Here's a shorter profile: on boxer Manny Pacquiao.
And an interesting job shadow with a lactation specialist.
Let's read these and discuss this week, along with the Ebert piece.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Profile Example: Esquire on Ebert
Here's a link to an Esquire magazine profile of Roger Ebert, the Chicago film critic. Let's discuss this next week as we cover the topic of profiles and begin to plan for Assignment #2 and the Final Paper.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
What are people reading online?
The New York Times studied its own Most E-Mailed list and was surprised by what it found.
An excerpt:
An excerpt:
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.
The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”
But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.
Let's edit a Journal story
Critique Questions Film Incentive Impact
A study regularly cited by supporters of New Mexico's film industry incentives as proof the tax breaks more than pay for themselves may have significantly overstated the revenue they generate, a policy analyst with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston says.
The analyst also says the cost to New Mexico taxpayers for each film job created here is more than 20 times the amount estimated in the 2009 economic impact study by Ernst & Young.
The critique by Jennifer Weiner of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston New England Public Policy Center is one of dozens of film incentive studies circulating in the Roundhouse while lawmakers consider a Senate bill that would cap the amount of money the state will provide filmmakers, said Lisa Strout, New Mexico Film Office director.
The Ernst & Young report issued in January 2009 found that each dollar of incentive generated a total of $1.50 in revenue — 94 cents in state economic activity and 56 cents in local activity.
But Weiner argued in an April 2009 memorandum that the study could overstate capital investment by the film industry, spending in New Mexico by highly paid people who live out of state, and the impact of filmmaking on tourism.
She estimated state level revenue is 39 cents — compared with the estimate of 94 cents by Ernst & Young — for every dollar of incentives. She did not evaluate local revenue.
Ernst & Young found New Mexico taxpayers spend $307 for each film industry job created. Weiner said the cost of each job is $7,543.
Ernst & Young was commissioned by the Richardson administration and paid $50,000 for its work.
Weiner, who studies public incentives for economic development, had concluded in January 2009 that film industry incentives in Connecticut did not pay for themselves.
She wrote in an April 2009 memo to Connecticut's Voices for Children that she wanted to understand why Ernst & Young concluded incentives offered by New Mexico and New York did pay for themselves. Connecticut is a state in the Boston Federal Reserve Bank's district.
Weiner's memo says her evaluation does not necessarily reflect the view of the Boston bank or of the Federal Reserve System.
"We will stick by Ernst & Young," Strout told the Journal in an interview Monday.
Strout said Ernst & Young spent eight months creating a model of the state's economy and gathering data about the film industry. "Ernst & Young were very tough. They said if they could not get the data (to support an analysis) they would leave it out."
Strout said her office saw Weiner's memo when it was first published, agreed with some of its findings and felt she raised important policy questions.
Weiner found:
• Ernst & Young assumed all film activity came to New Mexico as a result of the incentives, though some projects may have come here without them. Strout said the film office is convinced virtually all recent film activity is a result of incentives because the state's record of attracting filmmakers before the incentives was so spotty.
• The study did not account for New Mexico's requirement that its state budget balance. Therefore, taxes lost to the film industry have to be made up somehow, which would tend to depress economic activity elsewhere.
• Study findings that increased tourism accounts for between 25 percent and 40 percent of the incentives' economic impact are "difficult, if not impossible" to verify. Strout said data such as these were gathered through direct contact with businesses and local governments.
• Ernst & Young probably overstates the impact of industry capital expenditure. The study looked at activity in 2007 when Albuquerque Studios was being built. Weiner said a project of that size is not likely to be repeated and the revenue-generating impact of construction projects is short-lived.
• The study appears to include the impact of spending in New Mexico by directors, producers and actors who make large salaries on a New Mexico-based film but who don't spend much money here because they live elsewhere. Strout said Ernst & Young used only spending data that it could verify were accurate.
The state provides a 25 percent refundable credit on most taxable expenditures film companies make in the state. Most of the credit to date has been applied against corporate income tax liability, according to the Legislative Finance Committee, the legislature's budget analysis arm.
Senate Bill 235, sponsored by Senate Finance Committee Chairman John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, would limit the amount of credit a production could claim to $2 million for direct production expenses and $2 million for post-production expenses. The LFC said that of the nearly $82 million in film-production tax credits awarded to 53 different productions in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2009, 10 were in excess of $2 million, representing nearly 42 percent of the total dollar amount awarded.
A study regularly cited by supporters of New Mexico's film industry incentives as proof the tax breaks more than pay for themselves may have significantly overstated the revenue they generate, a policy analyst with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston says.
The analyst also says the cost to New Mexico taxpayers for each film job created here is more than 20 times the amount estimated in the 2009 economic impact study by Ernst & Young.
The critique by Jennifer Weiner of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston New England Public Policy Center is one of dozens of film incentive studies circulating in the Roundhouse while lawmakers consider a Senate bill that would cap the amount of money the state will provide filmmakers, said Lisa Strout, New Mexico Film Office director.
The Ernst & Young report issued in January 2009 found that each dollar of incentive generated a total of $1.50 in revenue — 94 cents in state economic activity and 56 cents in local activity.
But Weiner argued in an April 2009 memorandum that the study could overstate capital investment by the film industry, spending in New Mexico by highly paid people who live out of state, and the impact of filmmaking on tourism.
She estimated state level revenue is 39 cents — compared with the estimate of 94 cents by Ernst & Young — for every dollar of incentives. She did not evaluate local revenue.
Ernst & Young found New Mexico taxpayers spend $307 for each film industry job created. Weiner said the cost of each job is $7,543.
Ernst & Young was commissioned by the Richardson administration and paid $50,000 for its work.
Weiner, who studies public incentives for economic development, had concluded in January 2009 that film industry incentives in Connecticut did not pay for themselves.
She wrote in an April 2009 memo to Connecticut's Voices for Children that she wanted to understand why Ernst & Young concluded incentives offered by New Mexico and New York did pay for themselves. Connecticut is a state in the Boston Federal Reserve Bank's district.
Weiner's memo says her evaluation does not necessarily reflect the view of the Boston bank or of the Federal Reserve System.
"We will stick by Ernst & Young," Strout told the Journal in an interview Monday.
Strout said Ernst & Young spent eight months creating a model of the state's economy and gathering data about the film industry. "Ernst & Young were very tough. They said if they could not get the data (to support an analysis) they would leave it out."
Strout said her office saw Weiner's memo when it was first published, agreed with some of its findings and felt she raised important policy questions.
Weiner found:
• Ernst & Young assumed all film activity came to New Mexico as a result of the incentives, though some projects may have come here without them. Strout said the film office is convinced virtually all recent film activity is a result of incentives because the state's record of attracting filmmakers before the incentives was so spotty.
• The study did not account for New Mexico's requirement that its state budget balance. Therefore, taxes lost to the film industry have to be made up somehow, which would tend to depress economic activity elsewhere.
• Study findings that increased tourism accounts for between 25 percent and 40 percent of the incentives' economic impact are "difficult, if not impossible" to verify. Strout said data such as these were gathered through direct contact with businesses and local governments.
• Ernst & Young probably overstates the impact of industry capital expenditure. The study looked at activity in 2007 when Albuquerque Studios was being built. Weiner said a project of that size is not likely to be repeated and the revenue-generating impact of construction projects is short-lived.
• The study appears to include the impact of spending in New Mexico by directors, producers and actors who make large salaries on a New Mexico-based film but who don't spend much money here because they live elsewhere. Strout said Ernst & Young used only spending data that it could verify were accurate.
The state provides a 25 percent refundable credit on most taxable expenditures film companies make in the state. Most of the credit to date has been applied against corporate income tax liability, according to the Legislative Finance Committee, the legislature's budget analysis arm.
Senate Bill 235, sponsored by Senate Finance Committee Chairman John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, would limit the amount of credit a production could claim to $2 million for direct production expenses and $2 million for post-production expenses. The LFC said that of the nearly $82 million in film-production tax credits awarded to 53 different productions in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2009, 10 were in excess of $2 million, representing nearly 42 percent of the total dollar amount awarded.
Friday, February 5, 2010
More on the future of print
More musings on the Twitterization and the old guard from George Packer of the New Yorker.
Here's a sample in which he quotes from the newly revived Baffler:
“As the world careens one way we faithfully steer the other,” the editors state up front. “Print is dead, they say; we double down in our commitment to the printed word. Brevity is the fashion; we bring you long-form cultural criticism with an emphasis on stylistic quality.”
A little like the appearance of [William F.] Buckley’s National Review, whose original mission statement, back in 1955, declared that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
Here's a sample in which he quotes from the newly revived Baffler:
“As the world careens one way we faithfully steer the other,” the editors state up front. “Print is dead, they say; we double down in our commitment to the printed word. Brevity is the fashion; we bring you long-form cultural criticism with an emphasis on stylistic quality.”
A little like the appearance of [William F.] Buckley’s National Review, whose original mission statement, back in 1955, declared that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The medium or the message?
Scroll down to the end of Michael Miner's column here about the iPad and check out the first comment. The poster has this to say:
The future of journalism, such as it is likely to be, appears to be evolving from insufficiently different or distinctive content channeled through the narrow sluice gates of traditional media to utterly indifferent, bottom-dollar, untraceable, unverifiable content ejected through the global-gauge spray nozzle of new media.
In short, if newspapers or other old media hope to retain their toeholds on the public imagination, they need to pay a hell of a lot less attention to the latest gadget or iteration on the Internet and start paying a hell of a lot more attention to generating passionate, distinctive and indispensable journalism, the kind of stuff that readers will not be able to live without.
That's our goal: passionate, distinctive and indispensable journalism.
Note the link by the poster, Pelham, to this Vanity Fair article, with a nod to the cult film favorite "Fight Club."
The future of journalism, such as it is likely to be, appears to be evolving from insufficiently different or distinctive content channeled through the narrow sluice gates of traditional media to utterly indifferent, bottom-dollar, untraceable, unverifiable content ejected through the global-gauge spray nozzle of new media.
In short, if newspapers or other old media hope to retain their toeholds on the public imagination, they need to pay a hell of a lot less attention to the latest gadget or iteration on the Internet and start paying a hell of a lot more attention to generating passionate, distinctive and indispensable journalism, the kind of stuff that readers will not be able to live without.
That's our goal: passionate, distinctive and indispensable journalism.
Note the link by the poster, Pelham, to this Vanity Fair article, with a nod to the cult film favorite "Fight Club."
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Mixing up our euphemisms
Does this report from AP let a bias slip through?
As a federal appeals court judge in 2002, she ruled against an abortion rights group that had challenged a government policy prohibiting foreign organizations receiving U.S. funds from performing or supporting abortions.In her opinion, Sotomayor wrote that the government was free to favor the anti-abortion position over a pro-choice position when public funds were involved.
As a federal appeals court judge in 2002, she ruled against an abortion rights group that had challenged a government policy prohibiting foreign organizations receiving U.S. funds from performing or supporting abortions.In her opinion, Sotomayor wrote that the government was free to favor the anti-abortion position over a pro-choice position when public funds were involved.
Waterboarding demonstration
Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens agrees to undergo an "enhanced interrogation technique":
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