Al's Morning Meeting

The Sunshine Week Web site says: 

Sunshine Week is not about journalists, it's about the public and the importance of protecting and promoting open government. Sunshine Week is not about protecting journalists' rights, it's about the right of all citizens to know what their government is doing -- and why.

Please send me links to your best 2006 Sunshine Week stories and projects, and I will post some of them on Morning Meeting the week after.

The site provides a toolbox to help newsrooms produce material for Sunshine Week. Here are the links:

Ideas for 2006 [PDF]

News & Features [PDF]
Local News; People & FOIA; FOI Guides; Audits; Used in News; Other Sections; Special Sections; Legislative Issues; Other

Editorials & Commentary [PDF]
Editorial; Opinion; Cartoons; Editors' Notes; Reader Forums

Graphics & Presentation [PDF]
Illustration; Charts & Informational Graphics; Creative Formats; Use of Sunshine Week Logo; Creative Page Layouts; Promotion; Advertising

Online Presentation [PDF]
Special Web Pages

Community Involvement [PDF]
Forums & Workshops; Reader Views; Motivation; Proclamations

Broadcast [PDF]
Television; Radio

Other Resources [PDF]
News and Wire Services; Sunshine Week Toolkit Materials

The Death of DVD

The Dallas Morning News said March will be the month that the DVD began to die -- to be replaced by HD-DVD. The new Blu-ray-based hi-definition discs will contain tons more data than current DVDs -- and the discs will require a different kind of player to read them.

The paper reported:

Movie players and disks built around the HD-DVD standard will hit stores in late March. Devices and disks built around the competing Blu-ray format will arrive a few months later.
 

In many ways, the releases seem premature, given the lack of a single format and the fact there are still fairly few people who own high-definition TVs.
 

But movie studios and electronics makers are eager to reinvigorate the slowing DVD revenue machine.
 

Consumers will benefit, too, as they finally get access to features that are either illegal or technically impossible with current DVDs.
 

Only about a quarter of U.S. televisions are expected to be capable of displaying HD video this year, and those are the only sets that will be able to take full advantage of the razor-sharp images on HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks.
 

But the adoption rate for HD-capable TV sets is expected to zoom past 50 percent by 2008.

For the movie studios, it's a simple financial calculation.
 

Roughly 80 percent of homes in the U.S. now have a DVD player, according to a report from the DVD Forum, an industry group.
 

Americans now spend twice as much buying and renting DVDs as they do going to the movies.  

Howstuffworks.com explains Blu-ray technology.
 

If that is not enough, here is a white paper [PDF] with way more information than the average person would want on this.

The Struggle to Fill Smaller Arenas

I got this note from Al's Morning Meeting reader Andrew Barksdale, a reporter for The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer: 

We just finished a two-day exhaustive look at our public coliseum, which is a ($3.6-million-a-year) drain on county taxpayers. The coliseum is almost a decade old and has not lived up to expectations. This series shows the challenges of that smaller markets like Fayetteville, N.C., have in attracting concerts and selling out shows. This series could give reporters in similar-sized markets (MSA is 305,000) some ideas about their public arenas.

 

Here is the Sunday link, which is free and does not require registration so long as you view it before next Sunday. 

Here is the second day of the series. The main story shows how folks here and at other coliseums in the Southeast attract shows and overcome other obstacles. The story explains how the concert industry has changed.  

The story includes some insights worth considering for your local audience: 

There are more indoor coliseums than ever before -- 10 others in the Carolinas alone for the Crown to compete against -- and the performers who do tour don't stay on the road as long as they used to. This causes an out-of-whack supply and demand. 

And this:

Things were good in the '70s and '80s, but then summer concerts moved outdoors, thanks to the amphitheater concept. Nearly every major city in the Carolinas decided to build its own arena with dreams of sports teams and increased economic visibility. 

In January 2005, the Brookings Institution reported that there was a large and growing national glut of unused convention and arena space. But despite the fact that attendance at the biggest conferences each year has stagnated at its 1993 levels, the report found that cities around the country are building or planning to build even more meeting and entertainment space.

Related (2005) stories:

"Convention Centers Grow, Fewer Go" (USA Today)

"Convention Biz Dims" (Boston Herald)
"Convention Hall Use Stagnant Since '90s" (The Enquirer, Cincinnati, Ohio)
"Study Finds Convention Center Forecasts Overly Rosy" (Anchorage Daily News, Alaska)

Al's Morning Meeting reader Ross Alexander at WQOW-TV in Eau Claire, Wis. said the people who recondition used cars for sale find pretty surprising stuff tucked in the forgotten places of the vehicles.

Congress Gives New Energy to Online Schools

It may have escaped your attention as it did mine, but when Congress passed the federal budget, it changed a small but important item pertaining to who could qualify for federal student loans. The old law said at least 50 percent of a school's courses must be offered on a campus. The new law changed that -- and it means that 100-percent-online colleges can now accept student loans. The New York Times has a story.

This ruling almost certainly will increase enrollment in online courses. The New York Times reported:

How fast the college landscape will change is uncertain. Sean Gallagher, a senior analyst at Eduventures, a Boston research firm, predicted that the proportion of students taking all their classes online could rise over the next 10 years or so to 25 percent from the current 7 percent.

To test online learning, Congress established a demonstration program in 1998 that allowed a few dozen colleges with online programs to request waivers from the 50 percent rule. The Department of Education reported last year that enrollment at eight of the colleges shot up 700 percent over six years.