalism Innovators’ Fund with an initial annual budget of $100 million—less than 0.5 percent of the more than $20 billion it takes in annually. The fund would seek not to subsidize existing news operations but to support creative ideas and new programs aimed at reinventing the news as Schmidt suggests.
It would support start-ups and fledgling enterprises engaged in investigation, international reporting, policy analysis, blogging, and other forms of probing and provocative reporting and commentary undertaken by the independent journalists who, given the severe retrenchment taking place at traditional organizations, are making up an ever-larger part of the field.
More and more journalists are becoming entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs need start-up capital, and who better to provide it than Google, itself a product of, and tribute to, the entrepreneurial spirit?
—Michael Massing via NYRblog – The News Crisis: What Google Can Do – The New York Review of Books.
Message from Greg Farrar
Dear Colleagues,
Today, we announced that Nielsen Business Media has reached an agreement with e5 Global Media Holdings, LLC, a new company formed jointly by Pluribus Capital Management and Guggenheim Partners, for the sale of eight brands in the Media and Entertainment Group, including Adweek, Brandweek, Mediaweek, The Clio Awards, Backstage, Billboard, Film Journal International and The Hollywood Reporter. e5 Global Media Holdings has also agreed to acquire our Film Expo business, which includes the ShoWest, ShowEast, Cinema Expo International and CineAsia trade shows.
In addition, we’ve made the decision to cease operations for Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews.
Watch this. She is utterly fabulous.
Zina Saunders from Gel Conference on Vimeo.
I don’t have a column this week.
You see, I analyze and interpret the news, trying to find something that others haven’t touched. When there’s lots of news, I have a playground of riches. But during the past week, there were only two stories, and every reporter, columnist, commentator, pundit, bloviator, and blogger weighed in on it. There was nothing more I could add—from any perspective.
There was the Tiger Woods story. It led off the TV newscasts and took page 1 newsprint for a couple of days, and then became a featured story the rest of the week. One day, the breaking news about Tiger was that he wasn’t wearing a seat belt.
But, there was also the story of the gate crashers at the White House state dinner. Everyone covered that story. When the pundits finished blaming the Secret Service, they started on the White House staff, somehow making it seem that President Obama himself was guilty of allowing homeland security to deteriorate. Congress, always eager to take the spotlight away from Hollywood celebrities, launched an investigation. Overlooked was that although the gate crashers did get into the State Dinner, they had gone through several security checks, and the only hazard to the President was that he would have to be in the same publicity shot as a bleached blonde.
Now, some may say that the addition of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan is news. They may even claim that a recent report that concluded the Bush-Cheney administration failed to provide requested ground troops to capture a boxed-up bin Laden at the end of 2001 is news. They may claim that neglecting Afghanistan while throwing 170,000 troops into Iraq forced President Obama to beef up the forces in Afghanistan to finish the mission that was supposed to have been finished years ago. But, that’s not news. It’s not even worth commenting upon, especially when all the media resources were devoted to the Tiger Slam and the Tareq and Michaele Salahi invasion.
And that leaves me nothing to say this week. Maybe next week there may be news that 10,000 reporters, columnists, commentators, pundits, bloviators, and bloggers won’t give saturation coverage to. I sure hope so. I need the work.
Standing in line at the bank I watched battle-weary congresspeople on TV argue for what’s right and decent for an American national health care system. And the opposition argued point for point with ludicrous accusations that amounted to protecting their own interests.
That this debate even exists is ridiculous. A government for the people?
I wonder if in a decade I’ll be able to buy my own congressperson. That’s probably the only way I’ll ensure my community’s voices are heard.
Some editors at The Dallas Morning News have started reporting directly to executives outside the newsroom who oversee advertising sales, under a restructuring that overturns longstanding traditions in American newspapers aimed at shielding news judgments from business concerns.
A memo sent to employees on Wednesday explains the creation of new positions with the title of general manager, each responsible for ad sales in particular parts of the paper. “In the sports and entertainment segments, the senior news editors will report directly to the G.M. while retaining a strong reporting relationship to the editor and managing editor,” the memo said.
via In Dallas, Some Editors Are Reporting to Ad Executives – NYTimes.com.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, has agreed to pay $40 million to as many as 87,500 current and former employees in Massachusetts, the largest wage-and-hour class-action settlement in the state’s history.
The class-action lawsuit, filed in 2001, accused the retailer of denying workers rest and meal breaks, refusing to pay overtime, and manipulating time cards to lower employees’ pay. Under terms of the agreement, which was filed in Middlesex Superior Court yesterday by the employees’ attorneys, any person who worked for Wal-Mart between August 1995 and the settlement date will receive a payment of between $400 and $2,500, depending on the number of years worked, with the average worker receiving a check for $734.
The Massachusetts case is similar to many others that have been brought against the retail behemoth by employees across the country, most alleging that the Bentonville, Ark.-based company violated laws by requiring employees to work through breaks, to work beyond their regular shifts, and similar practices. Wal-Mart has denied the allegations, but in December, the merchant agreed to pay up to $640 million to settle 63 federal and state class-action wage-and-hour lawsuits.
(Institute for Public Accuracy — IPA) GARETH PORTER, (703) 532-0124, (703) 600-9057, porter.gareth50@gmail.com, http://ipsnews.net
Porter recently wrote the piece “Obama Had Rejected His Own Speech’s Surge Rationale,” which states that Obama in his West Point speech “said the escalation was for a ‘vital national interest’ and invoked the threat of attacks from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area, asserting that such attacks ‘are now being planned as I speak.’
“Despite Obama’s embrace of these new national security arguments, however, he has rejected within the past few weeks the critical link in the national security argument for deploying tens of thousands of additional troops — the allegedly indissoluble link between the Taliban insurgency and al Qaeda.” http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49495
ZOLTAN GROSSMAN, cell: (360) 359-8871, (360) 867-6153, grossmaz@evergreen.edu, http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz
Grossman, a geographer and faculty member at The Evergreen State College (Olympia, WA), just wrote the article “Afghanistan: The Roach Motel of Empires,” which states: “In just a few months, Afghanistan will surpass Vietnam as the longest single war fought by the United States in its history. In his West Point speech, President Obama denied that ‘Afghanistan is another Vietnam’ — and in some senses he is correct. Vietnam in 1975 was a far more unified state — ethnically and politically — than Afghanistan ever has been. Afghanistan is far more mountainous and difficult to occupy. …
“Like the Soviets, the Americans are perfectly capable of denouncing human rights violations by their Islamist enemies, but completely ignoring abuses by the violent warlords they are supporting. … The Islamization of Afghanistan did not begin when the Taliban took power in 1996, but when the U.S.-backed mujahedin ousted the pro-Soviet government four years earlier. …
“Instead of unifying the different ethnic regions of Afghanistan, the NATO occupation seems headed more toward a de facto partition of these regions. The foreign policy team that President Obama has assembled includes some of the same figures who advocated the ethnic-sectarian partition of Yugoslavia and Iraq. … Some trends in Afghanistan show traces of a similar partition strategy. …
“In both former Yugoslavia and Iraq, the U.S. interventions have left behind large permanent military bases, just as they have in Afghanistan. … Many of the largest air bases, at Kabul, Bagram, Kandahar, Shinand and Jalalabad, were the same bases from which the Soviets launched air attacks on the mujahedin in the 1980s. These military bases are the epitome of the ‘roach motel’ — they become a self-fulfilling argument for continuing an occupation: to defend the bases.” http://consortiumnews.com/2009/120209c.html
Grossman also wrote the piece “New U.S. Military Bases: Side Effects or Causes of War?” http://www.counterpunch.org/zoltanbases.html
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
via Scrutinizing U.S. Goals in Afghanistan — Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA).
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case challenging a law that critics say treats human rights advocates as criminal terrorists, and threatens them with 15 years in prison for advocating nonviolent means to resolve disputes.
The case is known as Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, and is the first case to challenge a portion of the Patriot Act before the Supreme Court. Originally brought in 1998, the suit challenges the constitutionality of the law that makes it a crime to provide “material support” to groups the administration has designated as “terrorist.”
The plaintiffs, led by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), charge that the law goes too far in making speech advocating lawful, nonviolent activity a crime. The lower courts have unanimously declared several provisions of the law – including one added by the Patriot Act – unconstitutionally vague because they encompass speech and force citizens to guess as to their meaning.
via High Court to Hear PATRIOT Act Challenge by William Fisher — Antiwar.com.
Scientists at the University of Montreal launched a search for men who had never looked at pornography – but couldn’t find any.
Researchers were conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users.
But their project stumbled at the first hurdle when they failed to find a single man who had not been seen it.
“We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” said Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse. “We couldn’t find any.”
By Jonathan Liew via All men watch porn, scientists find – Telegraph.
Sex, drugs & rock 'n' roll made me crazy — thank God!