Archives for March 2009

The latest newspaper to teeter to the edge of existence is the Chicago Sun-Times, which has just filed for bankruptcy, joining a half dozen other major papers: The company has one significant creditor -- the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS has said Sun-Times Media Group owes up to $608 million in back taxes and penalties from past business practices by its former controlling owner, Conrad Black, … [Read more...]

Today we're happy to launch Dalouge Smith's new blog on arts advocacy. It's called Dog Days. Dalouge runs the San Diego Youth Symphony, and we met last summer in Chicago while I was writing a story on new thinking in how to run orchestras. Why a blog on arts advocacy? There's an awful lot of talking about the state of the arts, about the survival of the arts, and about the place of the arts in the … [Read more...]

Where are all those laid off journalists going? Why to TV of course... … [Read more...]

Interactivity has been redefined in the past few years. Newspapers used to think they were interactive because they ran letters to the editor. Rarely did they respond to the letters (unless those letters demanded a correction), but "hearing from the readers" became a mantra for the focus-group-driven news organization.Arts organizations have also prided themselves for being interactive. Applause, … [Read more...]

One thing you hear about the current economic mess is that some banks and companies are "too big to fail." This is the idea that if a mega-corporation like AIG goes down, the repercussions are so enormous that other companies will fall in its wake and the whole financial system might fall apart. Thus an argument for tax-payer bailouts.That got me thinking about the culture of failure. Science is … [Read more...]

Vastine Stabler makes a case that changing the tax code to reduce the the top rate of deduction for charitable giving from 35% to 28% will have an enormous impact on giving to the arts:It may be shocking to learn that the level of federal support for the arts in the United States is most likely the highest in the world. To understand why you need to know how non-profit arts are funded in the … [Read more...]

ArtsJournal has been a bit depressing lately. Day after day, there's news of cuts in public funding  arts organizations cutting back, retrenching, or going out of business. Growing numbers of unemployed artists. These links from just the past week or so.And yet, I keep hearing other stories arts organizations holding fund-raisers and raising more money than ever. And other stories of artists … [Read more...]

The Washington Post reports this morning that NPR's audience has grown about 47 percent in this decade. A pretty nice bump. But NPR is still having to cut as its income declines in the recession. As for longer-term prospects, NPR stands in a pretty interesting space. While audiences for mass-media outlets have declined precipitously in the Online Age, NPR has done very well. But it's current … [Read more...]

Newspapers aren't the only ones contemplating a digital future. The University of Michigan Press says it will move from paper to pixels:Michigan officials say that their move reflects a belief that it's time to stop trying to make the old economics of scholarly publishing work. "I have been increasingly convinced that the business model based on printed monograph was not merely failing but … [Read more...]

A Taiwanese study of people using online dating sites finds that "the more our brains have to search through, the more difficult it also becomes to ignore irrelevant information. A person is also more likely to be distracted (or attracted to) attributes that were not initially relevant or pertinent to their original search."This is the classic consumer conundrum. Too much choice can be paralyzing. … [Read more...]

Ticketmaster announces a billion-dollar loss, blaming "declining ticket sales, costs associated with layoffs and a massive impairment charge." The loss is real (in a 2009-paper-losses, bank-accounting kind of way), of course. But:The bulk of Ticketmaster's loss was because of a $1.1 billion charge the company took because of a precipitous decline in its share price since being spun off from … [Read more...]

Yesterday on CNBC, host Mark Haines said that Wall Street could not possibly be run well by people making $250,000. Here's the transcript:Let's get back to what I regard as a fundamental issue here. I know it's politically unpopular, politically incorrect. I know it goes against all of the populist indignation that's out there right now. But you can't really, it seems to me, expect that these Wall … [Read more...]

Americans for the Arts has warned arts organizations to plan scenarios for 40% cuts in their budgets as the economy gets worse. And the group says that 10,000 arts organizations could go out of business in this recession. Some have been saying for some time that the arts were overbuilt in the boom of the 90s when America built some $25 billion worth of new theaters, concert halls and museums (the … [Read more...]

when the most committed owners of newspapers start selling off their shares:Donald Graham, the chairman and chief executive officer of Washington Post Co.has sold tens of millions of dollars worth of stock in the past year through a series of trusts he oversees for his relatives. In the process he has decreased his control of the company's publicly traded class B shares to 3.2 million shares, or … [Read more...]

Is there anything ironic about National Public Radio canceling its newspaper subscriptions? This is, after all, the member organization that often fund-raises with the line "The news isn't free." … [Read more...]