Comparing the ANCHORAGE and ALASKA International Film Festivals - Real Festival? Scam?

This is the final post of  three part series of posts.  The first two parts were:

Part 1:  What's a Scam?
Part 2:  What's a Film Festival?

This post is Part 3:  Comparison of Authenticity of ANCHORAGE and ALASKA International Film Festivals.

This is a long post. To make it a little easier, here are the key sections. The links will take you to that section.


Overview
Some Background
Comparing the  authenticity of the ANCHORAGE and ALASKA IFFs.

• Question 1 Is it really a film festival? 
• I contacted some of the 2010 Winners
• Interesting Development
• Question 2 Is it really a scam?
• The 9 elements of Oregon fraud 

Conclusion


Overview

In 2009, there were two film festivals in Alaska with the same ACRONYM - AIFF. One A stands for Anchorage. Think of the ANCHOR of a boat. Something that keeps the boat secure and safe. The ANCHORage International Film Festival began in 2001 and is a winter celebration of film and film people with people coming from around the world.

The other Alaska. Think of ALAS! the word of woe when something is wrong. This festival began last year, though the original website made it sound like it had been around for years, and there actually is no festival. People send in films and money and they announce their winners in July. In fact, this year in July, after the awards announcement, they changed their name from Festival to Awards (Alaska International Film Awards.)

This post compares the two film events against standards for a film festival and against standards for a scam. Actually, I've used standards for fraud.

Some Background

This all began last November when I was preparing to blog the ANCHORAGE IFF and accidentally got onto a website that puzzled me because all the pictures were different.  I couldn't imagine  they would make such a radical change to their website a week or so before the festival.  And then I saw it.  This said ALASKA, not ANCHORAGE.  I ended up writing a post:  Film Festival Scam?  AIFF is NOT AIFF.

In March of this year I received a letter from the ALASKA IFF threatening me with a law suit if I didn't remove the post.  My attorney responded with a letter back.  They never responded.  But I've been poking around since then and discovered that there is a dark side to the film festival circuit.  These posts are intended to alert film makers to be careful when choosing festivals. 


Comparing the  authenticity of the ANCHORAGE and ALASKA IFFs.


There are two basic questions to ask:
1.  Is it really a film festival?
2.  Is it a scam?

To answer Question 1 Is it really a film festival?  I've pulled out the elements of a film festival that I put together in the post on What is a Film Festival?  and put them into this table to compare the ANCHORAGE and ALASKA IFF.

Characteristics of Film Festival	ANCHORAGE  IFF	ALASKA   IFF 2010
Gathering of people	YES	NO
Show and watch films	YES	NO
Get an audience for filmmakers	YES	NO
Let the public and critics see a wide variety of new films	YES	NO
Opportunities for the participants to meet, discuss the films, filmmaking, and distribution of the films.	YES	NO
A networking opportunity	YES	NO
Festival gives awards	YES	YES
Festival, not award winners, pays for awards	YES	NO

I contacted some of the 2010 Winners

You can see that the only film festival-like characteristic of the ALASKA IFF this year was to give out awards.   When they posted the winners on July 15 I contacted about four of them.  I told them I was a blogger who covered the ANCHORAGE IFF and that since there was no actual showing of films or gathering people for the ALASKA IFF, could they tell me what they got for their awards.  They all replied that they got a nice certificate and the right to BUY a "crystal wave" award for prices ranging from $155 to $250.

When I was researching these posts, I didn't see too much that discussed awards, but in a book called Film Festivals Secrets by Christopher Holland, there's a short section on scams (p. 19) where he mentions having to buy the awards.

So, the  only criterion the ALASKA IFF for 2010 met was the award, but the winners have to pay for their own awards.   The ALASKA IFF clearly is not what most people would consider a  legitimate film festival.

On the other hand the ANCHORAGE IFF met all the criteria of a legitimate film festival.


Interesting Development

I would note that in the time since I wrote the first two parts of this series, the ALASKA International Film Festival has renamed itself to the ALASKA International Film AWARDS.  Festival is gone.  Well, not completely.  Their web address still (as I write this) includes filmfestival.


That does change things a bit.  If it doesn't have FESTIVAL in its name, at least film makers should be alerted to some extent that there might not be a festival involved.  No showing of films.  No networking. No meeting other filmmakers, no parties, etc.




Question 2:  Is it really a scam?

Does changing the name from festival to awards mean this is all moot?  Not exactly.  Scam doesn't necessarily mean illegal, but it does mean there is some deception involved, some attempt to appear to be something that it is not.  There are still some questions about the awards, about the use of the name Alaska, and the overall transparency of the organization.   

Finding clear criteria for a scam isn't all that easy, so I've decided to take the more stringent criteria of Oregon fraud as listed on Fraudlaw.com.  We can go through them one by one.

The 9 elements of Oregon fraud are:

1)  A representation

ANCHORAGE International Film FESTIVAL - represents itself as a film festival in Anchorage, Alaska.  It has had festivals since 2001, in Anchorage, showing films, supported by local sponsors and many volunteers.  It has an Alaska business license, and the names of the board of directors are available on their website.  They have local addresses, emails, and phone numbers.  

Alaska International Film Awards - represents itself  (as of July 2010) not as a  film festival, but as Film Awards. This is their first year - first month as I write - as the Alaska International Film Awards. 

2) Its falsity;

Anchorage International Film Festival - I've found nothing false about anything the AIFF website says.  And therefore the next criteria will only consider the Alaska International Film Awards. 

Alaska International Film Awards -  Much of the text is similar to what was up when this was the Film Festival.  (I would note, that even then, it did state on one of its pages that there was no actual showing of films.)  They still have the same mailing address:

Alaska International Film Awards
3705 Arctic Blvd. #2329
Anchorage, AK 99503


As I showed in my original post on this, this is simply a private mail service box. The Mail Cache is a private company that rents mail boxes and forwards mail. There is no need for anyone related to the Alaska International Film Awards to even be in Alaska because the Mail Cache advertises that:

Our unique computerized system allows for almost any forwarding contingency possible.

For example, if you needed all your first class mail only, sent once every week to Australia,  and all your magazines every other month to New York City, we can do it!

 I cannot find a business license for the Alaska International Film Awards (or Festival) on the Alaska Corporations, Business and Professional Licensing website.

Their phone number on their Withoutabox listing has a Kentucky area code (270-675-0451)

Their two sponsors (they had no sponsors when they first posted and we pointed that out) are listed as ViewConference whose address is:

• info@viewconference.it
• Corso Marconi, 38
• 10125 Turin
• Italy

and Indie Media Entertainment (IME) which is located in California:

Mailing Address:
15 Hammond Suite #302
Irvine, CA 92618

3) Its materiality -

 Does it matter that the Awards organization is not in Alaska?

They have represented themselves as Alaskan, with Alaska in their name, with pictures of what appears to be Alaska wilderness on their webiste, and even some Alaska theme names among their Awards - Kodiak Award, Denali Award, Northern Lights Emerging Talent Award, and Best of Alaska Award. Obviously, they want people to think they are connected to Alaska.

If not, why would they do all this Alaska imagery and why not have people mail things directly to them instead of via a rented Alaska mailbox?

Why not call it by some other name, like "The Fantastic Film Awards" or "The International Film Awards"?  Why put Alaska in front?

Because, I would guess,

• Most film festivals have the location of the festival in the title and they have an actual festival in that location.  Without a location, people might check a little harder. This Awards thing called itself a film festival in its first year.  This blog and filmmaker.net called it out as not really being a festival.  Now they've changed their name to Awards.  But they've kept the Alaska name, a place most people know about, but have never been to and don't know much about. A place to which most people aren't likely to know the Awards have no real connections.
  
• Film makers would be confused. The original name had its acronym identical to an existing film festival in Alaska - the Anchorage International Film Festival with the same AIFF.  Even people in Alaska have gotten confused between the two names.  One might argue this is completely coincidental.  But it certainly sets up some confusion for film makers who aren't familiar with Alaska, and even people who are.  Award winners from this year that I've communicated with were clearly confused.
  
  
• Alaska's name and mystique sells.  

For all these reasons, they are more likely to be noticed and get submissions than if they had a name without a place in it, or even if they had some less romantic and less distant place than Alaska.  

Presumably, the existing ANCHORAGE IFF lost submissions because people confused the two festivals. 

As long as this Awards thing keeps Alaska in the name, it makes people believe that there is a connection to Alaska - even the names of the main awards have Alaska themes.  From their current website:

Awards will be presented in several categories including three main recognition levels: the Kodiak Award, the Denali Award, and the Northern Lights Emerging Talent Award.  

4) The speaker's knowledge of the representation's falsity or ignorance of its truth;

Clearly, the sponsors are well aware that 

• they have no connection to Alaska beyond the name of their Awards thing and a rented mail box. They know there is an Anchorage International Film Festival with the same acronym they originally chose.  
• they aren't a festival - and at least they had the decency to change their name from festival to award. But I suspect if bloggers - at least three of whom got threatening letters from their attorney for pointing this out - hadn't written about this, it would still be called a festival this year. 
• film makers aren't likely to know the above two facts.  Holland, in his book, Film Festival Secrets writes:

". . . and filmmakers are too focused on completing their films,  to pay much attention to how films get into festivals afterward" (p. 13)

Additionally, there is lots of missing information.

• There are no names of real people on the original website or the newly named Awards website.
• The process for judging films is not listed, nor are names of anyone involved in judging films.
• The winners of the first year are posted, but the other films submitted are not.  At actual festivals, they have to post the names of all the accepted films so viewers can know when and where to watch them.  This means there is no way to confirm that they only award a maximum of 15% of the films submitted.  [There's actually nothing to confirm here.  Even I, as carefully as I've gone through this, misinterpreted this.  It actually says 'more than 15%.'  But in my mind I couldn't imagine them saying this and so I misread it.]
• There is no information posted that the award winners must purchase their trophies.

5) Intent that the representation be acted on in a manner reasonably contemplated;

Obviously, they wanted film makers to send application fees to them. I don't know if they care about getting the dvd's of the films. I have no idea what they do with them, but if they didn't ask for them, how could they choose award winners. And from my calculation**, based on their representations, they probably made  [somewhere between] about [$2600 and] $16,000, minus the cost of the rented mail box ($10/month according to the mail cache website, though since they had one of the bigger ones, it might have been more) plus the postage to have everything forwarded.  If they're lucky, most people use Withoutabox and they don't have to pay for the postage.  And they don't have to pay for awards either, in fact, it's possible they get a cut from those too. 

6) The hearer's ignorance of the falsity of the representation;

Filmmakers have a responsibility to check out the festivals they submit to.  If they had read the Alaska IFF website carefully,

• they would have found out there was no actual showing of films, but 
• they wouldn't know there was no real connection to Alaska.  If they had spent some time googling, they might have found warnings. (when I google, the filmmaking.net story comes up on the first page and this blog's story comes on page 2)
• they also wouldn't have found out that winners had to pay for their own awards. 

There are festivals which exist like vanity press - people pay their money and get their award which they can use to impress people who don't know anything about the obscure festival.   

If someone knows that they are paying for an award, that may be a little seedy, but then the deal between the Awards thing and the film maker is transparent and everyone knows what the deal is.  But this organization advertises that

Awards will be presented to more than 15% of total applicants and only to those films that demonstrate a superior level of craftsmanship and quality. 

So this doesn't appear to be a vanity festival where all submissions win (and I have no reason to believe that is what happened, though the three Alaska themed awards had ten winners each) or where the winners would be expected to pay for their trophies as the winners I contacted were asked to do.

7) The hearer's reliance on its (the representation in item 1) truth;

The overwhelming number of festivals are legitimate.  In his book Film Festival Secrets, William Holland writes that "Fortunately, these [scams] are few and far between, but festival scams do exist."(p. 19)  I imagine that scams will increase as people begin to realize the amount of money to be made with a rented mailbox.

I'm guessing that many filmmakers, totally caught up in the time devouring activities of completing a film, do not pay near as much attention to getting in film festivals as they should.

There are many film related websites and blogs where people might learn about the reputations of various film festivals.

I have learned though my experiences just writing about film festivals is that:
1.  There doesn't seem to be any sort of vetting or regulation of film festivals.  I haven't found a governing body that verifies the legitimacy of festivals.
2.  Withoutabox, an organizations that streamlines submitting to film festivals, for many appears to be taken as a seal of approval.  But it also appears that because there are so many new film festivals daily and because they profit from people submitting to festivals - legit or not - they are not checking out festivals for legitimacy.

So, while some film makers, perhaps many, might assume being connected with Withoutabox implies legitimacy, this doesn't appear to be the case.  I couldn't find anything on their site that actually talks about Withoutabox and what they claim to actually do other than send people's films out to festivals.  However, they do have forums where people can ask questions about festivals and see what others have had to say. 

8) The hearer's right to rely on the representation;

One has to assume that the hearer has an obligation to read the website carefully.  Since there don't seem to be any governmental agencies or even industry groups that monitor festivals, there aren't a lot of options but to trust what the festival website presents.  Last year when I first discovered this, the only contact mentioned was the Anchorage mailing address.  I went to talk to the people but it turned out to be a rented mail box.  There was no email or phone number.

This year there is an email address.  Withoutabox has a phone number.  So, presumably you could get more information from the people who run this organization.

So, hearers - in this case readers -

• could have read and discovered there was no actual film festival.  And the name has even been changed in July to Awards, which reflects this more.
• could NOT tell there is no connection really with Alaska
• could NOT tell that award winners are expected to pay for their trophies

9) Damage caused by the representation.

• The opportunity costs of sending to a festival that isn't a festival.  Even this year, though, with the name changed to Awards, people will spend time and money submitting to this festival when, if they knew there was no connection to Alaska and they knew they would have to pay for their trophy, they wouldn't have submitted.
  
• The actual costs, somewhere between $30-50 for submission
• Cost to pay Withoutabox if they use them
• Cost of the whatever they submit to the Awards thing 
• Cost of postage

For individual film makers, the cost isn't great - perhaps $100 total at most, not counting their time.  But this is the  typical salami technique where no individual loses a lot but cumulatively the organization can make a considerable amount.  The FBI tends not to go after these things because the individual damage isn't great.

• The Anchorage International Film Festival stands to be the biggest loser.  As a real festival in Alaska with the same initials the Alaska International Film Festival adopted for its first year, a significant portion of the film submissions might have gone to them as film makers mixed the two festivals up.  

Conclusion

I'm only able to use information that is available here.  In a court of law, attorneys could subpoena information and take testimony that I can't get.  Therefore, I can't make any final conclusions.  But this is how I see it with the limited information I have.

The ANCHORAGE International is unquestionably a real festival, with lots of films, lots of viewers, lots of film makers from around the world.  I've seen it with my own eyes.  I've been to four or five of them and blogged three of them, so I know it's real.  It's not perfect.  But each year they learn from their mistakes and get better.  And film makers, including minor film makers, say they get treated very well in Anchorage compared to most other festivals.

The ALASKA International Film Festival/Awards is clearly not a festival, which they acknowledged last month by changing their name from Festival to Awards.  But there are still questions in my mind about their transparency, particularly on the issue of being an "Alaskan" festival and the awards.

• There is nothing Alaska about the Alaska International Awards except the pictures on their website (and some of those are questionable), their rented mail box, and their name.  To portray yourself as something you are not is clearly deceptive and what scams do to get their victims to part with their money.

• They charged their award winners a significant amount for the 'crystal wave' trophies they won.   Christopher Holland, the author of Film Festival Secrets (p. 19) lists this as the practice of film festival scams.
  
• There is no information about any of the organizers, jurors, or any people at all on their website. Most legitimate film competitions list the names of their boards and staff on their websites. 

To be totally open and honest they should

• abandon the name Alaska and take a name that more realistically represents who they are
  
• be more open about the fact that winners must pay for their trophies on the website.  If people want to submit to a vanity awards thing (a festival is a festival but what do you all an awards?), then they should know that is what they are doing.  
  
• list the names  and contact information of the key people involved in their awards event. 

**Calculation of $16,000 income from submission fees.
Their website says 

Awards will be presented to more than 15% of total applicants and only to those films that demonstrate a superior level of craftsmanship and quality.

[Update August 20:  I originally misread this and mentally put a 'no' before the "more than."  It would make sense for a film event with awards to limit the number of awards to a relatively small percent, especially since it says the films must "demonstrate a superior level of craftsmanship and quality."  How can they be sure there will be enough submissions that meet that standard?  So the 'no' would have made sense.  But this changes things.  It makes the amount they probably took in lower, but it also takes away any standards.  Reading it correctly means that potentially every film that was submitted could have gotten an award.  I'll adjust the rest accordingly.]
 
Their site lists 65 award winners for film and screenwriting.  That means they had to have at least 406 films submitted.  We have to trust that they kept to the 15% limit, since they don't show films and they didn't list the films submitted, we can't tell for sure.  If there weren't at least 406 films, then they would clearly be deceiving film makers and screen writers.

[We know that 65 films won awards (I think it's a little less because a couple may have won more than one category), so that is the minimum number of films.  So the festival could have had - according to their guidelines - anywhere from 65 films and scripts submitted to about 400 submissions (65 is a bit more than 15% of 400).]

Their fees - depending on length and date submitted - ranged from $30 - $55.  If we assume $40 as an average price in order to make a guestimate, they would have received [between $2600 and $16,000] $16,240 in submission fees.

[But this also means that they are not limiting the number of awards the way I thought and the way a legitimate award event would do it.  Rather,  they are leaving it open for every entry to potentially get an award.  As film makers around the world begin to realize this, the value of winning one of these awards diminishes because all the films could potentially get an award.  If that were the case, it would simply be like buying an award.  Because only the award winners are announced, no one knows what percent of applicants actually won. And it appears that the Alaska International Film Awards takes a cut of the award cost for themselves.]]

[UPDATE Nov 17, 2017:  It's come to my attention that in 2013 IndieWire did a two part post on film festival scams  and talked about the work on this blog, including this post.]

More Alaska Vanity

Some of these are more scrutable than others.

This is a great government program. People are actually willing to spend more than they have to for a license plate. All these people are adding to the state's coffers voluntarily. And not all plates cost the same.  From the DMV website:

And there are a few rules:

Plate Restrictions:

What you CAN USE on a personalized license plate: Letters A to Z Numbers 0 to 9 Spaces

What you CANNOT USE on a personalized license plate: Ham radio call signs Special symbols such as -, #, %, &, etc. Duplicates of active personalized plates Ethnic, racial, vulgar, or indecent connotations

Two Short Notes One of Which Wanders to a Third

I posted a brief irreverent video of RG's 20 second history of Alaska earlier today, but took it down at the request of the 'historian.' As you can imagine, any good history of Alaska would have to mention Ted Stevens. Although the reference was brief and not disrespectful, this week of memorials is probably not the best time to post it. I should have thought more carefully about this in the first place.

I would also like to point out a relatively new Alaskan website - Alpenglo. The blogger is someone I know, but that's not enough reason to mention it here. My reason is that she is traveling south on the Alcan and has posted some น่าดู photos.

น่าดู is Thai meaning "Good to look at." Thai has this easy way to turn a verb into an adjective meaning "good to ____".  Fill in the blank - eat, play, see, hear, etc.  You add the word น่า (Na - falling tone) in front of the word. In this case ดู (do) means "to look at." So น่าดู means "good to look at" or "worth looking at." Less literally translated, it could be 'attractive."

My mention of this is not totally off-the-wall because the new blogger was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand and I think that probably made me think to use น่าดู when I couldn't find exactly the right word in English. 


น = n, the little mark ่ on top (น่) is a tone mark and in this case makes it a falling tone
า = a as in "ah".  So น่า = na with a falling tone.  You can hear the tone at Thai2English.
ด =  d
  ู =  u, and is always under the consonant so ดู = 'do'

You can listen to all five Thai tones at Thailanguage.com.

Another Day with Blue Sky

The Anchorage Daily News may be focusing on days of rain, but I'm focusing on the times we can see blue sky.  Today was another such day.  Though I have to admit, not everyone sees it that way and when the sun shined briefly through the clouds this afternoon at a barbecue we were at, some people applauded.

Twenty Eight Days of Rain, But Who's Counting?

The Anchorage Daily News calls it "Anchorage's meteorological misery streak" which set a record of 28 days of measurable rain in a row.  But the moss and mushrooms are thriving. 

Identifying mushrooms, except for the few I know for sure, is always iffy.  Even with my Audubon Field Guide.  This appears to be a polypore, but that's as precise as I think I can get.  There's a penny in the lower right to give you a sense of scale.  Maybe we can call this the catcher's mitt mushroom.

This is a concrete step in our yard.  The little mushroom in the lower left is the one in the pictures below.

This is a blackish-red russula with a white stem as opposed to the rosy russula which has a pink stem.  Someone's been lunching on this one.

This mushroom is past its prime and naturally recycling. 

As our front yard raspberry patch goes through a period of serious decline, our backyard raspberries are making a resurgence. 

There is something called a cup mushroom, but I think this one is simply old and its cap has curved up as it decays. 

And here's a very fine spider web, low to the ground that seems to be capturing more moisture than mosquitoes. 

And all over Anchorage the amanitas are popping up and offering some color. 

Crazy French Camera Man Documents Grafitti Artists or ?

As a blogger who carries his digital camera/video in his pocket all the time, I couldn't help but relate to Thierry Guetta, the crazy Frenchman who films everything he sees.  He says he doesn't ask, he just films. He runs a clothing shop probably on Melrose in LA when the movie starts.  He buys in bulk - I got the impression from France, but I could be wrong - then hyped them and charged $400 for a cheap T shirt.  This should have been a clue to where this movie was going.  I don't usually go through the story line of the movie, but I don't think it matters in this case because it's how the story is told that makes this movie.  But if you don't want to know, skip the rest.

[Update, 10:50am - I forgot to mention the name of the movie:  Exit Through the Gift Shop.  It's not obvious and I'm not totally sure I'm interpreting it right, but it would seem to emphasize the commercialization of the art.]

On a trip to Paris, he finds out his cousin is making space invader inspired tiles and gluing them to buildings at night.   He follows him around Paris at night as he surreptitiously puts up his tiles.  His cousin introduces him to other graffiti artists (some call these street artists because they use media besides spray paint) and he starts filming them at work telling them he's making a documentary.  Much of the film is from these hand held films climbing up buildings at night posting all sorts of graffiti.  Back in LA he meets Shepherd Fairey whom everyone knows from his ubiquitous Obama Hope poster.  But in the film, he's going to Kinko's and making giant peel off illustrations that he puts up on buildings.

Soon Thierry is searching for Banksy  [The Banksy link is well worth it!], the most famous of graffiti artists, and eventually Banksy falls into his lap (is this a clue?) when he arrives in LA alone and contacts Thierry's cousin and Thierry gets to be his LA guide. 

Banksy in disguise for interview

Banksy lets Thierry film him but always in a black hoodey and his voice altered, or with his face pixeled out. Then asks when the documentary is going to be finished.  Thierry has never made a movie, he just films and sticks them in boxes.  But he tries. The film is bad.  Banksy tells Thierry to go back to LA and put on his own art show.

This is when Thierry's clothing store experience comes into play as he hires people to make hundreds, maybe thousands of 'works' which are basically copies of famous paintings with photoshop changes and in some cases paint dripped or sprayed on them.  It's marketed spectacularly and he sells a million dollars of art.

When we left, my wife said it was all a hoax and I scoffed.  But as I think about it five days later, maybe it is.  Check out the Wikipedia post on Mr. Brainwash, Thierry's artist name.  It seems Mr. Brainwash's show was real.  But is there really this stash of movies somewhere?

It doesn't matter.  If it is a hoax, then it is probably even more amazing than if it's true.  And which parts are hoax and which are true?  I would also say this is a film where the soundtrack plays a huge role in pulling these low res visuals into a coherent movie.    And given this film celebrates artists breaking the law for their art and Thierry shoots and doesn't even ask later,  I felt no compunction at all, taking some video of the movie in the theater, so you could get a sense of it.  Unfortunately, of the three clips I took, the one I'm posting is the best, and it's not that good.  In this clip, Thierry describes Banksy at Disneyland, hanging a blow up hostage/prisoner in an orange jumpsuit, black hood, and handcuffed, onto a fence where the old west train rides past in Frontierland.  When I first went to Denali National Park and rode the bus through the wilderness and people would point out a caribou way off in the distance, or a bear or moose, I dreamed of making plywood cutouts and putting up giraffes and zebras that would be barely visible from the bus.  So I can relate to this prank.  The security guards at Disneyland weren't amused.



This is not a typical Hollywood movie.  Good fun.


[Update Sept. 18, 2010:  NY Times article about another graffiti artist  MOMO's 8 mile paint drip in NYC.]

Martin Lindeke "Up Ship Creek Without a Dam"

I do understand the power of the soundbite.  When I downloaded the video to load it onto Viddler, that quote just stood out.  How could I resist?

I ran into Lindeke, the Democratic candidate for the House District 18 seat - the bases and Eagle River mostly.  This was the district represented by Nancy Dahlstrom before she switched over to a state job and then resigned that job because the timing looked like it violated the spirit of the law if not the letter of the law prohibiting legislators from take jobs created while they were in the legislature.

Lindeke served in the Navy on the USS Dwight D Eisenhower (nuclear powered aircraft carrier), he was a professional in-line skater, and a line cook/chef at Simon's and Sous Chef at the Brewhouse.  He now works for a private company in Eagle River as a Hazardous Material Specialist and Building Inspector. 



I had great intentions to try to cover a number of the Anchorage races.  As it is I'll be lucky if I'm able to get up some videos like this one to give you a sense of the candidates.  You can check out his website as well.

Here's the full list of the District 18 candidates from the Division of Elections website:

State Representative District 18

* Nancy A. Dahlstrom (Republican) - Withdrew
PO Box 771094
Eagle River, AK 99577
Phone: (907) 694-4929

* Bill Cook (Republican)
19328 Monastery Dr. #A
Eagle River, AK 99577
Phone: (907) 694-1010

* Dan Kendall (Republican)
PO Box 770616
Eagle River, AK 99577
Phone: (907) 696-7066

* Martin J. Lindeke (Democrat)
16111 Cline Street
Eagle River, AK 99577
Phone: (907) 622-4216

* Dan Saddler (Republican)
PO Box 771811
Eagle River, AK 99577
Phone: (907) 696-5492

ACPRTF Just Rolls Off the Tongue

I had been invited today, as a Healing Racism in Anchorage Steering Committee member, to come to the ACPRTF meeting to discuss Tim Wise's September  Anchorage visit.  (When I mentioned this to my mother just now by phone, she said, "I saw Tim Wise on television last night.  He wrote Colorblind. I'd come to see him."  Except she's in LA.)

In addition to two Anchorage Police Department representatives - including Chief Mark Mew - there were two FBI agents and people from a variety of Anchorage communities.


Here's a little background on the Anchorage Community Police Relations Task Force from the Equal Rights Commission webpages:

Background
The creation of the ACPRTF arose from an unfortunate incident involving a young black male named Cassel Williams on January 14, 1981.  Mr. Williams had fired several shots from his apartment window and the APD was called to intervene.  The responding officers believed it was necessary to use deadly force and Mr. Williams was shot and killed. Considerable concern was raised at the time that other crisis intervention alternatives to deadly force were either not used or not available.  Following extensive discussions, an agreement was reached to establish a ACPRTF. Since its establishment in 1981, the Task Force has operated successfully in its role as a liaison between the ethnic minority community and the APD.  It continues to provide a forum for input and constructive dialog between the ethnic minority community and the APD.  This reinstatement of the original commitment is intended to ensure the continued relevance of the ACPRTF, and further, to ensure that the APD’s philosophical objectives are achieved.
To file an Incident Report, please fill out the form and fax to 343-4395 or email to aerc@muni.org.

 Laura (making a presentation in the picture), from Anchorage United for Youth,  a coalition of organizations that help youth,  talked about their program first and asked for assistance making contact with youth and parents who ought to take advantage of the many programs available in Anchorage.  Often, she said, there are great programs available, but lack of transportation keeps kids out.

Then I got to talk about Tim Wise. (From his Facebook page:

Tim Wise will be on CNN with Don Lemon tomorrow night [Sat Aug 14], about 7:10 EST to discuss "Dr." Laura's public n-word meltdown and all-around racist rant, and to place it in the context of white racism more broadly...check it out, it should be a good one.)

Then there were some reports on complaints received.  Someone whose son had been murdered felt he wasn't kept in the loop by the police and felt the story he heard from witnesses contradicted the outcome.  Another complaint was from a woman who was sitting in her car when the police swooped down and searched her car for drugs.  All she had in her car, she was reported saying, was her bible.  These had been looked into outside the meeting and there wasn't a lot of discussion.

Another issue that came up was racial profiling.  In addition to the previous story, one of the task force members said he'd been stopped twice recently.  In both cases he hadn't done anything wrong.  In one case the police officer demanded to see proof of citizenship.  In the  other case, the reason for the stop was strange - that he had turned left into the wrong lane from Seward Highway into Northern Lights which is a one way street.  In both cases, when he finally mentioned that he was on this task force, the officers gave him his license/registration/insurance back and simply left.  The police chief asked that they meet to discuss this further after the meeting.

The chief said people need to call in and complain right away so it can be investigated when it's fresh.  He also said racial profiling is prohibited.  People are only to be stopped if they have violated the law or if they match descriptions of suspects.  There is no policy saying officers should or shouldn't ask for proof of legal status in the US, but in practice this doesn't come up unless someone is arrested and basically this has happened recently, to his knowledge, in prostitution busts and that's been mostly Asians.

One member said that her mother and her mother's friends would never call in a complaint.  It just wasn't something they would do culturally.  One suggestion was to contact others in their community - such as task force members - who could help them do this.

It was a low key meeting.  I was impressed with the group as a whole and it was good to see the chief listening respectfully and showing what appeared to me to be genuine concern. Though it also appeared that incidents are happening which either aren't being reported or aren't being resolved as well as they could be.

Barbara Jones, the Equal Rights Rights Commission Director, reported that the US Justice Department which helped to create the ACPRTF (do you remember what that stands for with looking above?), will be coming to Anchorage in September to hold community meetings and do a check on things.  As I write this, I'm thinking the Justice Department isn't mentioned in the background info on the web that I posted above.

Testing the Soil

I thought that by going organic and supplementing the soil in the garden with my compost, I would get the right balance of nutrients.  Other organic gardeners have told me they've stopped testing.  But I have spots where some things look pretty anemic.  So I recently bought a soil testing kit and today I finally did the first sample.

The green top is the PH test.  That was the easiest match.  Clearly a 7.  The red was nitrogen and that seems to be low.  The phosphorus is a little harder to tell, probably between medium and low.  And the potassium appears to be medium. (You have to look through the water with the black square on the other side.)  Obviously, testing this way is NOT an exact science. 

An ADN story two years ago says that home soil test kits are inaccurate.

The home test kits for nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium didn't work either. In some cases it was impossible to match the color of the sample to a color on the chart of the soil test package. In others, the readings didn't coincide with the results from the lab and tested high when the lab indicated nutrients to be low.

But I can do 12 tests for about $12.  If you send it for a test, it's about $40 for one.  

They want you to mix soil from all over the yard into one sample. 

To collect a representative sample for an average-size garden, I suggest taking at least five sub-samples. For vegetables and flowers, dig a hole 8 inches deep and, from the side of the hole, take a sliver of soil and put it into a bag. Do this in five locations and shake up the soil to mix it thoroughly.

I know that the soil varies from place to place in our yard.  So I can take soil from different beds and get readings for that bed.  We have some young friends I'm going to enlist to help do some of the other readings.  I think we'll have a good time.  

Even if they turn out to be inaccurate, I'm not a competitive gardener (as any of my neighbors will attest) so I can't do any real damage by adding too much nitrogen.  And putting the water, the tablets, and the soil into the water and waiting for the colors to show up is fun. 

Link Clickers Beware - But You Can Opt Out

[Update, August 12]:  An anonymous comment provided a link to the FTC guidelines covering endorsements and testimonials. You can see the relevant section for bloggers in the third comment at the end of this post. It sure looks to me that this totally violates those guidelines.]

BloggerBuzz had a post recently announcing a new way to 'monetize' one's blog:

. . . Any time you write about a product or service, you're connecting your audience to that product. If someone makes a purchase, the seller benefits from your written word—you influenced a purchase. There are thousands of websites that will pay you a fee for any business you bring them through a form of online advertising called affiliate marketing. With affiliate ads, web publishers are compensated for driving online actions.

VigLink is a content monetization company that makes affiliate marketing very easy for bloggers. We offer a simple snippet of code you can install in your blog that automatically and transparently does all the work for you. We've catalogued and signed up for more than 12,500 affiliate programs and we collect all the performance information and deliver you a single integrated payment. In return, VigLink takes 25% of the incremental revenue you earn. [emphasis added].

There's also a two minute video.




What's wrong here?    Most might say, nothing at all.  This is the American way of life.  Nothing has value unless it has a price.  Unless we can make a buck off of it.  People who blog for free are losers.  Well, here are the problems I have:

1.  The reader doesn't know the blogger is being paid and thinks the endorsement is uninfluenced by a payoff.


When I was a cab driver in LA, a fare once wanted to go to a strip club.  When I dropped him off, the club guy came to my window and gave me $5 and told me it was always $5 per person I dropped off.  So if someone asked me if there were any good clubs around, you know where I'd take him.

This is the same sort of problem these unmarked links set up.  The reader thinks it's a genuine endorsement uninfluenced by the promise of a payoff. Currently, there are ads in some blogs, but they are labeled as such.   Readers suspect or know that the blogger gets a commission on these. 

In their FAQ's, the company writes this about reader awareness:

Will my users notice?

Likely not. VigLink does not change the user experience one bit. No links are inserted or removed on the page, there are no double-underlines or pop-ups, and mousing over a link looks "clean."

But, it's really dirty is what they seem to be saying.

This is like tv shows and movies that pay film makers to embed their products in their shows.  So buying Full Circle Farm produce no longer is an integral aspect of the character, but rather they wrote that in because FCF has paid them for this stealth ad.

I've gotten emails offering me payments if I plug a product on my blog and they will pay more if I don't say that I'm getting paid.  The advertisers believe that if the readers don't know the bloggers are getting paid, they are more likely to believe.

In the FAQ's, they even tell merchants:

Additionally, VigLink increases confidence, click-through rates and conversions by making the links to your site appear to be "natural" links instead of obviously embedded affiliate codes. [Emphasis added]

They are selling the fact to merchants that they are deceiving viewers into thinking these are natural links.

As a viewer, YOU CAN OPT out.  There's a page where if you click on the button, it says

If you'd like to disable VigLink on sites that you visit, click the button below.

I'm not sure what that means.  I have no idea how the average viewer would ever find the page, or even know there is something to opt out of.  Does it mean they won't collect data on you?  Does it mean that the blogger doesn't get his payoff if you purchase something through his link?  There's a link there to a long privacy policy which includes statements like:

We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under the age of 13. If you are under 13, please do not give us any personally identifiable information.  [Emphasis added]

How many kids read privacy policies?  How many adults read privacy policies?  How many people even know this company exists? 


2.  The blogger starts pushing products, not because he really likes them, but because they will make him money.

Behavioralism is a school of psychology that tells us, among other things, that people repeat behaviors that are rewarded.  So, if bloggers get paid for writing posts that get people to click on links and buy products, they will start writing more such posts.  And eventually, some bloggers will recommend products they don't really believe in because they know they will get rewarded.  


3.   Trust in Blogs Will Turn to Suspicion

Before this new company arrived, readers knew that if they clicked on an ad, the blogger would get some small amount of reimbursement, but if they clicked on a link in the post, there was no compensation.  They could reasonably assume that the blogger put in the link because he believed it was in the reader's interest to click on the link.

Now though, as surfers begin to understand this new system, they will become suspicious of all blogs and bloggers (and probably the websites of newspapers and everyone else will do this as well.  Maybe they already do.)

Even if bloggers, like me, post announcements saying that we do not have paid links, there's nothing to stop people who DO have paid links from putting up the same announcements. 

Note:  People should be skeptical about what they read on blogs.  But there has been a sense of innocence in many blogs that are written by people who just enjoy sharing their ideas and without the corrupting influence of money. 

4.   Bloggers are probably also being ripped off

So, if VigLinks is willing to hide from the viewer the fact that the blogger is getting paid, why should we be surprised that they are also snookering the blogger?

• Blogger pay is probably pretty tiny.  One reason putting up ads is not even a temptation is that I know I would get so little revenue from the ads anyway.  If I'm going to sell out it's going to be for a lot more than $50.   I looked into google-ads  when I first started blogging and learned that only blogs with at least thousands of daily hits are likely to make any real money.  The ads for this company don't talk about how much a blogger would actually get.  I looked through more of the links on the website.  You get vague things like:

How does payment work?

VigLink will pay by check in the United States and PayPal anywhere it is available. We are expanding our payment options over time. VigLink will ask for payment information and pay publishers as soon as their balance reaches $25. VigLink typically takes 25% on commission earned by publishers. Often publishers still receive higher payouts due to collective bargaining and high volume commission levels. We will issue an IRS Form 1099 to any publisher who makes more than $400 in a fiscal year.

What percent of bloggers will even earn that $25?  If they don't, what happens to the money?  So, we don't really know how much you get per click.   Actually, another FAQ says you get paid if someone makes purchase only.  It doesn't say how much.  Instead it says,

How does VigLink make money?

You earn a commission for every sale made on a linked site. VigLink takes a small fee from that commission and then passes on the rest to you.

Small fee?  It's true it will be a small fee in absolute cents.  But it is 25% of what the blogger earns.  Gryphen at Immoral Minority said that Tank Jones and Rex Butler's commission from Levi Johnstons' earnings is only 20%.  I don't know if that's true, but Gryph seemed to think that was a significant chunk.  This company takes 25%.

But if the blogger doesn't make much money at all, what's 25% of nothing?  Well, there's something called the salami technique:

Employee embezzles large amount of money by stealing small sums from many different accounts.

This linking scheme isn't stealing because they tell the blogger and the blogger agrees to it. Though they intentionally do not want the viewer to know what is happening.   But, the vast majority of bloggers who might sign up for this probably wouldn't make much money.  It's possible a lot won't even reach the $25 threshold necessary for them to write the first check.  And as I asked earlier, what happens to this below threshold accumulation?  Why don't I think they'll donate it to decrease our national budget? 

I'm guessing, based on talking to people who have google ads, most people won't make more than, say, $50 a year, and that's probably high.  A few of the very big blogs with  thousands of hits a day, might do well.  But if this company got a million blogs to sign up - and it's really easy to add the code - and they get 25%, and if that amounted to about $10 per blog, that would be $10 million per year. (Hatrickassociates claims there are 400 million active English-language blogs in 2010, so my estimate is probably way low.)

So a scheme like this would

• pollute general trust in blogs with 
• minor benefit to most bloggers who sign up, 
• cause deception for readers, and 
• cause companies to pay a salami slice commission for links that they had in the past for free. 

The main beneficiary would appear to be this new company, and, probably Blogspot, WordPress, and TypePad also get a cut.  I couldn't find any mention of that.  


It seems to me that blogs with stealth links like this should post a notice at the top of the blog:

"This blog may receive kickbacks from merchants if you click from here and our reviews of products may be biased because of that."