As many as 100 Italian newspaper could be closed as the government cuts subsidies to an industry that is seen as “a wasteful abuse of taxpayers’ money propping up a declining industry with limited readership.”
The Financial Times reports (subscription required) the heavily subsidized papers are likely to be victims of deep budget cuts needed to get the economy back on track.
The cuts in newspaper subsidies, from €170m in total to €53m budgeted for next year, were ordered by the previous government of Silvio Berlusconi – the billionaire TV magnate with no great love for the print media he does not own – and confirmed by Mr Monti’s administration, which took office last month.
The government is promising to come up with some kind of system to determine who deserves money, but isn’t quite there yet. In the meantime, a bunch of smaller papers face extinction.
In the age of austerity what may be the last copy of Liberazione (5,000 circulation) will hit the news stands on Saturday. Other notable titles facing extinction include L’Unita, the former communist party daily founded by Antonio Gramsci in 1924; Il Manifesto, an independent leftwing paper since 1969 and Avvenire, a popular Catholic daily.
When Vonciel Offord walked into a Jacksonville, Fla., conference centre to renegotiate the terms of her mortgage, she felt her entire life depended on the outcome of her brief meeting with bank representatives.
Without a deal, she’d lose the four-bedroom house she’d been living in for six years. She’d be forced to find rental accommodations for herself and a disabled sister, and deal with the stigma that comes with having the bank foreclose on your dream.
“I had a death in my family and then my sister got very ill and had to move in with me,” said Ms. Offord, an Orlando-based salesperson. “It was just one thing after another and I fell behind on the mortgage.”
So with a pile of papers in hand outlining her finances and history, she drove from Orlando to Jacksonville to meet her lender at a three-day renegotiation event put on by the Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America (NACA), a grassroots organization that was founded to help Americans in danger of losing their homes refinance their mortgages.
Although the U.S. economy has been slowly rebuilding since the 2008 recession, the housing market remains mired in a deep slump. Values have dropped by as much as 60 per cent in some neighbourhoods, and at least 2.7 million homeowners who took out mortgages between 2004 and 2008 have faced foreclosure.
Another four million are expected to run into trouble over the next two years, prompting U.S. President Barack Obama to create a program intended to help millions of frustrated middle-class homeowners refinance their homes at lower rates, even if they owe more than the house is worth.
The stakes are high – banks are carrying billions of dollars on their books in risky mortgages, and each time one of those mortgages fails, they are stuck with a house to sell. The government – through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – insures more than a trillion dollars in loans, providing it with incentive to help solve the housing crisis by whatever means necessary.
But the Obama program is limited – it only helps homeowners who are current on their payments, and their loans must be guaranteed by the government. This excludes a wide swath of the most vulnerable, NACA says, and does little to keep those people in their homes.
“We’re doing something different here,” says NACA representative Darren Duarte from the floor of the Jacksonville convention centre. “We think these good people here deserve a chance to talk to their banks, too.”
There are plenty of reasons to keep these people in their houses. While many of them obtained loans under less-than-ideal circumstances as U.S. banks rushed to issue credit during the boom years leading up to the recession, they still want to pay their loans.
But with interest rates as high as 10 per cent at a time when mortgage rates are at all-time lows, they are being forced out when a simple rate reduction can keep them in place and save the trouble and expense of foreclosure.
It would also help the broader economy – Karl E. Case, a professor of economics at Wellesley College, said in a recent paper that the decline in house prices from 2005 to 2009 lowered consumer spending by some $240-billion (U.S.) – equal to about 1.7 per cent of all of the country’s economic activity.
NACA was founded in the backroom of a Boston union hall in 1988, as the Hotel Workers Local 26 created the organization to help it negotiate a housing trust fund with management that would help workers make down payments on houses.
Under president Bruce Marks, it evolved over the years into an aggressive defender of homeowner rights. Frequently referred to in the U.S. press as a “bank terrorist,” Mr. Marks has led the fight against “predatory lending,” appearing before congressional hearings and actually getting arrested as he protested at a Senate committee appearance by Chase Home Lending chief executive officer David Lowman.
In 2007, it created the “Home Save Program” to help homeowners renegotiate their loans with their lenders. It criss-crosses the country holding huge seminars in which homeowners are taught how to fill out forms and express their situation in a way that will appeal to their lenders.
Then, they whisk them into another room where dozens of bank representatives are waiting to hear their cases. In some instances, those who attend the events walk out with a modification the same day. Others are sent back to do more work on their budget, while more yet are told there’s no help to be found.
NACA receives government funding for each person it sees, which has led some to criticize the organization’s motives for holding large events that often run 24-hours-a-day and could provide false hope to many homeowners who are destined for foreclosure regardless of their interest rate.
But Ms. Offord isn’t likely to pay much heed to the critics. She walked into the converted rail station in Jacksonville – along with about 1,000 distressed homeowners – with a mortgage rate of 5.5 per cent. She walked out hours later locked in at 3 per cent – a savings of $380 a month.
“I thought maybe a temporary solution, I didn’t realize I could get a permanent one,” she says afterward, in shock that she’ll be able to keep her house. “I’ve been losing sleep, but I won’t be losing sleep now. I can make this payment.”
UK newspapers do a lot of things that Canadian newspapers don’t. Like count down the days until a movie star turns 16, so that readers can feel less creepy about having crushes on them (I’m being charitable about their intentions, I know).
The Levenson inquiry, which is looking into alleged phone hacking, received a report today from four groups who want the inquiry to expand its scope to include sexist reporting.
“Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped”, “Party girls thumped for having lesbo sex”, “hooked on hookers”, “Six footballers jailed over gang rape of 12-year-old girls in midnight park orgy”. These are all recent headlines – some in the tabloid press, others in broadsheets all freely available in newsagents and all, according to a major coalition of key women’s groups, adding to an often degrading and dangerous portrayal of women in the British media.
Four groups – End Violence Against Women, Equality Now, Object and rape charity Eaves – are calling on the Leveson inquiry to move away from addressing the concerns of celebrities and other victims of alleged phone hacking by News International and look at the daily treatment of women, which they say contributes to a society where rape can only be committed by evil strangers down darkened alleyways and where a woman is valued only because of her body.
The report is worth reading.
Our Coalition believes that ending and preventing violence against womenand girls must involve challenging and changing many deeply held attitudeswhich condone and tolerate it. The media in all its forms is a critical creator,reflector and enforcer of these attitudes. It is essential that those workingwithin it are conscious of this and that they actively seek not to reproducesuch attitudes. Too often this is done through inaccurate reporting (for example of the law on rape), intrusive reporting (on victims and their families),misrepresentation, the narrow, skewed, sensationalist selection of violence against women stories (eg ‘victim and attacker met on Facebook’), thelanguage used (can imply the victim somehow provoked her assault), and thesupporting ‘experts’ and quotes reported (might for example say that aparticular crime is ‘cultural’ or religious and therefore is either less serious or somehow inevitable). Such reporting too often amounts to victim blaming,dehumanises women and girls and exoticises violence against some women and girls.
For $6,000 (U.S.), Wanda Smith bought her dream home in the country.
It might not have been much to look at – the mobile home on a quarter acre of Georgia brush had been vacant for some time and exposed to the elements through broken windows and a leaky roof.
The last owner was foreclosed on, and left in a hurry. The trailer was littered with forgotten items – a child’s doll was on the kitchen counter beside a Mars Attacks DVD. A pair of dirty jeans lay in a heap at the back door.
But none of that mattered to Ms. Smith as she raised her hand to bid on the property at a recent real estate auction in Macon, Ga., about 135 kilometres south of Atlanta. Less than 10 years ago it was worth close to $25,000, and she has rented around the corner for years. The persistent crowing of roosters won’t catch her by surprise, nor will the hole in the middle of the bedroom floor.
“I’m going to make it a home,” she said after the auction, her eyes wide with surprise that she had managed to place the winning bid. “It will be my own.”
The small auction is one of thousands taking place each month across the United States as foreclosures continue to happen at a record pace and banks scramble to sell properties at any price to help rebuild their balance sheets.
The sales are helping to clear a backlog of inventory, albeit at a glacial pace, and are also making it possible for those who couldn’t afford a property through the boom years to settle comfortably into a new home while interest rates are low and houses are relatively inexpensive.
It’s just one way the U.S. housing market is struggling to rebuild after a momentous crash that has many properties selling for as little as 50 per cent of the lofty prices they fetched only three years ago. And some for even less.
“These banks aren’t asking me to sell these properties for a lot of money,” said John Dixon of John Dixon and Associates. “They are asking us to sell them so they can get on with other lending.”
Although he has sold thousands of houses for the banks over the years, there’s no risk of running out of work to do. A report from the Centre for Responsible Lending said that at least 2.7 million mortgages issued between 2004 and 2008, or 6 per cent of all mortgages issued in that time, have ended in foreclosure. Another four million are heading that way in the next two years.
“The nation is not even halfway through the foreclosure crisis,” says the report, which analyzed 27 million mortgages made over the five years.
The auction that made a homeowner of Ms. Smith featured six houses, all of them within a one-hour drive of Macon. About 50 people gathered in a small room at the back of a convention centre, with a few more on the line to place bids over the phone.
The auction itself is as much about theatre as it is about commerce. Over two hours, auctioneer (and Mr. Dixon’s son) Drew Dixon worked as hard at entertaining the bidders as he did at driving up the bids. A dozen staff members circulated through the stuffy room, making eye contact with bidders and locking in on anyone who wanted in on the action.
Once a bidder is identified, a staffer will stand beside them and maintain constant eye contact. The employee’s role is to theatrically shout when the bidder decides to keep going, and each has their own signature move. If you take your eye off them for a moment, you could lose your property.
“What? It’s over?” one man complained as the auction ended on a piece of commercial property outside the city that he wanted to develop. “I had at least another $50,000 left to go.”
The houses sold for as little as 20 per cent of the prerecession highs. Commercial buildings retained about half their value, while the valuation on building lots varied wildly depending on neighbourhood.
“For those prices, you may as well buy something to give away as a Christmas present,” Drew Dixon said.
T.D. Brantley has something like that in mind. The retired plumber trolls regional auctions looking for deals, and at the Macon auction picked up two fixer-uppers for a combined total less than $30,000.
The houses are in rough shape, any copper has been stripped out long ago and the previous owners had no incentive to leave the properties in decent shape. But he will fix them and then step in where the banks won’t – it’s a formula he’s repeated dozens of times.
“I’ll sell them to people,” Mr. Brantley said. “I’m the bank, I provide the financing. They give me a down payment, they pay me monthly payments. The house is paid back in a few months, and if they miss a payment then they are out. Either way, I’ll end up ahead.”
So will John Dixon And Associates. The auctioneers have been selling houses for more than 30 years, said long-time staffer Jack Napier. The process works in any economy – in good times the buyers line up to get the best prices. Lately, buyers are harder to find and sellers are lining up to get their properties listed.
“The sellers will take what they can get. It has to be worse than the Depression, how could it not be,” he said, minutes before the no-reserve auction began. “I’ve never seen anything this bad, though. But still, every one of our properties will go.”
The other day, I activated my Facebook Timeline and was presented with three years of crap that I had uploaded to the site. None of it was embarrassing, but it did crystallize many of the thoughts I had in the back of my mind about the amount of content I had uploaded over the years.
I’ve often posted pictures of my kids, and that’s because we have family from out of town who like to look at them. That seemed fine a few years ago for some reason, but privacy-breach-after-privacy-breach and other random Facebook goings-ons had me reconsidering whether that’s a good idea.
It’s not easy to live without a Facebook account any more - it’s increasingly used as a gateway to news sites and other services that I use for my job all the time.
But it’s also really hard to take stuff down. So, rather than scrub the thing I decided to deactivate and start over from scratch. That also helps whittle down the list of 600-plus “friends” I’ve accumulated over that time without actually defriending anyone - there are a lot of people on there I’ve never met and it’s silly to keep reading about what online games they are into at the moment.
I mostly wrote this so that when someone DOES accuse me of abandoning them, as inevitably happens, I can point to the post to prove that nothing mean was happening. Promise.
Investors rushed to buy Toronto condos in the good times, now there is a worry that they will rush for the exits as the economy weakens and they realize that profits are hard to come by in an overbuilt market.
A record number of condos were built in the past year in the Greater Toronto Area, with some 43,000 units under construction. Anecdotal evidence suggests many of the units were sold to investors who plan to rent them out, but a flood of supply hitting the market at once could drive rents below what’s needed to generate a profit.Bank of America Merrill Lynch said if this happens, expect investors to slap “for sale” signs in the windows. And they won’t be selling for a profit, which will drag down prices for anyone else in the city putting a place on the market.
In a city accustomed to more than a decade of predictable price gains, the bank’s worst-case-scenario call of a 15 per cent price drop over the next two years is an uncomfortable proposition for many who count their homes as their financial asset.
“What drives this housing cycle up inevitably drives the market down,” economist Sheryl Kingwrote in a report. “We estimate there are already enough units in [Toronto] to satisfy fundamental demand for the next five years … our estimates indicate there will not be enough renters in Toronto to occupy these units as they are completed.”
Toronto’s boom has been fuelled by several factors. Land use restrictions have encouraged vertical growth, and the price of standalone housing has exploded in recent years. The average detached house in the 416 area code sold for $708,993 in the first two weeks of December, the Toronto Real Estate Board said. The average condo sold for $359,206.
Merrill Lynch isn’t alone in its concern – in its December economic update, the Bank of Canada noted a “heightened risk of correction” in the condo market.
“Certain areas of the national housing market may be more vulnerable to price declines, the bank said. “Particularly the multiple-unit segment of the market, which is showing signs of disequilibrium.”
Builders, however, maintain the market is robust and suggest many who issue dire warnings are underestimating demand. While some suggest up to 60 per cent of all city condos are bought by investors, Tridel Group of Companies senior vice-president Jim Ritchie said his numbers suggest no more than 15 per cent of buyers are looking for an investment.
No reliable statistics are kept, which is one of the main reasons analysts often disagree about the market’s direction. It matters – homeowners are less likely to sell if prices drop because they aren’t looking to make a quick profit. If they hold on through any volatility, prices are less likely to fall sharply.
“As an industry, we’re getting pretty accustomed to people telling us that things are out of control and unsustainable,” said Mr. Ritchie, whose company plans to build eight new condo towers next year. “If this market had sprung up overnight, then maybe I’d understand. But this has been a solid contributor since 1967, and has been doing well for the last 10 years. This is not a blip.”
Ed Arnold is retiring. It’s a big deal - there are few editors in Canada who ran their papers for as long as he did. He gave an unimaginable number of young journalists their start. In an industry that is rapidly shedding talent, it’s a significant loss.
He’s been managing editor of the Peterborough Examiner for decades. When I was there, he had a newsroom of eight city reporters. There were two sports reporters on top of that. And a city editor, entertainment editor, life editor, night editor, editorial pages editor and a sports editor.
In the decades prior, there were double the numbers. Now, there are about half. God knows where it goes from there - but it would have been a difficult job to be the New Ed during the boom times. I don’t envy the New Ed in these times. I hope Quebecor gives the paper the editor it deserves, I still care about it a lot.
Ed is the old school type of editor reporters have nightmares about. When I was there, the entire reporting staff turned over at least once. But most of them went on to bigger papers - and more often than not it was because he rode them hard and forced them to be better.
I came in as a reporter, and was hammered for weeks by little notes left in my inbox. If a word was wrong, he’d circle the raw copy and leave it for you to see. The first thing you’d come across when you walked in some days was a marked up copy of the newspaper on your desk, with a note pointing out something stupid you had written the day before.
It was brutal. Some reporters would have to sit in their car for a half hour before going into the building because they needed to work up the nerve to face his memos. But he was working from a basic premise that one of two things would happen if he kept on you - you’d get better and he’d have a good employee until you left for your dream paper, or you’d quit and he’d get to start over with someone who wanted to get better.
I got better, and after a year or two became city editor. A big part of my job was acting as a buffer between Ed and the newsroom. I tried not to do it too much, but what most reporters couldn’t seem to figure out was that he wrote those memos at six in the morning, and the tone was completely accidental. Where he would see a note as helpful feedback, insecure reporters would see crushing criticism.
It was always like that with Ed - as reporters grumbled about a lack of resources, he was shielding them from head office by cutting down on other expenses. As they complained that he didn’t keep an eye on their day-to-day work, he was listening to night editors read copy over the phone while the reporters were long gone and worrying about something else.
Ed taught me a lot. I had been working at a weekly for a few years prior to moving to Peterborough, and the pace was different. So were the expectations. I remember complaining to him one day that I had a bunch of typos in my copy because I had too many stories to do that day. His answer? “How much longer, exactly, does it take to spell a word correctly?”
Other reporters learned too - my friend would go through her copy with several different highlighters in front of her. If it was a statement of fact, it got highlighted. Yellow for names, green for numbers, etc. She did this all the time - the desk never left her snippy notes.
And so it was most of us came to understand the most valuable lesson of a small town paper - you can’t rely on someone else to catch your mistakes. That’s because sometimes there isn’t anyone around. Or the person who is around is bored and not paying attention. Or was doing something else all night and forgot about your story until two minutes to deadline and could only do a half-assed job (the amazing thing, of course, is the same thing happens no matter where you go).
There’s no doubt he could be difficult to work for- there are dozens of people who would tell you how hard he was on them. But that’s nothing when you think of the volume of reporters he churned out of the place in the decades he was in charge. There are Examiner reporters working at dozens of big city dailies across Canada, and they all owe him for their starts.
As I was leaving Peterborough for Kingston, he gave me some of the best advice I’ve received in journalism. “Everyone you see out there is as talented as you,” he said. “But a lot of them are bitter, and a lot of them are lazy. The only thing that separates you from them is your attitude, so don’t change it.”
If you can believe what the old timers say in Peterborough, Ed’s attitude has softened markedly over the decades. I didn’t see any fistfights while I worked there, and he didn’t yell too often. But he did have a fierce competitive streak and an intense desire to write - so I can’t imagine he’ll be idle too long.
And whatever else he decides to do, you can be sure of one thing. I’ll be watching to make sure whatever he writes is flawless. Because, God help me, if it isn’t I’m going to send him one hell of a memo.
Every five years, I need to be reminded that Music From The Elder is the worst album of music ever recorded. The Kiss album is truly terrible, but I have a mental defect that makes me remember it fondly. Since the inception of file sharing software, I’ve been able to use Napster to remind myself every now and then.
But as I said yesterday, Napster is pulling out of Canada. I won’t rehash all the reasons it’s a pain in the ass, but it is. I need another subscription music service. I whined about it yesterday, and a bunch of suggestions came in. I started with Rdio, and for the time being that’s where I plan to stay.
Here’s why, with the major caveat being I’ve only used the software for one day.
PRO
It has a lot of songs. I haven’t really tested it yet, but it passed basic coolness tests and had enough new releases to show it’s a real thing.
It’s cheap at $10 a month. For that, you can use the songs offline - which means you can have them on your iPhone or whatever.
That means I don’t have to download the songs onto my computer, and then run them through other software to break the digital locks so I could hear them in the car or wherever I actually want to listen to music.
Runs in a browser window, so you don’t need to install additional software that your IT department will hate. It also has desktop software, if you want to run it standalone on your computer instead of in a browser window.
CON
My car prefers me to use my iPhone’s music feature to play music, which prefers to pay iTunes songs. So it’s annoying when you plug the iPhone into the car and it keeps diving back into the iTunes catalog after playing one Rdio song.
Having a browser window open means you can accidentally close it a lot.
I can’t figure out a way to sync with a wire - wireless is fine, but it’s not always available.
Ed Arnold is 
