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, now imprisoned for theft from corporate coffers. Unlike other newspaper owners that have filed for bankruptcy amid steep dropoffs in advertising, … [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 broader culture. I've been looking for someone to focus not just on the issues that affect the arts, but in how we argue those issues, both inside … [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, of course, is the first-line of that interaction. But the state of one's box office sales also helps focus the attention of a presenter. When websites … [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 built on failure. Make observations, posit solutions, try them out, fail, learn from your failure and try again until you find a solution. Scientific … [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 United States. Approximately 50% of the financial support for the arts comes from earned income and another 10 % comes from non-federal government support. … [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 finding new opportunities. The impact of the recession seems to be mixed. A recent report [pdf here] on how the arts are being affected in Seattle … [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 business model as a member-station organization faces some major challenges. I've delved in to some of the numbers over here at the NAJP's ARTicles blog. … [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 broken," said Phil Pochoda, director of the Michigan press. "Why try to fight your way through this? Why try to remain in territory you know is … [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. Sociologists report that the amount of leisure time we have today is about the same as we had 20 years ago. Yet ask people if they have more or less, … [Read more...]