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...]

A ridiculous question, sure. The National Endowment for the Arts is the channel through which the federal government invests money in the arts. And though it's not much money, compared to what other countries invest, it's something. Besides giving money, the NEA also has the value of drawing attention or legitimacy to the things it supports. Good things. But some of the recent debates about … [Read more...]

I've been using this blog mostly as a place to put administrative posts about AJ. But I've decided to take up blogging myself. First, a couple more administrative notes. We've been adding more blogs to AJ in recent weeks. Former NYTimes reporter Judith Dobrzynski's Real Clear Arts debuted last week with a bang, and she's been breaking news almost daily, so check her out.Today is a sad day. The … [Read more...]

I've been meaning to post this for some time. As my previous post explained, I was looking for some more help at ArtsJournal this fall, and posted the job notice in the post below. Ultimately, we had 134 applications for the editor job. There were some really great applicants. In the end, I chose two. They are: Matthew Westphal, who most recently was news editor for PlaybillArts and before that … [Read more...]