Liberty Watch - TSA Guarding the Nation

Here's the beginning of the story of an Icelandic visitor who was chained and handcuffed at JFK held without sleep or food and very delayed phone contact, then taken to a jail in New Jersey. I found a number of other sites carrying the same story, but not futher corroboration of the story. It appears from the story that her crime was having overstayed a visit by three weeks in 1995. So let's withhold judgment at the moment, but put it into our Liberty Watch file as we watch Naomi Wolf's ten steps to dismantling democracy take place. This seems to fit 5. Arbitrarily detain and release citizens. Although this is not a US citizen, would American citizens expect this sort of treatment when visiting other nations? The whole story is at this site.

[Note: Later stories say it is Erla, not Eva]

The story of Eva, [Erla] Ósk Arnardóttir:

During the last twenty-four hours I have probably experienced the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected. During these last twenty-four hours I have been handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep, been without food and drink and been confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned. Now I am beginning to try to understand all this, rest and review the events which began as innocently as possible.

Last Sunday I and a few other girls began our trip to New York. We were going to shop and enjoy the Christmas spirit. We made ourselves comfortable on first class, drank white wine and looked forward to go shopping, eat good food and enjoy life. When we landed at JFK airport the traditional clearance process began.

We were screened and went on to passport control. As I waited for them to finish examining my passport I heard an official say that there was something which needed to be looked at more closely and I was directed to the work station of Homeland Security. There I was told that according to their records I had overstayed my visa by 3 weeks in 1995. For this reason I would not be admitted to the country and would be sent home on the next flight. I looked at the official in disbelief and told him that I had in fact visited New York after the trip in 1995 without encountering any difficulties. A detailed interrogation session ensued.

I was photographed and fingerprinted. I was asked questions which I felt had nothing to do with the issue at hand. I was forbidden to contact anyone to advise of my predicament and although I was invited at the outset to contact the Icelandic consul or embassy, that invitation was later withdrawn. I don't know why.

The rest of the story is at this site.

[12/26/07 See related/follow up story here.]

Victor Lebow's Complete Original 1955 Article

Summary:

• The article is at the end of this post.
• The article appears to be in the vein it is quoted - more a prescription of how retailers will have to market things than a critique of capitalism. But the quote itself shows he had a macro perspective as well as a micro perspective
• I haven't been able to find much more about Victor Lebow.
• There is the 1972 book titled, Free Market: The Opiate of the American People. Perhaps he got disillusioned about American business and this quote was an early insight he had.
• Are there any students of Lebow? Family? If you ever see this please help fill in the missing links.
• Kevin, this post is all your fault. Thanks.

[Note:  This all began with a Dec. 10, 2007 post on The Story of Stuff.]

[January 30, 2008 Update: I've just received and posted Lebow's bio from the 1972 book, Free Enterprise: The Opiate of the American People.]

[Update 13 May 2009: Yesterday's NYT article on Story of Stuff seems to have brought more than the regular number visitors here. Hundredgoals has given a link to a much easier to read pdf version of the 1955 article in a comment today.]

In a previous post I raised questions about a quote by Victor Lebow. Was this the serious blueprint for American business to insinuate consumerism into the spiritual center of American life or a critique of modern capitalism?

Most of the links I googled looked like they all linked back to the same source. There was no contemporary discussion of the 1955 article on line. The University library nearby didn't have the Journal of Retailing on line back to 1955, but did have hard copies. But then I found a 1972 book by Victor Lebow called Free Enterprise: The Opium of the American People. It seemed to me that someone writing a book with that title must have have written the above paragraph as a critique, not as a prescription. I decided not to follow up and find the original article.

But I got an email from Kevin in Chicago who was trying to track it down too. So I went to the library today. Got the microfiche and found the article. It looks like a serious retailing article, talks about the 1955 marketing year and what retailers are going to have to do. It's in that context the above quote is written. There is no electronic version available, and the copier connected to the microfiche wasn't working very well, so I ended up taking pictures. I still haven't figured out how to post pdf files on blogger, so I'm going to post the pictures of the microfiche screen. (See below)

In the midst of all this there was a fire alarm in the library and everyone had to evacuate. A staff person, it turned out, had burnt popcorn in the microwave. That all took about 40 minutes.

Googling today I've found a 1944 article:

The Nature of Postwar Retail Competition
Victor Lebow Journal of Marketing, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jul., 1944), pp. 11-18. [The link gets you page 1]


An OCTOBER 13, 1976 Manas Reprint article "MOTIVES OR METHODS?" that talks about a Victor Lebow book review of Robert Heilbroner's Business Civilization in Decline. Here Lebow appears as a critique of modern business culture, and is qouted writing, for example,

Capitalism is already showing signs that it can no longer generate the social morale so essential to continued existence. It is true that it has freed probably more than half the American people from scarcity and want. But at the heart of this business civilization is a "hollowness"—everything is evaluated in money terms. "Or consider advertising, perhaps the most value-destroying activity of a business civilization." That hollowness is further emphasized by the low estimation business places on the value of work, which it sees as a means to an end—not the true end in itself for that is profit, income, economic growth. Nor is industrial socialism immune to this outlook, for its roots lie "in machine process and worship of efficiency." Under a business culture [civilization as Heilbroner puts it sharply]. Stuffed into the dustbin of history would be[the values] of output are celebrated and those of input merely calculated."

Then there is a totally different sort of reference to a Victor Lebow. This is about a 1942 Wichita Kansas East High graduate who was part of a fantasy Martian Empire that was created in 1937, by the website owner's older brother.

My brother James was 13, and in the eighth grade at Robinson Junior High School in Wichita, Kansas. And in his mind he was fashioning a cosmic empire filled with strange and wonderful creatures and races — in which a stalwart group of Exiles from the planet Mars were the chief actors and heroes.

This Empire, the Martian Empire, eventually spread over most of the known Universe before it finally faded around 1948. During the eleven years it flourished, however, the Martian Epic became very elaborate — covering some 15 billion years of Martian history — and Martian technology, manners and morals, art, music, religion, language and literature. And it generated a narrative Epic that encompassed many galaxies.

Among the members of this empire he identifies Victor Lebow and includes a picture.

Victor Lebow: At East High: he was usually on the Honor Roll, was a member of the Nationally Honor Society, and a semi-finalist for the Summerfield Scholarship. At WU: he belonged to the Independent Students’ Association and Aesculapius.

I emailed Lee Streiff, the website owner, but the email came back undeliverable. [later: I guess that's because of this:

Thornton Lee Streiff, 72, died Sunday, August 1, 2004 in Wichita, KS. No service was held.]

This Victor Lebow graduated high school in 1942 and it is unlikely he would have authored an article in a business journal in 1944. He could be the author of the 1972 book on Free Enterprise. And the Lebow quoted in the Manas article above. But the Manas quote echoes thoughts from the original quote. It's probably a different Victor Lebow.

Meanwhile here are the bad copies of the original 1955 article that the quote comes from. The famous quotation comes from page 7, right column. There is a chunk that was skipped over, but it really doesn't change the tenor of the quote. But I saved these as high res photos so you should be able to click them and get them in readable = not good, but readable - size.

[Jan. 7, 2008 - Thanks to Nathan, one of the commenters on this post, I now have an account at scribn.com where you can park word, pdf., and other files. So I cleaned up these photos and saved them as a pdf. file. You can enlarge the document in the window or even download it. This should make reading it easier. I'll leave one or two of the old pages up so you can see the difference. It's on p. 5-10 in the journal, then skips to 42, then a part of page 44. The oft quoted part is on p. 7.]

[January 4, 2021:  This post, and I'm sure many others, is the victim of the demise of FLASH.  I'll have to figure out how to retrieve some of these documents in a still usable form.  Thanks for your patience.] [A little later:  That wasn't hard. SCRBD has figured it out and I just went back to SCRBD and the new embedding code works fine.]

LebowArticle by Steve

p.5 of the journal / (p.1 of the article)above

"It's like a bully, a black hole bully punching the nose of a passing galaxy"

This blog's name is "What Do I Know" because I'm interested in how people 'know' what they know. How is it that Christians of one denomination 'know' their truth while those of another know a different truth? And Muslims yet another truth. Hindus and Sikhs still others.

How is it one voter 'knows' that Ron Paul is exactly what American needs, while another thinks he would be a disaster?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but the explanation that makes most sense to me is that humans come to 'know' things through a complex mix of ways.

• genetics provide us with instincts and predisposed tendencies
• experiences with the world that provide us with mostly unconscious knowledge of the physical world (visually interpreting depth and movement) and the social world (interpreting the intent of other people)
• instructions from authorities such as parents, the media, teachers which is why Chinese babies end up speaking Chinese, unless they get adopted by, say, an American, in which case they end up learning English; and why Muslim kids usually have Muslim parents
• logic and reason provide us with ways to examine what we know, test it, change it

All of these ways are essential, none is best for everything, some are better for some things. How they play out in our brains is different from individual to individual, and even within a single individual from one time to another.

So I found Seth Borenstein's AP story on a black hole the other day interesting. He writes:

"It's like a bully, a black-hole bully, punching the nose of a passing galaxy," said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, who wasn't involved in the research.

But ultimately, this could be a deadly punch.

What in Neil deGrasse Tyson's life causes him to see, in these images, a bully punching someone in the nose? Why does he put human intent in them? Poets use images to convey abstract ideas. If Tyson is trying to make this astronomical event understandable to us non-astronomers, why that image? Watch the NASA video and see if that is what you see.





Actually the description in the video is far less based on human emotions.

This made me think of Rohrschach tests. Those inkblots psychologists give patients to interpret. From the same ink splotches, different people see totally different things. I only have a layperson's understanding of such tests and the Rorschah.com site said very little

The test itself, as well as the book, are too well known to require any detailed commentary here,

Rohrschach.org was full of typos that didn't give me much confidence in that site. (revealing one of the ways I 'know' what I think I can trust on the internet.)

uk.tickle.com had what they purport to be an actual Rohrschach test. I went through the eleven inkblots, but at the end I had to 'skip' eight or nine ads to get to a page where I could pay £8.95 to get my results. But if you just go through the test pages, you'll get the point I'm making here about interpreting what you see. The questions they ask give a sense of the different things people see. Here's one of their inkblots.




I think the inkblots - and the space activity - are good examples of seeing how people take their own knowledge, experiences, and emotions to interpret the identifical 'facts'.

One part of improving public discourse is for people to become more aware of how they know things - the stories in their heads with which they interpret the 'facts' of the world. Also, explicitly seeing how different people 'see' different things in the same set of 'facts' is also instructive.

Attending the corruption trials also emphasized the way people take in evidence and determine guilt or innocence. Clearly the jurors saw things differently than the defendants.

And, of course, some people's interpretations of facts, are a closer match to reality. My basic test for good interpretation is how successful one is in using that interpretation to predict outcomes. Sometimes this can be done - which fishing hole is most likely to yield fish? - sometimes it can't be done - which is the most beautiful painting?

Winter Solstice Yet Again - Thank You Jean Meeus

So, when exactly is the solstice? I felt a little dumb cause I couldn't remember if it was Dec. 21 or 22. Turns out it changes. This year, the solstice was today at 1:07am.

Hermetic Systems Offers a way to calculate the solstice:

To calculate the date and approximate time of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes and of the summer and winter solstices you can use this online calculator. This is based upon the formulas given by Jean Meeus in his Astronomical Algorithms but without corrections for perturbations, so that the times may differ from the true times by up to 20 minutes.

So who is Jean Meeus? Wikipedia says:

Jean Meeus (born 1928) is a Belgian astronomer specializing in celestial mechanics. He is sometimes known as Jan Meeus. The asteroid 2213 Meeus is named after him.

Jean Meeus studied mathematics at the University of Leuven in Belgium, where he received the Degree of Licentiate in 1953 . From then until his retirement in 1993 , he was a meteorologist at Brussels Airport.

His area of interest is spherical and mathematical astronomy.

In 1986 he won the Amateur Achievement Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

The Willmann Bell Publisher site has this on Meeus' book Astronomical Algorithms:

Meeus, 6.00" by 9.00", 477 pages, hardbound, 2nd Edition published 1999, 2 Lbs. 6 Ozs. ship wt., $29.95..

Errata: 1st Edition
Errata: 2nd Edition

Note: We are currently shipping the June 2005 printing which incorporates all know corrections to that date.

In the field of celestial calculations, Jean Meeus has enjoyed wide acclaim and respect since long before microcomputers and pocket calculators appeared on the market. When he brought out his Astronomical Formulae for Calculators in 1979, it was practically the only book of its genre. It quickly became the "source among sources," even for other writers in the field. Many of them have warmly acknowledged their debt (or should have), citing the unparalleled clarity of his instructions and the rigor of his methods.

Start year and End year specify the range of years you're interested in. Only years in the range -100 CE through 4000 CE can be used with this calculator. (c) 2001-2007 Sunlit Design www.sunlit-design.com Sat, 22 Dec 2007 03:20:22 PM +700 gives UT You can click the publisher link above for the rest of this.



And Sunlit Designs a site for Understanding and Designing Sundials writes:

Jean Meeus has provided a bridge text for dedicated amateurs interested in astronomical and solar event calculations.

Programming the calculations provided by Meeus is possible using any modern programming language. Meeus covers a wide range of astronomical areas.

If your interest is in the motion of the sun, you do not need to program his algorithms yourself ... it has already been done in The Sun API.

Someone named Raoul posted to habitiblezone.com 12/10/2007 9:09:17 AM

A very well known mathematician (I once spent some time at his home) Jean (for John) Meeus calculated when did that happen before and when in the future: 1612, 1615, 1632, 1668, 2007, 2022, 2059, 2078, 2191. [I would think John is for Jean myself]

I mention this only because there is a John F. Meeus who is the Belgian Consul to Liverpool, England. Is this the same man? I don't know how common a name Meeus is and I don't think it is worth it emailing him.

The point of all this is: We can thank, apparently, Jean Meuss for knowing exactly when the solstice is.

Last year I put up some pictures that showed the winter and summer solstices - here's a link to that post

Sweeney Todd

Sweeney is a dark, dark movie. They must have depleted the blood bank filming it. But the music and lyrics carry us through this evilly brilliant film And Johnny can sing. Not like Rex Harrison talks his way through the songs in My Fair Lady. There's one bright sunny vignette when Mrs. Lovett sings By The Sea, but Sweeney is grimfaced throughout.




After completing the video, I read the A.O. Scott's NYT review. As Scott wrote,

It may seem strange that I am praising a work of such unremitting savagery. I confess that I’m a little startled myself...

Stephen Sondheim - the man behind Sweeney Todd

After seeing Sweeney Todd in Anchorage, probably in 1990-1, I decided I needed to know more about the musical's creator. I was surprised to learn that he had written the lyrics to West Side Story and Gypsy. West Side Story had always been, in my mind, connected to Leonard Bernstein.

Stephen Sondheim was born on 22 March 1930, the son of a wealthy New York dress manufacturer. But, when his parents divorced, his mother moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania and young Stephen found himself in the right place at the right time. A neighbour of his mother's, Oscar Hammerstein II, was working on a new musical called Oklahoma! and it didn't take long for the adolescent boy to realise that he, too, was intrigued by musical theatre.(from A Guide to Musical Theater)

A list of his musicals from The Stephen Sondheim Reference Guide

* Anyone Can Whistle
* Assassins
* Bounce
* Candide
* Company
* Do I Hear a Waltz?
* Evening Primrose
* Follies
* The Frogs
* A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
* Gypsy
* Into the Woods

* A Little Night Music
* Marry Me a Little
* Merrily We Roll Along
* Pacific Overtures
* Passion
* Putting It Together
* Saturday Night
* Side By Side By Sondheim
* Sunday in the Park With George
* Sweeney Todd
* West Side Story
* You're Gonna Love Tomorrow

I realize that the American musical - especially those of the 1950's and 1960's - doesn't mean that much to younger Americans, but there were many great ones, and Sondheim was involved with many of them. And he has pushed the medium harder than anyone else to discover what it could be.

His initial success came as a somewhat reluctant lyricist to Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story (1957) and Jule Styne on Gypsy (1959). Exciting and adventurous as those shows were in their day, and for all their enduring popularity, Sondheim's philosophy since is encapsulated in one of his song titles: "I Never Do Anything Twice". His first score as composer-lyricist was A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (1962) - a show so funny few people spotted how experimental it was: it's still the only successful musical farce. In the following three decades, critics detected a Sondheim style - a fondness for the harmonic language of Ravel and Debussy; a reliance on vamps and skewed harmonies to destabilise the melody; a tendency to densely literate lyrics. But, all that said, it's the versatility that still impresses: you couldn't swap a song from the exuberantly explosive pit-band score of Anyone Can Whistle (1964) with one of the Orientally influenced musical scenes in Pacific Overtures (1976); you couldn't mistake the neurotic pop score of Company (1970) for the elegantly ever-waltzing A Little Night Music (1973).(Again: A Guide to Musical Theater)

But Sweeny Todd has to be the masterpiece of masterpeices.

With Sweeney Todd (1979), the Prince/Sondheim collaboration reached its apogee, blurring the distinctions between lyrics and dialogue, songs and underscoring, and combining a complex plot with operatic emotions to create a unique musical thriller(.A Guide to Musical Theater)

So tonight we go see Johnny Depp as Sweeny Todd in the new movie. The preview we saw a while back doesn't even mention this is a musical/opera. It only emphasized the macabre story of the the man coming back with revenge on his mind. It will be interesting to see how audiences react when they find out. And we will also hear the debut of Johnny Depp the singer, in an extremely complex musical role.

Here's a link to Sondheim on the Charlie Rose show.

Oh yes, there are a bunch of other movies that rolled into town that look good, including Charlie Wilson's War and Atonement. The Secret of Raon Inish and Stephanie Daley. Both also got four stars in the Daily News. The Kite Runner, another great book, only got three stars.

[For video and short review go to Sweeny Todd]

10,000th Visitor Prize

The prize for the 10,000th visitor to the site since I set up sitemeter has been received by the closest person I could identify (#9,998). Her blogging name is Tea N. Crumpet and she embroiders. So she got a tin of Chinese Tea and an embroidered Chinese handkerchief.
Fortunately, I remembered to take a picture before I sent it. Our runner up, KS (I think that's who it is,) gets a dinner at the Thai Kitchen next time she's in Anchorage.

Car Wash at 0 degrees - Before and After

I sometimes get stuck on how I have to do something. Like washing the car. Either I take it to one of the places where you put the quarters in and you can blast it with hot soapy water, or I use the carwash attachment I bought for the hose and wash it in the driveway. But I don't do that in the winter when the hose is safely in the garage.

Yesterday it was hovering around 0° F outside. My wife, after months of driving a typical Alaskan car around - see first picture - suddenly decided she needed a clean car to take some friends to the airport. I didn't relish driving to a car wash place and then taking the wet car out of the washing bay into 0° weather.


So I got two buckets of warm water and some old dishtowels and in 20 minutes we had the worst of the dirt gone just by hand washing in our own garage. It still looks pretty streaky, but at least you won't get all dirty if you lean against it. When it warms up I'll take it in for a soapy soak spray job.

I just needed to think differently about how to solve the problem. Faster, cheaper, and good enough for now.

$8 Billion in Unredeemed Gift Cards - More than Double Credit and Debit Card Fraud

That's not the headline of Tuesday's ADN article in the money section. Instead they have "With gift cards, easy buy becomes personal." It's a story, by Detroit Free Press reporter Greta Guest about how

Holiday gift card sales have soared 44% from $17.2 billion sold in 2003 to $24.8 billion sold during the 2006 holiday season, according to the National Retail Federation.

[I've linked to the Detroit Free Press article because it doesn't show up on the ADN website. I'm guessing that's because it was a syndicated article. The Freep article is a little longer than the ADN article.]

Everything in the article is about how convenient gift cards are as presents. My skeptical mind began thinking about the gift cards my daughter got for graduation that she found five years later. How many people never use their gift cards, because they fall behind the desk, or get left in a pocket of pants that are no longer worn? And why didn't anyone at the ADN Money section ask that question? This was just a fluff piece promoting gift cards.

I'm thinking, 1% of $24 billion is, quick, can you figure it? 24+ seven zeros. $240,000,000. If just 1% of the people who got gift cards lost their cards it would come $240 million - a quarter of a billion dollars. OK, ok, people who got $100 cards are less likely to lose them than people who got $10 cards, or are they? And what about the people who use up only $22 of a $25 card? And besides, what if it's two percent or even five who lose their cards? The companies get free money. Maybe I can sell gift cards to my garage.

So I emailed Greta Guest, the reporter, and asked if she had gotten information on unredeemed cards too, because it wasn't in the ADN story. She said she had and sent me to the Free Press online story. In fairness to the ADN, it wasn't in the Free Press story either. Well, she emailed back, she'd written an earlier story on the topic which had all that.

That story is "Gift cards are popular, but many sit unused" published November 14, 2007. If the ADN published that one I don't recall seeing it and I can't find it on their site. That article says,

Consumer Reports, which started a public education campaign Tuesday, warns shoppers that when unredeemed, gift cards can turn into a windfall for retailers. When a gift card goes unused, retailers in many states can take the card value as income.

But they do have to report it as income. However, in some states, including Michigan,

the value of unused gift cards is collected from companies by the state after five years

In the fourth quarter of 2006 after last year's holiday season, Nordstrom recorded $8 million in income from unclaimed gift cards unused for five years or more. Massachusetts-based research service TowerGroup estimates that nearly $8 billion was lost last year because of unredeemed, expired or lost gift cards.

Did you catch that? $8 Billion unredeemed. The National Retail Federation says there was $24.8 billion in gift cards sold in 2006. That's just under 1/3 that's unredeemed. But it isn't quite that neat. The articles said most cards are void after five years, so this may be five years worth of sales. But the start of the article was that there was a 44% increase in the last three years.

The Consumers Union says

Consumer Reports is also releasing its latest survey, which finds that 27 percent of gift card recipients have not used one or more of these cards, up from 19 percent at the same time last year. And among consumers with unredeemed cards from last season, 51 percent have 2 or more.

Among the reasons that gift cards have not been redeemed:

• Over half (58%) of consumers indicated not having the time; followed by not finding anything they wanted (35%).
• Nearly one-third (32%) of respondents who have unused cards from last holiday season did not use their gift card because they forgot about it.
• A good proportion of consumers (7%) will never redeem their gift cards from last season because the card is lost (3%) or expired (4%).

And it gets more complicated. TowerGroup who made the $8 billion estimate based that on much more than retail gift cards.

Research and advisory firm, TowerGroup, expects gift cards to be a major hit again this holiday season. Combined gift card sales in the U.S. will exceed US$80 billion in 2006 - a more than 20% increase over their 2005 level - with breakdown by segment as follows:

* Retail: $29 billion [$4+billion more than NRF estimate]
* Restaurant / Fast Food: $18 billion
* Miscellaneous (gas, services, etc.): $12 billion
* Universally accepted (i.e., bank-issued): $23 billion

Despite the popularity of gift cards with consumers, the space continues to be a source of controversy in terms of fee-structures and redemption rules. While retailers do not generate revenue until a card is either used or permitted to be declared as dormant, they do receive a "free float" on unused cards. One large retailer recently showed a $42 million benefit to its income statement for unused gift cards more than two years old.

In any case, instead of a fluff piece on how great gift cards are, the ADN at least should have told us that (from the TowerGroup again)

the unused value on these cards, often referred to as "breakage" in the payments industry, has a bigger impact on consumers than the combined total of both debit and credit card fraud. While debit and credit card fraud in the U.S. totals $3.5 billion annually,

But we all know that the ADN, like most media, have a rabid liberal bias, so they always put an anti-business slant on their stories.

And while you're at it ADN Money folks, what happens to the unredeemed amount in Alaska? Do the retailers keep it or does it go to the state like unclaimed money in banks? Or is it all collected where the companies have their headquarters?

Anchorage Daily News Blogging Policy - 2

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the ADN is recruiting community bloggers. This resulted in a comment by a community council member who had received a copy of the terms of agreement that ADN was asking community bloggers to sign. I discussed the terms of agreement and posted them in the ADN Blogging Policy 1. Their terms of agreement suggest to me that they haven’t thought this out very carefully. So in this post I’m going to discuss

1. What's the difference between a blogger and the kind of contributor this Agreement was originally written for?
2. Why might a blogger sign the agreement?
   

I would first distinguish between 1) the reporters and staff who are working with the website and the blogs at the ADN. They obviously understand the potential and have done a great job in posting important and timely material, and 2) the higher ups who are responsible for the Terms of Agreement.

The Terms of Agreement document- and Kathleen McCoy, who’s coordinating this effort, and who appears to be in the “reporters and staff” group, corroborated this - is basically a version of the old agreement the ADN has used for independent contributors to the ADN with a few cosmetic changes to make it address blogs. (I should also say that this is McClatchy boiler plate rather than ADN, since it even leaves the name of the newspaper blank.) But bloggers are a far different animal than contributors of old.

Bloggers and traditional writers are significantly different

Writers needed a publisher, bloggers do not. The biggest difference by far, the difference that makes all the difference, is that before the web and blogs, writers were dependent on some medium to publish their writing. Websites (and blogs are a type of website) have changed this completely. Bloggers don’t need a publisher. They need access to the internet (most libraries provide this) and knowledge of how to set up a blog. They don’t even need to know how to read or write. My MacBook allows me to push a button and the computer’s built in webcam will record my picture and whatever I want to say.


This said, why would I, a blogger, sign up with the ADN? Here’s what the ADN says it offers to bloggers:

[When I went back to get the specifics of what the ADN would provide, I couldn’t find it in the Terms of Agreement. I guess I got that from the Key Terms in the email Kathleen McCoy sent the Federation of Community Councils, which I didn't post anywhere. I’ll post the whole list at the bottom of this post.]

• ADN wishes to host community bloggers on our site.*

Blogspot hosts my blog and everyone else's free already. This is no big deal.

• We will use our print and web platforms to inform readers of the online blogs we host and that they can participate in, to help grow audience. *

This is the only benefit I see from cooperating with the ADN. And it is important. When Kyle linked to my blog during the corruption trials, he did it because he felt the blog had something worthwhile to add to the coverage. With in-house blogs, will he be told he can't link to other local blogs that are better than the ones ADN carries? (Obviously I have a personal interest in this issue.)

• No money is involved*

I get the same great benefit from my Blogspot blog. Google (who owns Blogspot) pays me nada. But they have adsense if I want to sign up. They will put content related ads on my site and I would get some tiny amount of money from the hits on the ads. With ADN, any ad revenue goes only to ADN.

• Readers will be able to comment on blog entries, and subscribe to an rss feed from the blog.*

These features come with my Blogspot blog and I have more control over comments if I need to than the ADN seems to have.

• Blog writers will be able to link, post photos, and even post video on their blog if the spirit moves them.*

Yeah, yeah, yeah, every blog can do this too.

• Standing content on the righthand side of the blog page can be built in and stay on the blog for use by readers. This could be useful Websites, good books or articles you like your blog readers to know about, PDF documents you think they might want to read,etc.*

Again, standard on all the main blogsites.


[* the lines with * at the end were taken from the McCoy Key Points mentioned above and posted at the end of this post]

What does it cost bloggers?

1. More legal exposure than they probably would have as an independent blogger. From the Terms of Agreement:

You warrant and represent that all written entries and all other materials posted to the Blog is your original work, free from plagiarism, and that it has not been published anywhere else, that it has not been assigned, licensed or otherwise encumbered anywhere else, that it is not libelous or defamatory, that it will not violate or infringe the copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, right of privacy or publicity, or any other proprietary right of any third party. You also agree to refuse any compensation from any third party for placing any content on the Blog, to not use the Blog posts as a vehicle for advertising or promoting goods or services, and to not knowingly link to any downloadable applications or other content which may be harmful to a user’s computer.
[Did Dan Fagan sign one of these?]

Bloggers should avoid much of this anyway, except that

• by being on the ADN site, new bloggers have a larger audience. Upset readers are more likely to go after the ADN than a lone blogger. But then they will find out that the ADN has dumped all the liability onto the blogger. So the blogger, who would have been fine as an independent blogger, has attracted, because of the connection to the ADN, a legal action.
  
• now you can get in trouble from the ADN as well as someone reading your blog
  
• A private blogger might want to take payments from someone to post things. And may want to take ads.
  

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless NEWSPAPER and its affiliates, employees, successors and assigns, against and from any and all third party claims, liabilities, damages, fines, penalties and/or costs of whatsoever nature arising out of or in any way connected to a breach of your representations and warranties under this agreement.

You open yourself up to all sorts of potential liability.

2. Loss of control over your blog

NEWSPAPER shall own all right, title, and interest in and to the ___________________.com web site, and all intellectual property rights relating thereto. All rights not expressly granted under this agreement are expressly reserved.

It isn’t clear what this means because it seems to be contradicted later in the Agreement, but if you get tired of the ADN you own the content, but here it says they own the blog.

...you grant NEWSPAPER an irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, paid-up, transferable license, in perpetuity, to reproduce, distribute, publicly display, perform, and publish your Blog, including a license to redistribute, reproduce, republish, and to authorize republication, reproduction, and syndication of all or part of the Blog in any database, in any other media or platform or by any other method (computer, electronic, magnetic, online, optical, video, CD-ROM or otherwise), now or hereafter invented.

While most bloggers aren’t going to do any of these things, and while the ADN gives you the copyright, they also have taken the right to make money from your work with nothing in here that says you even get a share of any profit they make off your work.

NEWSPAPER shall have the right to modify the Blog content in order to make it compatible with the technical requirements and the “look and feel” of it’s web site. You grant us the right to use the Blog name, your name, likeness, photograph and biographical material to advertise, promote and publicize you and your Blog for the purposes of promoting and introducing new users to the Blog….NEWSPAPER shall have the right to remove any content from the Blog or it’s web site that NEWSPAPER believes, in its sole discretion may violate the rights of any third party, violates any law, or is otherwise objectionable.

WHAT?!!! You’re going to edit me without my having any say? Are you going to correct my possessive pronouns too? And reproduce it with my name on it? Even if I don’t like what you did to it? NFW. (Would that be found “otherwise objectionable” by the ADN?)

3. Banishment from the ADN's realm if you terminate your agreement.

in the event that this agreement ends, NEWSPAPER will stop within 30 days any advertising, promotion or publicizing of the Blog from any Web sites owned or affiliated with NEWSPAPER

.

If you change your mind and get out of the agreement, you get blackballed by the ADN. Even if this isn't what they intended, it doesn't sound very welcoming.


What should the ADN do?

Recognize that this is new and ever changing territory. The only certain old rule is “go with quality.” Quality, in the blog age, means authenticity, immediacy, transparency, and honesty. Good bloggers looking at the Terms of Agreement will see them as: inauthentic, warmed over old contracts, with the real meaning hidden in legalese.

The attorneys should lighten up. Go for quality and things will work out the best they can. There’s no guarantee. The Terms of Agreement are the kind of document you take to the other party’s attorney and you work out the details to both parties’ satisfaction. But in this case, the bloggers don’t have an attorney. It’s take it or leave it. So, if you want bloggers to believe in your good faith, you need to offer the kind of Agreement they would get if a) you really wanted the bloggers on your website, and b) they had an attorney to negotiate a contract that fairly met the bloggers' needs as well as newspaper's.

I’d recommend you consider what the ADN has to offer the bloggers. What do they want? I can’t speak for them all, but here are things I’d like:

• Recognition that you value my participation. The newspaper is going to bloggers as part of the ADN's survival strategy, but the Terms of Agreement makes it seem like the higher ups are doing this completely against their will. Show you appreciate the bloggers with
• a token honorarium,
• free tickets to events bloggers might cover or other in-kind benefits,
• a share in any future profits from syndication or whatever ways you might leverage a blog into future earnings (odds aren't high this will happen anyway)
  
• a payment for every 1000 page hits.
• awards for best blog, best blog stories, best blog coverage of a major event, most prolific blogger, etc.
• any combination of the above and this is just off the top of my head
  

• Very limited and transparent editorial guidelines with a blogger advisory board to ensure fair application of the guidelines. Yes, the ADN needs to protect itself from copyright violations, defamation, and bad journalism. And sometimes there may need to be format changes. But any changes in content or style should be made with the agreement of the blogger and the newspaper, and failing that, with an appeal to the advisory board. The advisory board could be used to work out a new Agreement after a year or two of testing the first one. And pay them. It doesn't have to be the $400/hour you pay your attorneys, but if you do it right, you'll save a lot of that money too.

• Balanced protection against legal action. This means that the newspaper shouldn’t abandon bloggers if a lawsuit arises that is not due to negligence or carelessness on the part of the blogger. The newspaper should help protect bloggers' press rights such as getting access to events and information as it helped its reporters get access to trial documents and tapes this year.

You should also check out the NYU study of the best blogging newspapers in the US. They came up with eight factors to evaluate newspapers' blogging quality:

• Ease-of-use and clear navigation.
• Currency
• Quality of writing, thinking and linking.
• Voice
• Comments and reader participation.
• Range and originality.
• Explain what blogging is on your blogs page.
• Show commitment!
  (Details for each factor at the best blogging link above.)
  

The ADN line staff is doing what it can to meet these standards, but the ADN management need to convince the corporate attorneys that business as usual, legally, will be just as fatal as business as usual, journalistically. [Note: the survey looked at the biggest 100 newspapers, so the ADN wasn't in the running, but I think now - after a great summer of improvements - the ADN would score high with its web coverage and inhouse blogs.[



***Kathleen McCoy's Key Points to Community Councils

Key points:

* ADN wishes to host community bloggers on our site.
* We will use our print and web platforms to inform readers of the online blogs we host and that they can participate in, to help grow audience.
* No money is involved on our end or the bloggers' end. This is a community service, aimed at turning the ADN website into a place for conversations and information sharing, beyond what our own reporters produce.
* Readers will be able to comment on blog entries, and subscribe to an rss feed from the blog.
* Blog writers will be able to link, post photos, and even post video on their blog if the spirit moves them.
* Standing content on the righthand side of the blog page can be built in and stay on the blog for use by readers. This could be useful Websites, good books or articles you like your blog readers to know about, PDF documents you think they might want to read,etc.
* The blogger (cor bloggers, one blog can be shared among a tightknit group of people) will get a unique username and password that will give them access to their blog. They can blog from home or work, or the coffee shop down the street.


* I am your resource here at the News for questions, standing content you need posted to the right side, help getting that video up.
* This is new for us. We'll all be learning together, but we are confident it can make a contribution to the public dialogue in Anchorage.
* If you have an idea for a blog you'd like to see, call me and I'll follow up.
* I've enclosed the blogger agreement and the terms of use to this email

So, let's talk. I'm working on setting up as many community blogs as I can. I have three I am working on now -- and will be happy to start working on community council blogs if members so choose.

My best!/ Kathleen]