Friday, May 15, 2009

Houston Opera Vista Festival Threatened

From Joe White:

HOUSTON – The organizers of the second annual Opera Vista Festival suspected one of their featured operas would draw controversy. But when an anonymous letter threatening the founders of the Nova Arts Project arrived at founding director Amy Hopper’s doorstep, she realized the show had potential to ignite a firestorm.

“We received this letter that was all about ignorance and hate, and that’s the whole point of this opera – to confront ignorance and hate. It makes it even more important to tell the story,” Hopper said.

The opera is “Edalat Square,” one of two works that won Opera Vista’s inaugural festival competition in 2007 (think “American Idol” for opera composers). Written by Atlanta‐based composer R. Timothy Brady, the opera recounts the true story of Mahmoud Asgari, 17, and Ayaz Marhoni, 16, who were hanged in Iran in 2005 for the crime of lavaat, or sex between two men. Brady was inspired by the story to craft a poetic work that offers an unblinking look at bigotry, but is also prayerful and mystical, said Viswa Subbaraman, artistic director and co‐founder of Opera Vista. “It’s an amazing appeal to the soul,” Subbaraman said. “It’s some of the most poignant music and lyrics in opera. I don’t know how you could watch it and not be moved.”

Because of its exploration of two hot‐button topics – radical Islam and homosexuality – performances of “Edalat Square” have faced opposition before. At its world premiere at Emory University, the university’s president contemplated canceling the show because of complaints. Some critics have said the show is persecuting the Islamic faith, which festival organizers say it doesn’t. Others object to the homosexual content.

On May 5, Amy Hopper found out the show was already pushing buttons here in Houston. She opened her mailbox to discover a hand‐stenciled, anonymous letter that said: “You are pigs to mix Islam with gays. You must stop! We will not let you do it.”

The festival’s organizers actually are glad the opera could spark debate or criticism. That’s part of the purpose of the performing arts – to provoke discussion and ignite the emotions, they said. “Great art should open a discussion, and I think that’s what this opera does,” Subbaraman said. “Art has never existed in a vacuum – it often has a political bent, and that’s as it should be.” “Edalat Square” will open the Opera Vista Festival at 8 p.m. Thursday, May 21, in the Wortham Theater Complex at the University of Houston. For more information and a schedule of operas being performed at the festival, visit www.operavista.org or www.novaartsproject.com/shows/ovf. Nova Arts Project is a Houston based, not‐forprofit performing arts organization that seeks to recreate classics and inspire new works in a fearlessly theatrical way.

Opera Vista is dedicated to continuing the growth of the operatic tradition by producing fully‐staged versions of new and contemporary operas, giving living composers a performance venue, and establishing and developing an audience for new opera. Opera Vista is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.

Monday, May 11, 2009

The Houston Chronicle on Saving Newspapers

Yesterday, the Houston Chronicle editorial board weighed in with its suggestions on how to save themselves and their industry. As I outlined more broadly last week, these particular suggestions either make no sense or would be counter-productive. However, let's discuss each of the three Chronic proposals (cribbed, ironically, from the Dallas Morning News publisher):

  1. Provide temporary tax relief by passing the Baucus-Snowe Act, which would allow newspapers (or any other businesses) to offset losses from 2008 and 2009 against the past five years’ earnings. This may be a bad suggestion from a tax point of view; currently businesses can take current losses and "roll them forward" to offset future tax burdens. This would allow businesses to make the offset today against past taxes, and get a big refund from the IRS. What this might do is encourage newspapers owners to take the refund up front, then declare bankruptcy and close. Hardly seems like a public good.
  2. Give newspapers a limited antitrust exemption that would allow them to share ideas and investigate collaborative new business models. This is a very bad idea; collusion would potentially allow the small number of newspaper publishers nationwide an opportunity to distort the market to their own economic benefit, to the detriment of all their readers and customers. Funny that the newspapers, who have been such proponents of the "free market", argue against letting the market decide their fate, now that competition has dramatically reduced the amount of advertising revenue they can extract.

    Today less than 275 of the nation's 1,500 daily newspapers remain independently owned, and more than half of all U.S. markets are dominated by one paper. Why would we allow such an already small number of players in the market to collude on price-fixing? It makes no sense.

  3. Allow newspapers to devise a way to ensure fair compensation from Internet outlets that use their content to generate their own advertising revenues. This is the one that confuses me the most, probably because I don't use any Internet outlets which use newspaper content to generate advertising revenues. I do occasionally visit Google News, which gives me headlines; when I click on a headline, it takes me to the publisher's site, where they can serve me all the ads they want; I can't read the content on the Google News site. What about using a search engine to discover articles? As it turns out, the search function on the Houston Chronicle's own web site is so poor that the best way to find articles on their site is to use an external search engine. So where is the free ride? It seems the Chronic should be paying Google for the visitors they bring to the site.

    The Chronicle should, in the interest of fairness and accuracy, let us know how many of the visitors to their site arrive from Google News, or various search engines; we would then know how much value those "parasites" are actually providing to this content provider. I'll go out on a limb and suggest that without the online aggregators and search portals, no one from outside Houston would have any reason to visit www.chron.com - nor would they know it existed unless they stumbled upon it at random..

I also don't get the idea of "Topic A: allowing newspapers to become nonprofit organizations." As I pointed out, newspapers already have the option to emulate The Texas Observer and Mother Jones Magazine, which are publications supported by non-profit foundations. Why would we need to make any other changes to the tax code just for newspapers, since that solution is already available to them?

I am sympathetic about the plight of the newspapers; I have good friends who either work at papers or who have family members there. I wish them all the best as they try to navigate the new economic conditions, and try to survive after playing in the free market and having their indirect compensation model undermined by new competition for advertising. But, much like the health insurance providers, the big record labels, and the merged banking and investment institutions, I won't miss them if they end up disappearing. I think there are enough indicators that the functions they serve either aren't necessary or can be handled by other market players.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Save journalism, not newspapers

I'm a big fan of David Simon, the creator of HBO's The Wire, Generation Kill, and The Corner. Yesterday he appeared before a panel of Senators from the Commerce committee, and participated in a discussion of the fate of newspapers in the US (reported in Dallas Morning News).

As usual, his analysis is spot-on; it should be, he's been trying to tell us of the problem for over a decade. Newspapers are losing readers because they're doing a worse and worse job of covering the news and their communities; in the fifth season of The Wire, the Baltimore Sun pretty much missed or buried all the actually big news events that took place. He identifies the root cause: driven by a desire to make larger and larger profits, corporate-owned newspapers have been trying to reduce costs (personnel, mostly) while increasing circulation (to be more valuable to advertisers). This has led to overworked editors and a decimated newsroom, with fewer tenured reporters. The net result has been a disaster for journalism, and as Simon warns, will eventually lead to an environment in which public officials no longer feel constrained by the watchful eye of the fourth estate.

Sadly, I disagree entirely with his two proposed solutions to the problem.

  • Newspapers should charge readers for the content they create. Simon belittles the belief that "information should be free" on the Internet; it's this "freeloading" attitude toward newspaper content that is part of the problem, and the best solution is to figure out how newspapers can charge their readers for access to the content. After all, this content is costly to create; journalists, photographers, editors, managers must be paid, and their expenses covered while working on long running stories.

    While he's correct on the costs, he's coming to the wrong conclusion. Newspapers have never charged readers directly for the content therein; most of what you pay for covers the cost of raw materials and delivery. Newspapers have always paid for content indirectly by selling advertising, and there's no reason to expect that to change on the Internet. Yes, it's harder to make as much money - the newspaper is no longer the exclusive (or premier) advertising delivery vehicle for the community, so it can't charge a premium for the service. That's not the fault of the Internet readers; it's just a side effect of being in an economy where competition has sprung up for advertising dollars.

    If you make readers pay for content, fewer readers will come; that's a downward spiral, which seems only to lead to a small number of people paying large amounts of money for reporting, leaving the rest of us out in the cold. That's certainly not the model that speaks truth to power; only widely disseminated reporting can effect social change. In a strange sense, we've always had a small number of people paying for journalism - advertisers have often realized their power and attempted to use that to influence editorial decisions - but in the end, the need to deliver a large audience to advertisers has driven the delivery systems (newspapers, radio, television) to disseminate their product as widely as possible as cheaply as possible, to the benefit of society and to each of us individually.

    So how should newspapers recoup the cost of doing great journalism, if advertising dollars won't cover them? I don't know, but I do know that charging for content is likely to be a dead end. Instead, publishers should charge for some added value: access to archives, alerts for breaking news, or some other popular service. While we still have a multiplicity of news providers, we're likely to see experimentation in this area.

    One chilling suggestion Simon makes is that Congress consider relaxing anti-trust prohibitions so newspapers can collaborate on how best to charge for their content. The very last thing we need is a collusive attempt to establish a single business model, perhaps even the least efficient or effective one available. This would be analogous to relaxing anti-trust laws so software companies can collaborate on how best to eliminate their open-source competitors. It's a very bad idea.

  • Change the tax code to make newspapers tax-exempt, as non-profit organizations. This is a heavy-weight non-solution to the problem, and it's a suggestion which gives an unfair competitive advantage to newspapers over other content producers such as television, radio, and of course Internet-only sources. It's also unnecessary; the Texas Observer and Mother Jones Magazine are two examples of publications run by non-profit foundations (full disclosure: I contribute to both). Therefore, a solution is already out there; in my opinion, we don't need to exempt newspapers especially from taxes in order to save journalism.

    On the other hand, I do support one of his suggestions, which was to give some sort of tax preference to a particular one-time event: the transfer of ownership of a newspaper from a for-profit corporation to some non-profit organization (such as an independent foundation, as above). This one-time benefit would help more quickly close the book on the disastrous experiment of having Wall Street own newspapers. I don't mind paying holding companies a bribe to divest themselves of the real assets, the personnel and the presses, as long as the transition is to an ownership structure which is more robust and responsive to its readers.

Another model for funding journalism is the curious system that is found in the United Kingdom: the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), funded by a tax on radios and televisions. It's a progressive approach to the problem; journalism (and to be fair, entertainment) is seen as a necessary public good, and so it's financed by a tax levied by the state. Interestingly, the result has not been an organization that shies away from attacking politicians - in effect, biting the hands that feed it. It's sadly a model which will never fly in the United States.

David Simon makes another good point: journalists require standing to be taken seriously by the people they're interviewing and/or reporting about. Traditional newsrooms have nurtured the careers of those journalists who are now household names, either nationally or in their community; elected officials tend to be more careful when challenged by these reporters because they know they have a constituency. The non-profit foundation model can hopefully also nurture the careers of "rock star" reporters, who can supplement their salaries or other compensation with speaking fees and book deals. Perhaps what we'll end up seeing are even more specialized journalists, who get to know a particular geographical area or topic really well, and become worldwide authorities on their subjects. I especially like his quote on page 7 (of 10) of his testimony; read the whole thing when you get a chance:

When I was in journalism school in the 1970s, the threat was television and its immediacy. My professors claimed that in order to survive, newspapers were going to have to cede the ambulance chasing and reactive coverage to TV and instead become more like great magazines. Specialization and beat reporting were the future. We were going to have to explain an increasingly complex world in ways that made us essential to an increasingly educated readership. The scope of coverage would have to go deeper, address more of the world, not less. Those were our ambitions. Those were my ambitions. ...

In summary, I think the problem is how do we save journalism, not "how do we save newspapers". Journalism is a system we know, and one whose contours aren't likely to change; you need to pay for good writers, good interrogators, and people who can pull the story together. That's what we need to make sure persists, not the particular delivery system.

Friday, May 1, 2009

HISD Random Search Statistics

I received this Open Records Request information via email yesterday. The response is interesting; I certainly remember a lot more news reports last year about teachers being found with drugs in their possession. I guess I have to assume those detections were from actual tips and not from the random searches. Which implies to me that the random searches were even more of a waste than I'd suspected. I wish I'd asked how much it had cost to implement those searches!

Bai B030909 Statistics on HISD random drug searches
From: "Kaiser, Pamela" 

Full report:

As of March 11, 2009 we completed 261 Random Sweeps of HISD facilities during the 2008 - 2009 
school year.  Only 3 employees have been arrested as the result of the Random K-9 Sweeps.  
These employees are:

December 15, 2008                  Harper Alternative                  Sharon Vean arrested for Possession of Marijuana

January 5, 2009                         Walnut Bend El.                      Perla Sanchez arrested for Possession of a Firearm

January 13, 2009                       Roberts Elementary               Melinda Herrick arrested for Possession of Controlled Substance (Xanax)


All three of these individuals were arrested and criminal charges were accepted by the Harris 
County District Attorney's Office.  The Harris County D.A.'s Office would be the ones to provide 
the disposition of the criminal charges.  Sharon Vean and Perla Sanchez are no longer employed 
with HISD. Ms. Herrick's appeals process has not been finalized.

Pamela Kaiser
Public Information Coordinator
Public Information Office


-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, March 09, 2009 9:23 AM
To: Kaiser, Pamela
Subject: OPEN RECORDS REQUEST: Statistics on HISD random drug searches

Hi Ms. Kaiser,

I'd like to submit an open records request for the following information. I'd like to know how 
many random drug searches HISD made since June 2008; if a campus was searched twice, that'd count 
as two. For only those random searches, I'd like to know how many employees were disciplined by 
HISD (any action - suspension, reassignment, termination, etc.), and how many of those cases were 
referred to the DA. If you can provide the names in the last case (I think those are public 
record?) then I can track the resolution of those cases via the courts.

Thanks;

Luigi Bai