Took what I thought would be a shortcut to my grandma’s house on Friday and landed in Rhinebeck, where Chelsea Clinton and Marc Guy-Who’s-Marrying-Chelsea got married. Never knew where the place was.
Didn’t even know where I was, until I started to see signs congratulating the couple.
From the beginning of our joy ride with legalized gambling, there was a worry that more gambling would mean more overextended suckers addicted to slots, poker tables, lotteries and roulette wheels.
Now we know it’s true — only the addicts are not necessarily day trippers on tour buses.
They are also states, like Connecticut, New Jersey and New York — and most of their neighbors — desperate for cash, averse to raising taxes and doubling down on the one business that seemed to be eternally growing until it wasn’t.
” States Hooked on Gambling for Revenue, By Peter Applebome, The New York Times
Got a kick out of this.
(haha)
Gina as kitten. Uncovered while throwing a few display photos onto the iPad that is temporarily mine. Tails tk.
Cityfile’s 2,000-plus profiles of New York notables will be the centerpiece of our new topic and people pages.
It’s the type of thing you’re shocked Gawker hasn’t had already. Gawker recently tried converting its readers to using hashtag pages, which is sort of like a half-born transformation of your basic tag page that aggregates all posts about a specific topic while letting users contribute.
All this to say: Print was confined mostly by space. (And obviously no interactive stuff.) But with the web, papers (tv, radio, whatever. media) have the shackles of space lifted. You want context? You should get context galore. Your go-to news site shouldn’t just be the place where you can get the latest headline, but the place that helps you understand it. Part of that involves biographies. The Washington Post has been doing that, with a wiki component, over at WhoRunsGov.
The people who are huge Times readers/fans will pay - and yes, the web design IS worth paying for because it helps you understand and get to information, especially on or through topics pages. People are interested in a certain topic, story or genre are going to keep coming back.
Beyond that, one thing this does, whether Times execs realize it or not, is this plan gets readers conditioned to understand and believe that content is not and should not be free, and it is indeed valuable - meaning it is something they should pay for. But it does so gently, without alienating readers or hitting them with a hard and fast paywall, denying access to all or some content immediately. If the content’s worth it, as high-end niche mags have shown, people will understand that content is worth paying for, and they’ll come to think of it as just another usual, regular, normal cost of living, like a $3 latte, like a $120-a-month cable subscription, like an $11.50 movie ticket (which still seems outrageous but I pay it every time.)
My triumphant return to the blog. So busy with statehouse reporting.
Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute argues that governments should limit borrowing and get rid of state and local defined-benefit pension plans as a way of curbing corruption.
My (now) colleague John Reitmeyer of the Star-Ledger/Record Statehouse Bureau details the recent history of the use of debt in New Jersey, writing that the state has increased borrowing 700 percent over the past two decades. The state got around the constitution by setting up authorities that are allowed to issue debt without voter approval - but voters, too, gave the go-ahead for the state to borrow about 50 times in the last 60 years.
Bloomberg’s Dunstan McNichol also wrote last week about a report saying New Jersey’s debt grew to 33.9 billion, but I can’t link that because, well, y’all don’t have terminals. But you can read AP’s story on the same New Jersey debt report.
So glad I don’t have to do WH press briefings. I think I would explode and then it would be on Romenesko.
(Thanks SheraCiara for the video.)
So major, The New York Times has run at least three stories in the past five weeks about the same thing.
The latest installation, printed this weekend, explains the issue like this:
Real estate agents, mortgage brokers and appraisers all say that the low-ball appraisal has become increasingly common in today’s unsettled market. The problem is even more pronounced when homeowners are hoping to refinance a mortgage or get a home equity loan, because there is no current agreed-upon sale price as a benchmark, they say.It goes on to explain the changes that have come with the Home Valuation Code of Conduct, which changed the way some things are handled between appraisers and banks.
