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A buddy of mine, Matt Tansey, a producer for WSLS-TV in Roanoke, Va., sent this Associated Press wire story along that might be worth a local look. It makes sense to me that Global Positioning System devices would be the latest thing that thieves lift:

After a rash of thefts, police in northern Virginia are urging motorists to hide the satellite-based navigation devices mounted on their car dashboards.

In Alexandria, about 25 devices were reported stolen from automobiles this year, mostly in Old Town, said Mary Garrand, crime analyst for the city's police department.

"It's a huge problem for us," she said.

In Arlington, 23 GPS devices have been taken this year, mostly from parking garages, county police Detective Damon Washington said.

The thefts are being reported in other parts of the region -- including Fairfax County, the District and the Maryland suburbs -- but in smaller numbers.

The devices can cost anywhere from $200 to about $3,000.  

Pricey Summer Concerts

Have you seen the price tags for tickets to some of the biggest concerts this summer? Madonna is asking up to $375, and BusinessWeek says Barbra Streisand tickets could go for as much as $2,500 each! BusinessWeek adds:

None of the three biggest-grossing acts from last year, The Rolling Stones ($162 million), U2 ($138.9 million) and Paul McCartney ($77.3 million) are planning a blockbuster U.S. tour this year. Their absence leaves the door open to other top-tier acts, like Madonna, [Barry] Manilow and the king of Margaritaville, Jimmy Buffett, who will charge upwards of $150 for some premium seats.

The story says:

In 1985, the average ticket price for one of the top 25 acts performing that year, like U2, was $15.13, according to Pollstar, a music industry trade publication. By 1995, the top 50 acts raked in $25.40 per ticket. By 2005, that number had more than doubled, to $56.88. And that's for the top 100 acts.

Across the board, it seems, people are willing to pay a premium for quality live entertainment. In New York's theater district, the recent phenomenon of "premium tickets" for Broadway shows has caught on in recent years, beginning with the producers behind "The Producers." The model is simple: Producers and event promoters set aside a group of tickets and mark up the price for the die-hard fans, those with disposable incomes or corporations that purchase large blocks of tickets for clients, says Sam Craig, the director of the Media & Entertainment program at the NYU Stern School of Business.

Pollstar has a list of the hottest 50 concerts, updated every Friday.

Style Weekly in Richmond, Va., took a stab at trying to figure out why concert prices are so high.

There's no way to put on a concert in Central Virginia for less than $15,000, [concert promoter] Brad Wells says -- excluding the artist's fee. That low-end estimate would include such items as insurance, police and security, sound, lighting, catering, facility rentals, permits, staging, fees associated with ticket sales, stagehands, hotel fees and advertising. Costs can easily rise to $150,000 at The [Richmond] Coliseum, excluding artist fees.

"If you have a full house at the Coliseum, you could easily have 110 [local staff] people working," Dolly Vogt, Richmond Coliseum's general manager says. "People don't understand how much it costs to produce a show -- the promoter, the facility and the act are not walking away with as much money as you think. Big acts can have 80 to 100 people [with them] on the road, so artists can still lose money at the end of a big tour." 

Style Weekly put together this projected budget for a show the size of the upcoming sold-out Tim McGraw-Faith Hill performance at The Richmond Coliseum:

• Hall rental and front-of-house expenses such as security, ticket takers, box office, police, etc: $35,000.
• Stagehands: $35,000 (the larger a production the more stagehands are needed for setup, tear-down, etc; can run $7,500-$40,000 at the Coliseum).
• Back of house (backstage catering, advertising, etc): $45,000.
• Liability insurance: $3,500.
• Taxes: 7 percent city admission tax; on a show gross of $980,000 that equals $68,600 (plus city business license taxes).
• Artist fees: $500,000 or so; these fees are confidential and vary with every artist and venue. The fees also pay their crew/traveling contingent, musical and electronic/sound equipment, salaries for road managers, fees for personal managers, publicists, buses and transport and accompanying fuel cost, airfares, etc.
• Estimate of total expenses: $687,100  
  

Making News Out of History

Here is a story/regular feature idea that I love. You could do it, too. Names just pop up in the news and then they are gone. What ever happened to these momentary celebrities?

The note comes from Al's Morning Meeting reader Ben Welter, senior copy editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He explains:

I edit a blog called Yesterday's News. It features hundreds of newspaper stories, advice columns, editorials, ads, photos and illustrations culled from the Star Tribune's 139-year-old microfilm archive in Minneapolis, plus photos from the Minnesota Historical Society's huge collection.

Recent entries include a 1963 review of the Guthrie Theater's original "Hamlet," a 1953 account of two St. Paul boys who set out for Alaska on foot (they didn't get far) and a 1931 article about a tense "race row" prompted by a black family's move into a white neighborhood in Minneapolis.

Follow-up interviews and updates appear regularly. For example, the latter two entries include interviews with the runaway St. Paul boy (now 62) and the woman who now owns the house where the racial standoff took place. Newspaper types might be interested in this item on Jo Smith, who went on to teach journalism to thousands of students at the University of Florida: 

March 1, 1951: She wants to be a sports reporter

Readers will also find entries on big moments in Minnesota history: the 1940 Armistice Day blizzard, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the 1918 Cloquet fire and more. The site, launched in August 2005, is updated twice a week.  

9/11 Loans

My friend Christine Haas, an anchor at KVUE-TV in Austin, Texas, dropped me this note about a story that you might look into locally.

Last Tuesday, we aired a story on the Small Business Administration's STAR loan program. 

Congress passed legislation for 3.7 billion dollars in economic recovery loans after 9/11.

The goal was to allow the SBA to use Star Loans to help stimulate business for those business owners adversely affected by 9/11. But, as you may have heard before, the money went to random businesses all over the country. In our search, we found ice cream shops, boat shops, even a podiatrist who received over a million dollars in STAR loan funding for terrorism relief. But, these business owners had no idea they'd applied for the Star loan and admit they didn't qualify. The SBA is now under scrutiny by Congress because these types of reports are surfacing and the SBA's Inspector General released an audit that found only 4.7 percent of all businesses nationwide even knew they were applying for terrorism relief.

Here's a link to the story if you're interested. It's called "Recovery Money Wasted?"

I asked Christine how she got the names and information about who, in her area, had received the loans. She wrote back:

I did a FOIA with the SBA for our specific counties. Interestingly, I did this last year (October) and then did it again a few weeks ago and they wouldn't give me the addresses of the business owners as they did just seven months ago. They said, "we changed our mind."

The Inspector General's audit report said specifically [PDF]:

We interviewed 42 of the 59 STAR loan recipients in our sample to determine if they knew they had a STAR loan and had discussed the impact of the terrorist attacks with the lender. The remaining 17 borrowers could not be reached during the audit. The results of the interviews are listed below.

• Only two of the 42 borrowers were aware they had obtained a STAR loan.
• Thirty-six of the 42 borrowers said they were not asked or could not recall if they were asked about the impact of the attacks on their businesses.
• Of the nine borrowers who appear to have been adversely affected, eight confirmed they were adversely affected by the attacks. (The ninth did not respond to our inquiries.)
• Twenty-five of the 34 borrowers we interviewed, where eligibility could not be established, stated they were not adversely affected by the terrorist attacks.
• The other nine said they were adversely impacted, but provided different justifications than what was documented in the lender files or provided explanations of how the sellers were impacted rather than themselves.
• After repeated attempts, we were unable to reach the other 16 borrowers whose loans were not properly justified and therefore, we relied solely on the justifications and documentation in the lenders’ files in categorizing these loans.  
  

Who Owns Baseball's Numbers?

The New York Times included an interesting story about a fight over fantasy baseball using names and statistics from Major League Baseball. MLB wants the fantasy operators to pay for the rights. The NYT says there is more at stake than a small squabble:

This relationship between players and numbers, so often romanticized, is now being stripped to its skeleton in a lawsuit with considerably wider ramifications. While the dispute focuses on fantasy baseball -- in which millions of fans compete against one another by assembling rosters of real-life major leaguers with the best statistics -- a real legal question has arisen: Who owns that connection of name and number when it is used for such a commercial purpose?

Many onlookers have cast this issue as a tiff over batting averages -- as if children were squabbling over the backs of baseball cards -- but legal experts are saying it could affect the wider arena of celebrity rights, freedom of the press and even how the press is defined as the Internet age unfolds.

The dispute is between a company in St. Louis that operates fantasy sports leagues over the Internet and the Internet arm of Major League Baseball, which says that anyone using players' names and performance statistics to operate a fantasy league commercially must purchase a license. The St. Louis company counters that it does not need a license because the players are public figures whose statistics are in the public domain.

According to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, more than 15 million people spend about $1.5 billion annually to play fantasy sports, virtually all of them using an outside service to keep track of rosters, players' statistics, trades and more. Most participate through Web sites run by CBS SportsLine, Yahoo! and ESPN, which have paid Major League Baseball Advanced Media approximately $2 million apiece this year for licenses to display players' names and photographs, team logos and varying add-ons like video highlight clips.  

Tons of New Tech/Online Stuff  

CNN/Money has a "The Browser" blog that covers the coolest techology. All three of these items come from that worthwhile page:

• Motorola promises the long-awaited Q smartphone will hit the market next week. It is a Blackberry rival that joins the cool new Treo 700p and Nokia's E6.
  
• There is another player in the online video market. Google Video and YouTube make it easy for anybody to post video online. Now, AOL has launched UnCut Video. The Browser raised the question:

  What is AOL (owned, like CNNMoney.com, by Time Warner) going to do when illegal copies of Bugs Bunny cartoons start showing up on the service?
  

• "A new social network for groups has elbowed its way into the market today, reports Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. Like an updated Yahoo Groups, CollectiveX is meant to do for groups what MySpace does for individuals. That is, it allows groups to keep track of their members, exchange files, maintain a collective calendar, and generally communicate online... One major difference from existing social networks, however, is that CollectiveX will charge for its services: groups with up to 50 members will pay $36 a month for full functionality, while larger groups may pay up to $149."