Day: May 24, 2012

Must read: Yall Politics explores the hiring of former FBI agent Hal Neilson and his new company contains some very interesting Louisiana connections.

Folks I’d like to get some backgorund related to the ownership of Here Enterprises, which I highlighted in a post last week here.  I’ll let Yall Politics explain why:

These “microcap” stocks are sometimes affiliated with fraudulent “pump and dump” schemes where insiders accumulate large amounts of shares over time, manipulate trades and they pay internet marketers and boiler rooms (often overseas) to hype stocks and create a false market. Here Enterprises has issued (at least in the past) these similar Regulation S shares, which are targeted to trade overseas.

Something else that Here Enterprises shares is common ownership with a financial mastermind that has just been served an enforcement action by the SEC for $35,000,000 in securities fraud one week before Neilson was named CEO. Continue reading “Must read: Yall Politics explores the hiring of former FBI agent Hal Neilson and his new company contains some very interesting Louisiana connections.”

Jim Brown’s Weekly Column: New Orleans Criminal Justice – The Evil Empire?

Thursday, May 24th, 2012
New Orleans, Louisiana

NEW ORLEANS CRIMINAL JUSTICE- THE EVIL EMPIRE?

In the movie about New Orleans called Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Nicolas Cage plays a corrupt New Orleans cop, and tells a fellow cop to “Shoot him again.” “What for?” says his companion. Cage casually observes: “His soul is still dancing.” You can’t kill enough in New Orleans. It is the murder capitol of America with one of the worst murder rates in the world. And the killings continue at an ever growing rate.

When it comes to murder rates, America surpasses the developed world at some five per 100,000 people. New Orleans has more than ten times that number. For every 1,700 people in the Crescent City, one will be murdered. These figures were based on last year’s numbers. The murder rate so far this year is way ahead of last year’s. So it’s the bad guys vs. the good guys in the criminal justice system, right? Maybe not.

New Orleans has always pushed the limit of what is acceptable to those running government and to its citizens. The city is often referred to as a corrupt third world country and the most northern of the Caribbean nations. But in recent months, the bottom seems to have fallen out of the criminal justice system itself. A headline in the Times Picayune recently blared across the top front page: “We’re the Evil Empire Right Now,” referring to the New Orleans Saints scandal over “bounty gate.” But the headline could well apply to the criminal justice system, both state and federal, throughout the greater New Orleans area. Continue reading “Jim Brown’s Weekly Column: New Orleans Criminal Justice – The Evil Empire?”

The venerable Times Picayune to undergo major staff reductions and publication cutbacks

Hat tip to an observant reader for the link to the New York Times Media Decoder Blog which has all the skinny.  It is no secret these are very hard times economically for old-fashioned print journalism and it appears just a few years after a major employee early retirement program new cuts at the T-P are in the offing.

Frankly, with nearly universal internet access cutting back the print editions makes a lot of sense to me. That said other newspapers have cut their news operations to disastrous results.  The public will pay for quality journalism and thus in my opinion it follows those areas are where the resources need to be concentrated.

Finally there has been a fair amount of chatter about the new design of NOLA.com, with most of those moved to comment expressing unhappiness with the new format.  I held my fire expressing an opinion but here is an opinion I take seriously since it does not come from a regular reader and is the first comment on the NYT Media Decoder Blog entry:

Just visited their website, http://www.nola.com/, which as mentioned in the comments thread, is so poorly designed it is effectively unreadable.

This isn’t a new media v old media thing in my mind so any constructive comments would likely be well received in Mediaville as the transition to fully leveraging new technologies means change in how news is disseminated is inevitable.

sop