Tuesday Things
You've seen the commercials from People's Choice Charities on your television. Donate your car and the money goes to the charity of your choice. They claimed all proceeds from your donation would go to the charity you selected. But CA Attorney General Kamala Harris has filed a lawsuit and in the documents filed with the court, she accuses the charity of actually spending 97% of the proceeds from the donations on salaries, advertising and other expenses. She is also suing another car donation company, Cars 4 Causes, located in Ventura County. People's Choice Charities is in Los Angeles County.
Reporter's note: The majority of charities are extremely ethical and honest. But there are always those who try to take advantage of the lax oversight of charities to make money for themselves rather than a cause. Earlier this year the Federal Trade Commission and 58 state/local agencies reached a settlement with four sham cancer charities that scammed donors out of $187 million. Check out a charity before you choose to donate to it.
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The WWE has finally realized they need to pay attention to the ratings of their flagship TV show, RAW, falling through the floor. Those ratings are off 25% since June of this year. So they sent a survey to their WWE Fan Council membership. The link isn't there to encourage you to sign up but just to show you what it is.
Reporter's note: You write lousy scripts, your audience will dry up. The past few months of RAW and Smackdown have sucked. They're uninteresting and no longer compelling. John Cena is gone, at least for a while. Same with Daniel Bryan and Seth Rollins. That's only part of the problem. It is fixable, but it will take some major changes in the decision making process.
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This past April, the CEO of Gravity Payment, Dan Price made gigantic news. He gave everyone in his company a raise to a minimum salary of $70,000 annually. He made this possible by cutting his own salary of $1.1 million. Then it came out that his brother, who owns 30% of the company, had sued him over this.
Now Bloomberg Business has published a story claiming that it wasn't the pay increases for others and cut in Price's pay that caused the lawsuit, but it was the lawsuit that prompted Price to cut his own pay.
Reporter's note: We probably won't know the entire truth until the lawsuit goes to trial, next May.
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I did a mini-rant the other day about accuracy and checking things in reporting/commenting on events. Here are a few examples of why this is a lot more important than people might think at first.
Relying on interns can be dangerous. The NTSB has a policy of not releasing names of pilots, and placed the blame on a summer intern. One wonders what really happened.
The minute this guy called the KABC Channel 7 newsroom, and gave his name as "Louis Slungpue" someone should have verified he really was a DWP spokesperson. Big organizations like that have offices that handle interactions with the press. That person with the big fire hat that reads PIO at the scene of the fire is the Public Information Officer, the go-to person for news updates.
On April 8, 1955, famed singer Mario Lanza was scheduled to do two shows at the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, as a major come back. Ralph Pearl, the entertainment reporter for the Las Vegas Sun newspaper was there for the opening show. The start of the show was delayed and then delayed a few more times. Facing a deadline and having just heard that Lanza would be there in just a few minutes to start the show, Pearl went to the payphone and dictated a rave review of Lanza's performance to run in the morning edition.
Lanza was too drunk and too drugged to even walk out on stage, let alone sing and the appearances were canceled moments after Pearl hung up the phone. He tried and failed to stop the review from being printed. He writes about this in his book Las Vegas is My Beat, a great read for anyone interested in the history of the entertainment industry's connection with Vegas. Proof you can't write the story until the event takes place. It just dawned on me that I used this story in a blog entry from 2004. The context it was used in is interesting.
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While searching for that old blog entry, I found something else that shocked me by its existence. My old movie review website is still out there, lying dormant. I was a much more prolific moviegoer/reviewer in those days.
Reporter's note: The majority of charities are extremely ethical and honest. But there are always those who try to take advantage of the lax oversight of charities to make money for themselves rather than a cause. Earlier this year the Federal Trade Commission and 58 state/local agencies reached a settlement with four sham cancer charities that scammed donors out of $187 million. Check out a charity before you choose to donate to it.
* * *
The WWE has finally realized they need to pay attention to the ratings of their flagship TV show, RAW, falling through the floor. Those ratings are off 25% since June of this year. So they sent a survey to their WWE Fan Council membership. The link isn't there to encourage you to sign up but just to show you what it is.
Reporter's note: You write lousy scripts, your audience will dry up. The past few months of RAW and Smackdown have sucked. They're uninteresting and no longer compelling. John Cena is gone, at least for a while. Same with Daniel Bryan and Seth Rollins. That's only part of the problem. It is fixable, but it will take some major changes in the decision making process.
* * *
This past April, the CEO of Gravity Payment, Dan Price made gigantic news. He gave everyone in his company a raise to a minimum salary of $70,000 annually. He made this possible by cutting his own salary of $1.1 million. Then it came out that his brother, who owns 30% of the company, had sued him over this.
Now Bloomberg Business has published a story claiming that it wasn't the pay increases for others and cut in Price's pay that caused the lawsuit, but it was the lawsuit that prompted Price to cut his own pay.
Reporter's note: We probably won't know the entire truth until the lawsuit goes to trial, next May.
* * *
I did a mini-rant the other day about accuracy and checking things in reporting/commenting on events. Here are a few examples of why this is a lot more important than people might think at first.
Relying on interns can be dangerous. The NTSB has a policy of not releasing names of pilots, and placed the blame on a summer intern. One wonders what really happened.
The minute this guy called the KABC Channel 7 newsroom, and gave his name as "Louis Slungpue" someone should have verified he really was a DWP spokesperson. Big organizations like that have offices that handle interactions with the press. That person with the big fire hat that reads PIO at the scene of the fire is the Public Information Officer, the go-to person for news updates.
On April 8, 1955, famed singer Mario Lanza was scheduled to do two shows at the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, as a major come back. Ralph Pearl, the entertainment reporter for the Las Vegas Sun newspaper was there for the opening show. The start of the show was delayed and then delayed a few more times. Facing a deadline and having just heard that Lanza would be there in just a few minutes to start the show, Pearl went to the payphone and dictated a rave review of Lanza's performance to run in the morning edition.
Lanza was too drunk and too drugged to even walk out on stage, let alone sing and the appearances were canceled moments after Pearl hung up the phone. He tried and failed to stop the review from being printed. He writes about this in his book Las Vegas is My Beat, a great read for anyone interested in the history of the entertainment industry's connection with Vegas. Proof you can't write the story until the event takes place. It just dawned on me that I used this story in a blog entry from 2004. The context it was used in is interesting.
* * *
While searching for that old blog entry, I found something else that shocked me by its existence. My old movie review website is still out there, lying dormant. I was a much more prolific moviegoer/reviewer in those days.
posted by me at 5:17 PM
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