Business: April 2006 Archive Page

Alloy's team craft the proposal, shape the plot and create characters. Even the writing of the book is often farmed out to a team of authors. The process is more similar to television writing than most readers' idea of the creation of a novel and the packaging closer to creating a boy band than promoting a new literary star.

Among Alloy's hit series are The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, recently made into a film, and the Sweet Valley High books, which became a TV series. This weekend Alloy had three books in the New York Times children's paperback bestseller list. It did not return calls for comment.

After Alloy's input, Opal was picked up by Little Brown, a division of media giant Time Warner. Little Brown, too, was unavailable for comment. --'Lit chick' debacle that damns the publishers (Times Online)

If this is true, then it may be true that Kaavya Viswanathan really didn't intend to plagiarize from Megan McCafferty's novels, since it's theoretically possible that a ghostwriter did the plagiarizing for her.

At Shards O' Glass Freeze Pops, we believe in doing the right thing. Our products are intended for adults and as such, we only market to them. While some studies suggest that over 80% of our adult customers started eating Shards O' Glass Freeze Pops before the age of 18, the intent of our marketing efforts is to encourage customers to switch glass pop brands and not to get young people to start licking. In fact, we've introduced a million dollar youth prevention campaign with the highly effective slogan "Licking Glass Pops as a teen? Then you're missing the point!" --Responsible Marketing (Shards O' Glass Freeze Pops)

Preceded by the SNL "bag o' glass" skit from the 1970s. Still pretty good.

A recently-published novel by Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan '08, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," contains several passages that are strikingly similar to two books by Megan F. McCafferty -- the 2001 novel "Sloppy Firsts" and the 2003 novel "Second Helpings."

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Little, Brown signed Viswanathan to a two-book, $500,000 contract while she was in high school. This is the first book that the Harvard sophomore has produced for the publisher under that deal, and it reached 32nd on the New York Times? hardcover fiction bestseller list this week. --David Zhou --Student's Novel Faces Plagiarism Controversy (The Harvard Crimson)

In his decision, Spooner wrote: "It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work."

He added: "For this reason, city agencies permit workers to use a telephone for personal calls, so long as this does not interfere with their overall work performance. Many agencies apply the same standard to the use of the Internet for personal purposes." --Judge: Web-Surfing Worker Can't Be Fired (Yahoo!|AP (will expire))

This sounds reasonable. An employer certainly has the right to discipline workers who are not doing their jobs, but simply the act of using the internet shouldn't be a terminal offense.

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." --Hunter S. Thompson --Hunter S. Thompson on the Music Business (QuoteDB.com)

Happy thought of the day.

Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented television newsrooms' use of 36 video news releases (VNRs)--a small sample of the thousands produced each year. CMD identified 77 television stations, from those in the largest to the smallest markets, that aired these VNRs or related satellite media tours (SMTs) in 98 separate instances, without disclosure to viewers. Collectively, these 77 stations reach more than half of the U.S. population. The VNRs and SMTs whose broadcast CMD documented were produced by three broadcast PR firms for 49 different clients, including General Motors, Intel, Pfizer and Capital One. In each case, these 77 television stations actively disguised the sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting. In almost all cases, stations failed to balance the clients' messages with independently-gathered footage or basic journalistic research. More than one-third of the time, stations aired the pre-packaged VNR in its entirety. --Farsetta and Price --Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed (Center for Media and Democracy)

TV news is expensive to produce. As stations compete with each other for market share, they are pressured to produce slick stories that will hold viewer interest. And publicists are happy to provide professional-looking "reports" that highlight their clients.

Has your local TV station aired a marketer's PR videotape and presented it as if it were an original news report?

Publisher sales reps inform Wal-Mart buyers of games in development; the games' subjects, titles, artwork and packaging are vetted and sometimes vetoed by Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart tells a top-end publisher it won't carry a certain game, the publisher kills that game. In short, every triple-A game sold at retail in North America is managed start to finish, top to bottom, with the publisher's gaze fixed squarely on Wal-Mart, and no other. --Allen Varney --Wal-Mart Rules: One Giant Company Controls Your Games -- But How Much Longer? (The Escapist)

This is what happens when games go mainstream -- and when they mean big bucks. There will always be indie games, of course.

Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In response to these facts, a global warming devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change over such a short period". Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming. Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.

Does something not strike you as odd here? --Bob Carter -- There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998 (Telegraph)

I'm not really sure what I think. Certainly recycling and avoiding waste are sensible, but when well-meaning activists use bad science to back up their claims, reason suffers.

Also known as yupster (yuppie + hipster), yindie (yuppie + indie), and alterna-yuppie. Our preferred term, grup, is taken from an episode of Star Trek (keep reading) in which Captain Kirk et al. land on a planet of children who rule the world, with no adults in sight. The kids call Kirk and the crew “grups,” which they eventually figure out is a contraction of “grown-ups.” It turns out that all the grown-ups had died from a virus that greatly slows the aging process and kills anybody who grows up.

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“You have to have a little bit of Dora the Explorer in your life,” he says. “But you can do what you can to mute its influence.” Okay. “And there’s no shame, when your kid’s watching a show, and you don’t like it, in telling him it sucks.” Yeah! There’s no—wait. What? “If you start telling him it sucks, maybe he might develop an aesthetic.” Sorry, son. No more Thomas the Tank Engine for you. Thomas sucks. Stop crying. Daddy’s helping you develop an aesthetic. Now Daddy’s going to go put on some thunder music. --Up With Grups -- The Ascendant Breed of Grown-Ups Who are Redefining Adulthood (New York Mag.com)

Despite the retro-cool Star Trek reference, this essay is so absolutely not me. From the plastic lawn furniture in my study basement, the dining room table that's been home to a race car playset since I put it together three Christmases ago, to the inflatable ball pit in my living room (occupying the space vacated by the Christmas tree) to the Hello Kitty dollhouse on the coffee table, I am so not a Grup.

When I play Neverwinter Nights or The Elder Scrolls, my character -- usually a battle mage or a paladin -- is always "DaddyMan."

The article describes a pop-cult manufacturers fantasy world in which the arrival of children doesn't change people's lifestyle, or, more importantly, their spending habits.

My favorite music at home is my son's Suzuki practice CD. I really dig those "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" variations. But then again, I never was much into popular music.

And fashion? Fashion, my aunt fanny pack.

Prices will be roughly comparable to DVDs -- $20 to $30 for new releases, $10 to $16 for catalog titles.

Now doesn't that bother some of you?

I'm sure it bothers exhibitors, those that own multiplex cinemas. --Scott Rosenberg --Movie downloads an evolutionary idea? (Monsters and Critics.com)

Andrew Swinand, executive vice president at Starcom Worldwide, a major advertising-buying agency, said during a panel discussion that newspapers could do more to harness their presence online, such as getting more participation from audiences.

Swinand also said his firm would like to buy advertising across newspaper websites but had difficulty doing so, and had to go through third-party vendors. He also said it was difficult to buy both print and online advertising through newspapers, and that the process for fulfilling newspaper ad sales was cumbersome and less automated than in other media.

Swinand did say afterward that he was still "bullish" on newspapers' online advertising potential, but added that newspapers should do more to personalize and localize their online content, in ways such as the social networking site MySpace does. -- --Stop the Presses ... Go Online (Wired | AP)

The job market for traditional journalism jobs is drying up. No question about it.

Content rules. It did ten years ago, and it does today. People don't use things they don't understand. Writing for the Web is still undervalued, and most sites spend too few resources refining the information they offer to users. Jakob Nielsen --Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First (Alertbox)

The complex choices facing leaders in the Middle East have long confounded observers. But two graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University are hoping their video game based on the conflict will help players find solutions _ and raise capital for their new company.

Asi Burak and Eric Brown, along with a team of fellowr students, have spent more than a year building PeaceMaker, a computer game that attempts to simulate the violence and political turbulence of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. --Daniel Lovering --Students hope Mideast video game will produce insights, investors (OhmyNews)