Mediaboss Marketing

Leonard Pitts

Tribune Media

It will not be with guns.

If ever tyranny overtakes this land of the sometimes free and home of the intermittently brave, it probably wont, contrary to the fever dreams of gun rights extremists, involve jack-booted government thugs rappelling down from black helicopters. Rather, it will involve changes to words on paper many have forgotten or never knew, changes that chip away until they strip away precious American freedoms.

It will involve a trade of sorts, an inducement to give up the reality of freedom for the illusion of security. Indeed, the bargain has already been struck.

That is the takeaway from the latest controversy to embroil the Obama administration. Yes, it is troubling to learn the National Security Agency has been running a secret program that reputedly gives it access to Americans web activity emails, chats, pictures, video uploads -- on such Internet behemoths as Google, Facebook and Apple. Yes, it is troubling to hear that George W. Obama has routinely renewed a Bush-era program allowing the feds to more easily graze the metadata of phone activity (time and date, numbers dialed, etc.) of millions of Verizon customers.

But what is most troubling is that Americans are not particularly troubled by any of it. According to a new poll by the Pew Research Center and the Washington Post, most of us -- 56 percent -- are OK with the monitoring of metadata, a process then-Sen. Joe Biden called very, very intrusive back in 2006.

According to the same poll, nearly half 45 percent -- also approve of allowing the government to track email content and other online activity. And 62 percent feel it is more important to investigate terrorist threats than to safeguard the right to privacy. That approval is consistent across party lines.

We are at war against terror, the thinking goes, so certain liberties must be sacrificed. Its the same thing people said when similar issues arose under the Bush regime. It doesnt seem to matter to them that the war is open-ended and mostly metaphorical, meaning that we can anticipate no formal surrender point at which our rights will be restored.

For what its worth, weve seen similar ambivalence toward the excess of another open-ended metaphorical conflict, the War on Drugs. It has also played havoc with basic civil rights, the courts essentially giving police free reign to stop whomever whenever without needing a warrant or a reason.

Go here to see the original:
We’re surrendering our civil liberties

The reader signed herself, Losing my hearing yet hoping to hang on to my job.

Its not the gym, she wrote in response to my recent lament about deafening health club music, but the retail establishment in which I work. The music is turned way up 24/7 and I dont understand how that translates into dollars. I have torn out your column to share with my manager.

She was one of many people who wrote to moan about the invasion of dangerously loud music in every corner of modern life.

Some echoed my lament about health clubs.

Fortunately for me, wrote Lori Kash, who belongs to a Chicago branch of the New York-based club of which Im a member, I wear hearing aids (yes, most likely due to lots of loud rock concerts many years ago) and I can turn my volume way down to a safe level or simply put them on mute. Never thought Id be in a situation in which I felt more fortunate than those with normal hearing. Thanks for getting this issue heard (pun intended).

A reader named Maggie, who described herself as an avid gym-goer, instructor and personal trainer, called the music level where she works out ridiculous.

If it were not for my home remedy of stuffing Kleenex in my ears before each and every class, I would be completely deaf, she wrote. My Zumba instructor suffers from a hoarse voice constantly.

Zumba was a recurring villain in the emails I received.

I need multiple copies of your article, wrote Jacqueline Krump. I shall politely hand them to both Zumba instructors at my health club -- my own appeals have fallen on deaf ears.

Of course her appeals have fallen on deaf ears. Any instructor who constantly listens to screaming music is at risk of hearing problems. Seriously. Gym instructors need to start defending their own hearing health.

View original post here:
Stores as well as gyms need to turn down the volume

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Press Release: June 14, 2013 GAGFAH S.A. 2-4, rue Beck L-1222 Luxembourg

ISIN: LU0269583422 Frankfurt Stock Exchange (Ticker Symbol: GFJ) Regulated Market (Prime Standard)

GAGFAH to refinance 2.061bn EUR loan with improved terms

GAGFAH has signed the refinancing of its 2.061 bn EUR GRF loans and expects closing on 20th June. The interest rate will be 2.76% p.a. and amortisation 0.5% p.a. The current interest rate of the GRF loan is 4.32% p.a..

Given the favorable terms and the increased investor demand, the loan will be refinanced through a CMBS structure with a maturity of five years plus one year extension possibility.

Earlier this year, GAGFAH had already closed WOBA financing with a loan amount of 1.077 bn EUR.

'The refinancing at such attractive terms puts us in a great position and enables us to shift focus on our core business', explained Thomas Zinncker, CEO of GAGFAH GROUP and member of the Board of Directors of GAGFAH S.A.

Contact GAGFAH S.A. Investor Relations 2-4, rue Beck L-1222 Luxembourg Tel.: +352 266 366 21 Mail: rhoffmann@gagfah.com http://www.gagfah.com R.C.S. Luxembourg B 109.526

GAGFAH GROUP Dirk T. Schmitt Head of Communication Prinze-Luise-Strae 33 D-45479 Mlheim a.d. Ruhr Tel: +49201-1751-362 Mobil: +49170 302 8833 Mail: dschmitt@gagfah.de

Read the original post:
DGAP-News: GAGFAH to refinance 2.061bn EUR loan with improved terms

Once upon a time, a startup could issue a press release and get the word out.

If it were only that easy today . . .

Now a starup is confronted with an information horde from Twitter to TV to YouTube to Yelp to Facebook and on and on. It becomes a challenge just to rise above the noise, not to mention controlling the message across all these media. Add the need to manage its communications cost-effectively and you have all the ingredients for startup agita.

So whats a startup to do? Here are seven ways a startup can raise its profile without breaking the bank:

Take an unorthodox approach. Remember Dollar Shave Clubs breakthrough video that caused the company to get 12,000 orders in the first 48 hours.

Why was it so effective? The video is irreverent and funny, the CEO likeable and also the chief evangelist sales officer--and is everything an officer could be, says Maha Ibrahim, general partner, Canaan Partners, a global venture capital firm.

Obviously, most startups won't benefit from the initial bonanza of a Dollar Shave Club. However, any startup can exercise creativity and a little boldness in its marketing.

Accentuate the difference. Take Kabam, for example, a late-stage gaming company that issued a press release detailing its financial performance. Normally private companies shy away from opening the kimono. But by doing so, Kabam sharpened the difference between itself and some of its better-known, yet poorly performing competitors, like Zynga, according to Ibrahim, whose company is an investor in Kabam. Differentiation doesn't mean focusing on some obscure feature that no one cares about. Instead, draw attention to a feature or benefit or expertise that matters to customers.

Founders need to evangelize what they do. Often lacking the budget to employ a full-time marketing or PR person, founders need to assume the marketing mantle. Marketing and PR needs to be incorporated into a startups culture so they are talking up the company to everyone they meet and ingesting ideas, advises David Beisel, partner at early-stage investors NextView Ventures. Cross a politician's zeal and charisma with a business person's product knowledge, and you get some idea of what is required.

Avoid stealth mode. Avoid stealth mode. This cant be said often enough, according to Beisel and Ibrahim. Startups cant afford to be in stealth mode where everything is kept hush-hush. Doing that deprives them of valuable feedback, ideas and support when they need it most.

The rest is here:
7 Ways To Make Your Startup Stand Out

WASHINGTON

Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell's Tidewater Virginia drawl could make the word "court" sound as if it had two syllables. And Justice Clarence Thomas, though he doesn't talk much, speaks in a deep baritone.

The voices of those justices and 30 others, as well as thousands of lawyers who have argued before the court, are now part of a massive Internet archive assembled by the Chicago-based Oyez Project. The group has spent more than a decade putting together recordings going back to 1955, when an audio recorder was first installed at the court.

Now, the group is finishing work that makes the archive even more accessible, linking the audio to simultaneously scrolling transcripts that also identify the justices and arguing lawyers as they speak. In all, almost 14,000 hours of audio are available for free. It would take more than a year and a half of continuous listening to hear everything.

"The only way to be authoritative is to say we have it all," said Jerry Goldman, the director of the project, which is based at the Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Goldman said the audio contains gems ranging from the sound of one justice forming a spit wad during the days when chewing tobacco in court was still acceptable to the time an arguing lawyer used the F-bomb, a word key to a 1971 case involving freedom of speech.

By this fall visitors to the project's website will be able to search all the argument transcripts, so someone could, Goldman says, search for and then listen to every time the phrase "strict scrutiny" has been used or every time someone said "broccoli" during last year's health care law debate.

The court's aural history has never been so accessible. Until fairly recently, the Supreme Court waited months before releasing the audio of proceedings. Now, oral argument recordings are released at the end of every week, but the court's own website only provides audio from 2010 forward.

The Oyez Project's website and an accompanying app are vastly more comprehensive. When Goldman began his work in the mid-1990s, he offered free streaming audio of about 100 hours of the court's most important cases.

In 2003, with funding from the National Science Foundation, Goldman was able to expand his offerings by digitizing reel-to-reel tape of the court's proceedings that had been archived in a warehouse in College Park, Md. Additional contributions from law firms and grants, including one from Google, helped him complete the project.

Read more here:
Supreme Court archive has about 14K hours of audio