Al's Morning Meeting

From VIP packages, fan club pre-sales, premium-seat auctions and ticket bundles that also allow buyers to download just-released albums, buying tickets has become a complex and costly game.

And all of this jockeying around has done nothing to lower ticket prices, which have risen as high as 19 percent at venues that seat 2,000 to 4,999 fans.

USA Today offers 10 pieces of advice to keep from paying too much or from getting ripped off while buying tickets this summer.

Radio stations, recently smacked by "performance royalties" for the music they stream online, now feel the threat of a similar expense for all of the music they air on the radio. The radio stations say they help artists sell records by playing the music. Artists say that the "we sell records for you" argument is oversold and that it is time for radio stations to pony up.

Mediaweek reports:

Setting the stage for a new battle between radio broadcasters and the music industry, a group of recording artists have formed a coalition called musicFIRST to seek cash payments from local radio stations for the airplay of music broadcast over the air. Among the members seeking new performance royalties are Christina Aguilera, Jimmy Buffett, Celine Dion, Toby Keith, John Legend and Jennifer Lopez. [The group introduced its legislative plans a few days ago.]

Currently, broadcasters pay songwriter royalties to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, but not performance royalties. Broadcasters are required to pay performance royalties for music streamed over the Internet.

Broadcasters are girding for a fight. "The National Association of Broadcasters will aggressively fight the Recording Industry Association of America's proposed performance tax on local radio stations," said Dennis Wharton, executive vice president of the NAB. "Congress has long recognized that radio airplay of music generates millions of dollars in revenue for record labels and artists. Were it not for radio's free promotional airplay of music on stations all over America, most successful recording artists would still be playing in a garage."

At 6.84 percent, 30-year fixed mortgage rates are the highest they have been in almost a year. Realtors hope the rising rates will kick people who are waiting to buy into gear. They also hope that people will keep in mind that home prices are lower right now because of a softer home-sales market, so the lower prices may offset the higher cost of borrowing money.

The people who really get smacked when there is a jump in mortgage rates are the folks sitting there with adjustable rate mortgages, who are about to see their rates rise overnight.

Bankrate.com explains:

The consensus explanation is that the economy is getting warm reviews, and stocks are drawing good crowds all over the world. Consequently, investors favor stocks over bonds. To attract investors' dollars, bond yields must rise. Like an eager understudy, mortgage rates follow bond yields on their upward rise.

Ironically, rising rates have been boffo at the box office: Mortgage applications increased about 6 percent last week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Most likely, these applicants jumped off the fence when they realized that rates were rising too fast for comfort.

"Clearly, every mortgage originator worth their salt has been on the phone, making people aware of what's happening, and to lock in production before you see any more movement in mortgage rates," [Steve] Habetz, [owner of Threshold Mortgage in Westport, Conn.], says.

Normally, fewer people refinance their home loans when rates rise like this. But "you've got a lot of people that are in adjustables who better think about doing something," Habetz says. Some ARM borrowers might refinance into fixed-rate mortgages, even at substantially higher rates, just to eliminate the possibility of skyrocketing ARM rates.

The Wall Street Journal featured a story about the number of super-expensive, high-powered exotic cars smashed on highways by drivers who do not know how to handle the automotive muscle. In fact, there is a Web site called Wrecked Exotics, which has photo galleries of more than 700 high-dollar damaged cars. More than 650,000 visitors a month gawk at the site.

The story says that according to the California Highway Patrol, the total number of accidents involving Aston Martins, Bentleys, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Lotuses and Maseratis rose to 141 last year, an 81-percent increase over 2002.

The story says it may be that the number of high-end cars on the road is higher and that the rate of crashes is not rising.

In case you wondered, a Ferrari 599 boasts a top speed of 209 mph and costs $300,000. A Lamborghini LP640 costs about $321,000 and offers a top speed of 211 mph.

The Brunswick News, a small paper in Brunswick, Ga., has launched what essentially is a TV station on the Web. The market is unique because The Golden Isles were once served by a local TV station but have no local station now. I interviewed Executive News Editor Josh Rayburn about this project, the likes of which we have seen at a few other places, such as Naples, Fla. I think this idea will expand.

What's the opportunity that you saw that prompted you to launch this effort? Describe the breadth and depth of this project for us. How often do you post?

First, Brunswick is not served by a local television station. The Brunswick News was one of the first newspapers in this region to offer a Web site with more than a single page with a few stories thrown on it. In mid-2006, we began talking about creating a webcast to add to our newly redesigned Web site. That first vision was for nothing more than an anchor sitting behind a desk and reading highlights from that day's newspaper. Some staff departures kept that from happening, so we had to put those plans on hold.

Late 2006 and early 2007, we restarted those talks and decided that if we were going to do it that we wanted to push ourselves to create something truly unique for our readers and the visitors to our Web site.

Everything in each day's newspaper is fair game for inclusion in the webcast. Just as in preparing the print edition, we try to ensure the webcast has a nice mix of both hard news and features. We also are using original packages of materials that, while local, may or may not be in the print edition of The Brunswick News. We also promote stories that will be in the next day's print edition.

We are posting new webcasts to the Web site at 4 p.m. (EDT) Mondays through Fridays.

Your focus seems to be The Golden Isles, a series of islands off the southeastern coast of Georgia. Were those areas being underserved by traditional TV news stations?

Brunswick lost its local television station about eight years ago, and residents now can only get their television news from stations based in Savannah, Ga., (located an hour north of us) or Jacksonville, Fla. (located an hour south of us). They rarely cover stories in Brunswick -- only showing up for big stories that we break or that gain national attention (such as the March kidnapping and death of a 6-year-old boy). We work very hard to cover all aspects of our community and felt adding this webcast could only broaden our reach.

We launched the webcast on June 11, but began doing video reports to serve as companion pieces to stories in the newspaper in mid-March.

How are you staffing this project? What training did you provide to make this happen?

Our primary webcast anchor/reporter, Wainwright Jeffers, has a degree in broadcast journalism and already had experience working at a college television station. His knowledge on everything from camera selection to script pacing has been invaluable to us. He also came to us with the skills for editing all of the video together and getting it ready to post on the Web.

Co-anchor Lauren McCallister is a writer for Golden Isles Magazine, the bimonthly glossy that we create in-house. Reporter Cody Trawick is our producer and is in the process of learning how to edit video. I work the cameras.

Wainwright has provided a lot of training to everyone involved, and we've also learned just by doing a lot of practice.

Tell us about the infrastructure behind this effort (equipment, space, facilities).

We transformed our newspaper morgue into our studio. We've added professional lighting, high-tech cameras and low-tech curtains for use as our background. We also do a daily sports podcast, so we already had a soundboard. We purchased television monitors, computer programs for editing video, microphones and chairs for the anchors.

We've done as much as we can ourselves. It was quite a sight one day when I walked into the studio and saw our managing editor and president/owner hard at work installing the curtains that serve as our background.

How will you measure success?

As with any changes that we make, our success will be determined by how pleased our readers are with the product. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback on the video reports, so we're optimistic that the webcast will be even more popular. We're also anxious to see how many new visitors the webcast brings to our Web site each day.

What have you learned already that you wish you knew before you started?

Luckily, we've been able to learn a lot as we've made our way to the launch of the full-fledged webcast. Now, time is our big factor. We want more people trained to use the video-editing software so that Wainwright can have more time to do packages to go along with the webcast. We also want to get to a point where we have Web-only reports.

Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends on the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.