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 IAC/InterActiveCorp last year. In fact, TM's business is up. "For the full year, Ticketmaster reported revenue of nearly $1.5 billion, a 17% increase 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 Street companies are going to be run well by a bunch of people who don't make more than $250,000.Here's the video: Uh huh.I'm trying to make a … [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 90s were the largest expansion of the arts in American history). So maybe a little market adjustment is in the making for the arts. The recession … [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 33.8%, from 3.4 million shares, or 35.2%, last February. … [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 whether the arts ought to get cabinet-level prominence in the Obama administration seemed to me to be missing something. Sure it would be nice if the feds … [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 Seattle Post-Intelligencer is going out of business tomorrow after almost 150 years on the beat. Once upon a time I worked at the P-I, as a music critic … [Read more...]