Music to make the drive to Camden Yards more fun

With opening day for the Orioles at Camden Yards on Monday against the Yankees,

http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/baseball/ I had a dream last night that largely recreated the adventures of my then-girlfriend and I driving up to Baltimore in 1992 via I-95 from her place in Northwest D.C., for our first Sunday afternoon game of the year.

We were so psyched for baseball after SO many months of cold weather, we thought we'd explode.

When this song came on 99.1 WHFS, now a sports station that's the home of the Orioles, http://www.whfs.com/ , http://www.1057thefan.com/pages/2005680.php

we rolled down our windows and started blaring this song out while we sang at the top of our lungs.

re Gulfstream Park -Bankruptcy looming for Magna Entertainment?

As of a few hours ago, according to the Daily Racing Form, it looks like bankruptcy looming for Magna Entertainment -Bankruptcy looms on horizon for Magna.

Not mentioned, possible effect on Gulfstream Park's racing operations, like a (fire) sale, perhaps, after this racing season is over?

H-m-m-m... the plot thickens.

The Miami Herald had the following AP dispatch on their website Thursday, but have no original reporting on this: Spin-off of Gulfstream Park operator is canceled

http://www.miamiherald.com/business/breaking-news/story/911231.html

 

I haven't seen anything about this on local TV, as everyone is making nice with celebrity chefs on South Beach this weekend, showing the real limit of their reportorial skills.

Magna filed an 8-K with the SEC today which you can see here:

Magna Entertainment Corp · 8-K · For 2/18/09

http://www.secinfo.com/$/SEC/Registrant.asp?CIK=1093273

For many months, I've been meaning to write in-depth about all the many problems and very curious things I've observed in, at and around Gulfstream Park over the past few months, as they hurried to make themselves look presentable for its first race back in early January, even as construction continued at the Village at Gulfstream retail project being handled by Forest City Enterprises Inc., not Gulfstream.

Over the past year, I've snapped a few hundred shots of the construction work going on there along U.S-1/South Federal Highway, as well as those very curious things that I alluded to, which not only consistently showed a lack of marketing common sense or prowess, but which also showed a remarkable lack of concern for their customers' safety.

Naturally, with Hallandale Beach City Hall just across the street, the city's own gross indifference to safety and awareness issues, right in front of them, goes back years.

I'll document that at some point over the next few days with photographs that will make my points crystal-clear.

Postcards of Gulfstream Park -"back in the day."
http://www.cardcow.com/search2.php?substring=gulfstream%20park

As someone who's always been very interested in historical preservation, and who used to read the magazine Preservation cover-to-cover, I always thought that, media-wise, even for South Florida's very low journalism standards, there'd have been more made about one of the few iconic structures in South Florida going buh-bye.  http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/

And by that, of course, I mean so little attention paid or even fuss made when the old Gulfstream Park

grandstand came down, especially compared to the fuss and coverage of the implosion of the Bal Harbour Sheraton, or, more recently, the Miami Arena, a building I never stepped in since I was living in Chicago and Washington, D.C. during its very short heyday.

Is it just me, or does it seem that most TV news directors down here have become so jaded over the years, sent so many news reporters to cover faux news over on South Beach, City Hall or downtown Miami, that when something historical actually comes down the pike, they channel the mantra of a dis-interested teenage girl -

"Whatever."

If WPBT-Channel 2 was really worth a damn anymore, they'd have produced an hour retrospective program on the racetrack, and what it used to be like in the old days, pre-Shula Dolphins, when South Florida's sports world revolved largely around the horses and the Hurricanes.

I've heard stories and tales from myriad sportscasters and reporters as well as the fabulous Spinelli Brothers, who used to cut my hair at their sports and show-biz memorabilia-filled shop on West Dixie Highway in North Miami in the 1970's.  It was like being in a museum of pop culture!

Every visit was a real treat because those guys were so completely plugged into everything that was South Florida sports and show-biz, from the '50's thru the '70's because of who they knew, their old location near Biscayne Blvd. & 79th Street (?), and the great loyalty of their famous customers, that you honestly never knew who'd you'd run into at their shop.

Often it was well-known names who'd swing by when they were in town just to shoot the breeze with them to find out what'd been going on, what was happening, who was in town, etc.

They had a huge extended family of customers and friends, famous and otherwise.

(Though their shop was located in North Miami, because I was a frequent customer as a kid, and loved their stories, the Spinelli Brothers even agreed to be my sponsor for Optimist football whenI played on the NMB 95 lb. team, even though I was playing for North Miami Beach Optimist.

Eventually, they received one of those large official sponsor frames and photo of me which they hung up in their shop.)

Channel 2 could've done a simple compare-and-contrast using extant photos at local museums interspersed with interviews with personalities, former employees and public institutional memories in South Florida who know a thing or two and can tell a great story, like Hank Goldberg or Edwin Pope.

Of course, I also have to blame myself for not taking a ton of photos at the time it came down, since if I had, I'd post them here for posterity.
C'est la guerre.

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http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bal-bz.magna20feb20,0,3519391.story

Baltimore Sun

Magna may not be able to pay off debt to controlling shareholder

Due date moved up for owed $275 million; future uncertain for beleaguered racetrack owner

By Bill Ordine

February 20, 2009

The credit leash on financially beleaguered Magna Entertainment, owner of Pimlico Race Course and Laurel Park, just got a lot shorter.

The company's controlling shareholder, MI Development, is abandoning a reorganization plan that had been criticized by the firm's minority shareholders. As a result, the due date on about $275 million in debt owed by Magna Entertainment to MI has been accelerated to March 20.

Both Canadian-based companies are controlled by auto-parts magnate Frank Stronach.

In a statement, Magna Entertainment said that it will not be able to repay the loans unless it can raise money "through an alternative transaction with MI Development, asset sales, by taking on additional debt or by some other means." The due date on Magna Entertainment's $40 million line of credit with a Canadian bank has also been moved up, to March 5.

Because Magna Entertainment owns the two Maryland race tracks and the Preakness Stakes, the state's horse industry is in a constant state of unease about the future of the tracks and the second jewel of the Triple Crown.

It remained unclear what Magna Entertainment's options might be, particularly since it has been trying to refinance its debt with other sources and sell real estate without success.

MI Development has already granted Magna extensions a handful of times over the past year. Magna Entertainment hired a firm specializing in restructuring debt and Chapter 11 bankruptcy last fall.

"If by some circumstances they did file for Chapter 11, it could get pretty crazy," said Maryland Racing Commission Chairman John Franzone, "because then you're at the mercy of a bankruptcy trustee."

Officials for Magna Entertainment could not be reached for comment.

Tim Rice, a managing partner in a stock brokerage firm whose clients once owned Magna Entertainment stock, said that Magna has passed up opportunities to liquidate real estate holdings at reasonable prices in the past.

"I'm sure that [Stronach] would do whatever he can to [prevent] the public shareholders from getting wiped out," Rice said, "but I don't know if he can do that."

But Franzone expressed confidence that Stronach will find a way out.

"Frank is a pretty savvy guy. He's faced crises in his auto business over the years and he's always pulled rabbits out of his hat, so I wouldn't count him out," Franzone said.

Magna Entertainment has used MI Development as a lender of last resort in recent years, to the chagrin of some MI minority shareholders.

The proposed reorganization would have eventually severed the relationship, but was undercut when a vocal MI Development shareholder, New York-based Greenlight Capital Inc., complained that the plan would convert the company's secured loans into shares of Magna Entertainment stock.

Magna Entertainment shares closed at 38 cents yesterday.

Part of the money that MI Development lent to Magna was supposed to be used to develop a new slot machine casino at Laurel Park. But the company's effort to secure a slots license was derailed when it failed to put up millions of dollars in required fees when it submitted its bid this month.

State officials threw out the Magna bid last week. Lawyers for the track's owners have taken the matter to court. State Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller said the state should work to ensure that the Preakness Stakes stays in Maryland and that horse racing remains viable here. He compared any effort to save the tracks to building a baseball stadium or granting tax incentives to Hollywood filmmakers who bring their sets here.

"If we have an interest in having movies filmed in Maryland," Miller said, "then we certainly have an interest in somehow finding a buyer for our racetracks."

Baltimore Sun reporters Hanah Cho and Laura Smitherman contributed to this article.

re Journalism, Reporters as heroes in film, Blogs about Media Buyouts and Layoffs

1940 film classic His Girl Friday with dream team of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, a film which I've seen, conservatively, about four dozen times.
Info at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032599/
Trailer at: http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=102055&titleId=206

So, given that a story that I'm referencing below involves newspaper layoffs, guess I hardly need tell you there's a Medill angle to the story. http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/
I think there's a federal law to that effect now because of a provision inserted secretly into the financial bailout bill last week, requiring a Medill p.o.v. on any media story about newspaper layoffs.

(Local South Florida Medill grads include Evan Benn and Breanne Gilpatrick of the Herald, and Jordana Mishory of the Daily Business Review.)

Sorta like the one that requires all Florida media organizations to quote Susan McManus of USF ad nauseum. Or, in WIOD's case, twice an hour all day -as they did Tuesday.

Did you miss these recent McManus pearls of wisdom:

Undecideds could decide presidential race Florida Today, FL - Oct 5, 2008

"Obviously, they're the swing voters," University of South Florida political science professor Susan McManus said. "You've got two hurdles to jump with them ...

HIGHER SENIORITY: Older voters have clout Anderson Herald Bulletin, IN - Sep 27, 2008

“Despite the media’s focus on the youth vote, the most influential voters in the McCain-Obama

matchup are likely to have some gray hair,” said Susan McManus

So, am I wrong in saying that she has had every single demographic you can think of as the election game-changer?

McManus is the Bob Shrum of Pol. Sci profs turned analysts.
She's no Larry Sabato! !!!

See http://people.virginia.edu/~ljs/ and be sure to check out Larry J. Sabato's Crystal Ball, which features analyses of presidential elections, Senate, House and gubernatorial races: http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/

There's only one prescient political crystal ball in working order these days and Prof. Sabato has it.

Honestly, is everyone at WIOD a dopey Miami college student getting credit for those jokes they call regular newscasts? It sure seems that way. They run the same audio over and over and over...
They're positively unbearable, worse than ever.

Before you scroll down any farther, read this great blast-from-the-past from a TIME magazine cover story and guess when it was written:
"What's interesting about the current explosion of news is that it has not been accompanied by an equivalent increase in the amount of news gathering.
Over the past few years, in fact, cost cutting at the networks and many major newspapers has reduced the number of correspondents digging up stories around the country and the world."

The answer is at the bottom of this post.

Speaking of Medill, http://www.northwestern.edu/features/snapshots/ a place that I came to know and truly appreciate when I was living, learning and loving in Evanston, hard by Lake Michigan http://www.ugadm.northwestern.edu/pan/ and becoming friends with so many of their students, faculty and administrators, here's a site full of great media blogs that you might want to consider bookmarking for future use: http://blognetwork.poynter.org/media/

(To repeat what I wrote Tuesday: I watched the Dolphins' 1985 MNF win over the undefeated Bears wearing my Dolphins cap and the Bears mauling of the Patriots in the Super Bowl at the Norris Student Union at Northwestern with my friends at Medill and Kellogg, the same place I watched the Shuttle Challenger disaster live from the very beginning on ABC-TV.)

It's worse than sad, it's tragic really that none of the South Florida-based foundations has ever thought to have the good sense to fund anything approaching either the necessity, scope or quality of Medill Reports in order to keep the myriad bureaucrats on their toes: http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/govt/.

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/govt/aboutus.aspx

About Us
For the People…around Chicago is a project launched in the spring of 2008 by the Medill News Service to merge in depth reporting with social networking. For years, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism has reported on news and affairs through affiliations between Medill’s graduate journalism program and news organizations throughout the world. We still do that with a flourish through Medill Reports Chicago and Medill Reports Washington.
This project attempts to expand our universe, or more importantly, to create linkages beyond news organizations to groups that have a particular interest in an issue. That enables our stories to continue to be a part of the ongoing conversation about that issue. We cover stories that examine what’s working and what’s not around Chicago. We are well aware that news organizations, including Medill, tend to move on to the next issue, and then another one. Our work gets buried in the flow of continuing events, and those groups and individuals who stay with an issue can feel abandoned.

What we hope to do with this project is to become more connected with you; the network of groups and people who invest in particular issues. Any stories we cover are available to you to redistribute over the web, to republish in your newsletters or other material, to link to from your website, or to embed directly onto your site. Only one proviso; that you credit us with the stories so people know we’re involved. If you are an organization or individual or blog that cares about the issues we cover, let us know so we can link back to you to enhance the network.

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/washington/

It would be great to have Larry Lebowitz of the Herald as a field general and Gabriel at Transit Miami as his trusted aide-de-camp ready to unleash their smart, savvy eager beaver reporters at FDOT like a kamikaze squad, forcing the ever-elusive FDOT Secretary Stephanie Kopelousos to finally make a public appearance in South Florida where she's made to answer questions from actual taxpayers, not the industry/trade types, per her usual MO.

And when I think about what such a squad of eager reporters could've done to the Miami-Dade School Board years ago to ferret out the real facts on the $100K crowd that Rudy Crew sought to inoculate himself with, as well as hammer the sclerotic legion of bad teachers and cranky administrators, it literally my heart skips a beat.

By the way, after having missed it many times on Turner Classic Movies over the past 20 years, I finally caught 1952's The Captive City on TCM.

See http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=17060 and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044476/
It was great to once again see the under-appreciated John Forsythe, always so good in almost everything he was in, and a former baseball broadcaster, to boot, cast here as a small-town newspaper editor trying to battle organized crime getting its tentacles into everything he holds dear about his town, and later testifying at the Kefauver Hearings.
(Always wanted to say 'get their tentacles' in a sentence.)

Afterwards, with some time left on my videotape, as I was leaving for an errand, if you can believe this, per a recent conversation of many months ago with a reporter friend, I was almost able to tape Ace in the Hole for her right afterwards.
That's the great 1951 Kirk Douglas film, him as the world-weary once-promising reporter needing a fresh start, and lucking into a great story in a New Mexico cave-in and positively milking it dry -by hook or by crook. The first time I saw it was part of a double feature with Sweet Smell of Success at an art house, probably in Chicago.

Trailer at: http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=154055&titleId=613826 Warning: It's loud at the beginning!

http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=186689&titleId=613826

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=613826

When I got back home, the videotape had ended ten minutes before the film was over! Ugh!
I hate when that happens.

It replays on TCM at Tuesday 10/28/2008 10:00 PM , Friday 11/07/2008 2:30 PM , and Tuesday 12/09/2008 9:30 AM
Catch it if at all possible!

I still have it on another videotape somewhere, but that blew my idea of giving her a tape that had something like 3-4 really great newspaper/crime movies on them that she probably never saw in college, where she began her rise as a tough-talking, wise-cracking, crime-fighting/reporter with a nose for news at a school noted for turning out real journalists, not stenographers.

A real-life Hildy Johnson.

Finally, to reprise a story as old as crime and statistics, witness the logical result of fudging crime statistics, Baltimore-style -a murdered former councilman.

Shades of HOMICIDE: Life in The Street!

I found it while looking for results on Girls High School Field Hockey to see how my niece's excellent team, had done.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/baltimore_city/bal-md.ci.gun08oct08,0,206101.story
__________________________

Baltimore City Paper

October 8, 2008
Media Circus
Taking Things Personally Focusing On Personalities--and Their Bodies--in the Sun's New Look
by Martin L. Johnson

On Sept. 1, Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer published a column on Sarah Palin, the mercurial Republican candidate for vice president.

Published at the crescendo of the first wave of Palinmania, the column (tellingly titled "A Woman--But Why This Woman?") was highly critical of the Palin selection, which Reimer suggested was made to kowtow to special-interest groups on the right.

"I thought it was a natural topic for me," Reimer says in a phone interview. "She billed herself as a hockey mom, and I have billed myself as a soccer mom all these years. As the column clearly shows, I was very animated on the topic, personally and professionally."

But Reimer, who has been writing columns for the Sun for 16 years, wasn't ready for what happened next. The day after her column appeared, the Drudge Report, which gets close to 30 million site visits daily, linked to it as an example of media criticism of the Palin pick. Then the deluge started.

To see the rest of this story, which includes lots of info on http://www.tellzell.com/ , go to: http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=16827

--------------------------

Baltimore City Paper

September 2, 2008

Media Circus
Media Bias Blogs Tell the Story Behind Sun Buyouts and Changes

By Martin L. Johnson

The redesigned Baltimore Sun is more than just a pretty face. Even casual readers of the paper can't help but notice that sections have been cut and some of the paper's familiar bylines no longer appear.

But behind the scenes, journalists at the Sun and other papers owned by the Tribune Co. have launched an angry (if only online) revolt against staff layoffs, management decisions, and what they see as a wholesale dismantling of the Chicago-based company's newspapers.

To see the rest of the story, see: http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=16235

To see other great media stories like the above , go to the Media Circus archives at

http://www.citypaper.com/news/browse.asp?ColumnTitle=Media+Circus

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So my earlier question was to guess, more or less, when the following saw the light of day:

"What's interesting about the current explosion of news is that it has not been accompanied by an equivalent increase in the amount of news gathering. Over the past few years, in fact, cost cutting at the networks and many major newspapers has reduced the number of correspondents digging up stories around the country and the world."

The title featured the headline:

The News Wars

Print! Cable! The Internet!

We're being bombarded by information, gossip and commentary as never before. Is more news good news.

It's from TIME magazine of October 21, 1996