• Ella Forever – New Set Captures Singer At Her Peak
• Dylan, A Chameleon Changing Musical Directions
• Lady Gaga Disproves Her Dumb Blonde Looks
• Rod Faces 65 With Blonde Ambitions
• Do Copyright Collectives Need To Be Rethought?
• IsoHunt Faces Down CRIA and Challenges Copyright Law
• Million$ Hang In Balance On What Constitutes A Performance
• US Copyright Term A Windfall For Songwriters, Publishers
• Has Rogers Jolly Ad Spot Gone Too Far?
• Nielsen Data Music To Broadcasters Ears
• Corus Goes Analogue With Hamilton FM
• The CAB – An Uneasy Family Compact Comes Undone
• Cutting Content To Cut Costs
• Jim Lehrer Gets A Makeover
• Lewis Lapham’s Life In the Lap Of Luxury
• Pentagon Offers $40K To Chase Balloons
• Lou Dobbs For President?

INTIMATE ELLA: Verve has just released “Twelve Nights in Hollywood,” a four-CD boxed set of Ella Fitzgerald singing 76 songs at the Crescendo, a small jazz club in Los
Angeles, in 1961 and ’62 — and none of it has ever been released until now.

These aren’t bootlegs; the CDs were mastered from the original tapes, which were produced by Norman Granz, Verve’s founder and Fitzgerald’s longtime manager.

They capture the singer in her peak years, and at top form: more relaxed, swinging and adventurous, across a wider span of rhythms and moods, than on the dozens of other albums that hit the bins in her lifetime.

Richard Seidel, the producer of the boxed set, first heard the tapes early this year. He was driving to Massachusetts from his home in New Jersey and brought along some rough CD transfers to play in the car.

“I was feeling kind of down that day,” he recalled, “and the more I listened, I could  not help but start to smile. I’ve worked on dozens of Ella projects over the years, but  there was something different about this one — the sheer rhythmic joy she projects, the  endlessly inventive improvising.”  Jay Kaplan, Sunday New York Times

DYLAN’S CHANGING DIRECTION: In the same way that Dylan had followed the Beatles on the record charts of 1964, he might have easily been struck by an item in the trades describing Elvis’s sojourn on January 13, 1969 to American Studios in Memphis, to record there for the first time since his legendary Sun Records days of the mid-’50s (polishing off “Long Black Limousine” and “This Is the Story” on his first day of work). The country vibe was obviously in the air, put there by, among others, Dylan’s longtime cohorts, the Byrds, whose Sweetheart of the Rodeo came out in the tragic summer of ‘68, containing country fare like “I Am a Pilgrim” and Gram Parsons’ “Hickory Wind,” and Big Pink Dylan covers like “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and “Nothing Was Delivered.”

McGuinn himself had wanted the band to turn in the opposite direction, toward the kind of Coltrane-inspired jazz that influenced “Eight Miles High.” But he lost this particular power struggle to mercurial new sideman Gram Parsons, even though Parsons’ ‘68 release Safe at Home, by his short-lived International Submarine Band (featuring classic country tunes like “I Still Miss Someone” and “Miller’s Cave” as well as his own “Luxury Liner,” soon to be covered by Emmylou Harris), had gone nowhere. In March of 1969 the Byrds sang “Drugstore Truck Driving Man” and “Old Blue” in Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde and then “Jesus Is Just Alright,” as well as the mournful theme for Easy Rider, which came out in July, featuring the Band’s “The Weight” on the soundtrack.

Not surprisingly, the Band’s guitarist and main songwriter, Robbie Robertson, weighed in on the subject: Obviously, Bob didn’t need a weatherman (or Robbie Robertson) to know it was a good time to change direction, with Nashville Skyline becoming one of his biggest albums, thanks to some blushing praise in the rock press. “Bob Dylan’s ninth album poses fewer mysteries and yet, paradoxically, offers greater rewards than any of his previous work,” Paul Nelson started off his ecstatic if largely incomprehensible Rolling Stone review—which he would retract at a much later date. Shaking his head as he perused the review over his morning coffee, Dylan must have sighed deeply, wondering what else on earth he had to do to turn his rabid fans against him. It was surely then or a short time later that the light bulb called Self Portrait emerged as his last possible exit visa. Excerpt from “By The Time We Got To Woodstock: The Great Rock Revolution Of 1969″ By Bruce Pollock

THE END OF MUSIC: We seem to be on the edge of a paradigm shift. Orchestras are struggling to stay alive, rock has been relegated to the underground, jazz has stopped evolving and become a dead art, the music industry itself has been subsumed by corporate culture and composers are at their wit’s end trying to find something that’s hip but still appeals to an audience mired in a 19th-century sensibility.

For more than half a century we’ve seen incredible advances in sound technology but  very little if any advance in the quality of music. In this case the paradigm shift may not be a shift but a dead stop. Is it that people just don’t want to hear anything new?

Or is it that composers and musicians have simply swallowed the pomo line that nothing else new can be done, which ironically is really just the “old, old story.” Glenn Branca, NYT Opinionator blog

ROD STEWART, TURNING 65: “I played football in Los Angeles the other day and scored a goal – a header – after I hadn’t hit the net in six years.

“My wife Penny ran on to the field to congratulate me and grown men were seen to have tears in their eyes.”

And the scoring doesn’t stop there as Rod revealed he and Penny are trying for a wee brother or sister for their three-year-old son Alistair.

He said: “We were trying last night. One more child and we’ll close up the shop.” Billy Sloan, Sunday Mail

JAM MASTER JAY DOC: It’s hard to grasp the enormity of Jam Master Jay’s impact on Run-DMC until you see what the pioneering rap group looked like before he joined. In the new documentary “2 Turntables and a Microphone: The Life and Death of Jam Master Jay,” we see a picture of Run (Joseph Simmons) and DMC (Darryl McDaniels) in cheesy checkered blazers — one white, the other an adorable baby blue — like the perfect rap act for an early 1980s bar mitzvah.

It was Jay (Jason Mizell) who brought style and B-Boy swagger not just to Run-DMC, but to hip-hop itself.

With these voices, the film tells two stories. The first documents Jay’s early days, from his trading of the tuba for turntables to how he became one of the first to make the DJ not just a back-up player, but a central part of the act in hip-hop. Larry Getlen, New York Post

LADY GAGA - The Fame Monster:If there has been a defining musical story this year it has been the revenge of pop. The indie guitar boys were swept away by exuberant dance floor fillers that sank big dumb hooks into our collective consciousness and refused to let go. And Lady GaGa was the valkyrie leading the charge, fire erupting from both barrels of her conical metal bra as she exhorted us to Just Dance. Exhibiting a blonde ambition to rival her idol Madonna, former New York art student and burlesque stripper Joanne Stefani Germanotta made an album entitled The Fame and it made her famous. The Telegraph

CBC Radio3 – top 30
week of November 27, 2009

• 1. You Say Party! We Say Die! – Laura Palmer’s Prom
• 2. The Wooden Sky – Oh My God (It Still Means A Lot To Me)
• 3. The Mountains And The Trees – Up & Down
• 4. Great Lake Swimmers – Still
• 5. Julie Fader – Maps
• 6. The Rest – Sheep In Wolves’ Clothing
• 7. Boo Hoo – The Future
• 8. Rick White Album – Me And My Pillow
• 9. Magneta Lane – Lady Bones
• 10. Joel Plaskett – Gone, Gone, Gone
• 11. The Slew – 100%
• 12. Zeus – How Does It Feel
• 13. Octoberman – The Backlash
• from Fortresses (White Whale)
• 14. Little Girls – Last Call
• 15. John Southworth – I Get It Now
• 16. Spiral Beach – Domino
• 17. We Are Wolves – Me As Enemy
• 18. More Or Les – Pop N Chips (feat. Ghettosocks and Timbuktu)
• 19. The Diableros – Quell The Cold
• 20. Extra Happy Ghost – Mash-Up: Neither Being Nor Nothingness
• 21. Analog Bell Service – I Guess
• 22. Said The Whale – Black Day In December
• 23. Metric – Gold Guns Girls
• 24. King Khan & BBQ Show – Crystal Ball
• 25. Carolyn Mark & NQ Arbuckle – Officer Down
• 26. Land Of Talk – May You Never
• 27. John K. Samson – Heart Of The Continent
• 28. Kill The Lights – Crooked Fist
• 29. The Wheat Pool – This Is It
• 30. Wax Mannequin – Everthing And Everyone

COPYRIGHT

ISOHUNT VS CRIA: Canada-based BitTorrent tracker Iso Hunt search is challenging the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, seeking to validate its declaration that IsoHunt Website does not violate Canada’s Copyright Act.

Specifically, it argues the following:

1. It is the user having activated BT Client Software, and not the Plaintiff IsoHunt, who selects which dot-torrent file and the associated BT Content File to obtain;

2. The Other Websites are indexers of dot-torrent files and do not provide any BT Content Files;

3. Without sufficient information from the user and a person claiming to be the copyright holder, the Plaintiff isoHunt cannot effectively determine in respect of a given dot-torrent file selected by the user and the associated BT Content File: (a) whether the name of the selected BT Content File accurately describes the material contained in the selected BT Content File; (b)  whether the selected BT Content File associated with the dot-torrent file in fact contains material that may be protected by copyright; (c) if the material in the selected BT Content File is protected by copyright, which country’s copyright laws are applicable; (d) if the material in the selected BT Content File is protected by applicable copyright laws, whether under such applicable copyright laws, the user’s copying or distribution of such BT Content File is a permitted or licenced activity; and (e) if the material in the selected BT Content File is protected by applicable copyright laws, whether under such applicable copyright laws, the user’s copying or distribution of such BT Content File is an exception to infringement.

4. The Plaintiff IsoHunt expressly provides for and implements a “notice and take-down” policy for a person claiming that a dot-torrent file is related to a BT Content File containing material in respect of which the person holds the copyright.

According to copyright maverick Michael Geist the challenge poses a thorny issue for CRIA, especially so given that Canada’s copyright laws are in a state of flux. On his
blog, Geist writes: “The CRIA response will be interesting since it faces a conflict between its rhetoric and its view of Canadian law.  On the one hand, it has argued that the isoHunt case is indication that Canadian law is out-of-date, suggesting that it provides a clear sign that reform is needed.  On the other, given that it initiated cease and desist letters, it is unlikely to simply say that IsoHunt is correct and that it is operating legally.

In other words, if it challenges IsoHunt’s claims, it acknowledges that it believes that Canadian law can be used to stop torrent search sites.  If it doesn’t make such an argument, it can continue to make the claim for reform, but it loses the case.”

PERFORMANCE ROYALTY DEBATE: Whether downloading a song from the Web should be considered a performance is much contested. So far, the courts have sided with digital media companies.

In 2005, ASCAP entered into a rate-court proceeding to set licensing fees for the music services of Yahoo, AOL, and RealNetworks. A U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York delivered a blow to composers and songwriters by ruling that downloading music from a Web store was not a music performance. On the other hand, the judge found that streaming music was subject to a performance fee.

“The songwriter gets a performance fee if the song is streamed without the video,” Carnes noted. “But if it is downloaded within an audio-visual work like a movie we don’t get a performance fee–same song, no money.”

ASCAP has appealed the decision and arguments in the case will be heard later this year.

Of all of the efforts to collect performing-rights fees, few will likely be more controversial than trying to charge for 30-second samples. These are the previews iTunes offers so users can test drive a song and hear what they’re buying. According to sources close to the company, iTunes has acquired licenses to offer the previews but hasn’t paid anything for them. According to Renzer’s comments, music publishers want that to change. CBS News

PAYING THE PIPER: It appears the EU, unlike Digital Britain , does not require a court order for the ISPs to reveal the identity of the infringer. Either way, it’s a small shot fired off in the enormous internet content war. Who are the opposing sides? It’s not the rights holders and consumers, it’s the rights holders and ISPs. But it’s also a war
of soundbites, lawyers and money. As long as there’s no monetary advantage for ISPs to
disclose the identity of infringers, they’ll resist. The Guardian

PROFESSIONAL SONGWRITERS: The days of music publishers who have large staffs of professional songwriters seem to be over. Music publishers used to have both
established writers and their ‘farm team’ of new talent. Now they have neither. The
people they sign today (if any at all) are either working recording artists or ‘future’ recording artists. The days of the ‘stand alone’ songwriter appear to be over.

There are multiple causes for this situation but most of the damage was wrought by two specific problems. The first being that the internet has turned into a Cyber-Somalia.

Professional songwriters used to live on advances from their music publisher. These advances were to be recouped from record sales only (“mechanicals” is the industry term for these revenues). Music piracy killed record sales so that made it impossible for music publishers to recoup the advances they paid songwriters so they stopped signing writers and let go of the ones they had when their contracts ran out.

The second major problem was/is a practice by the record labels of putting “controlled composition” clauses in their artists recording contracts. For the non-lawyers reading this,these clauses are a very complicated system established by the record labels to insure that they don’t have to pay the full statutory rate imposed by the US Copyright office for the songs recorded by the artist that the artist either writes or “controls”.

Once an artist signs a recording contract containing one of these clauses (and since all the major labels have them they have little choice) the [beginning] artist will receive, at most, 75% of the statutory rate for recording any song they write or co-write. It is the co-writing that causes problems for the professional songwriters. The record labels, because they can pay a lesser rate for any song written or co-written by the recording artist, insist that the artists now write or co-write all their songs.

This has lead to a tremendous drop in the number of professional songwriters and, in most cases, the quality of the songs. The public is constantly complaining about having to pay US$12 to US$18 dollars for an album with only one or two goods songs on it. You can trace the cause of this problem back to the early eighties when all the record labels began implementing control compositions clauses in their contracts. Since then the norm on an album is one or two professionally written (or co-written) songs and a lot of filler songs that the artist wrote  in order to satisfy the record label’s demand for cheap music.

…Songwriters don’t sell T-shirts. We’re too ugly and we dress funny. Songwriter fan clubs meet in phone booths so the email lists are too small to monetize effectively.

But seriously folks, songwriters don’t sell concert tickets, or ancillary merchandise.

We make our money on record sales and radio airplay. Or, we USED to make our money on record sales. Illegal downloading ended that. Now we are looking for new jobs.  Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters Guild

COPYRIGHT COLLECTIVES: Canadian government policy has deliberately encouraged and even subsidized this collective system on the assumption that these tariffs will actually help actual creators. If so, these tariffs would take the heat off the beleaguered subsidy system for Canadian culture. But copyright tariffs work best for those who are already commercially successful and the collectives’ lawyers, consultants and managers.

Much if not most tariff money leaves the country as a result of international treaty obligations. Subsidies, however, can be narrowly targeted and kept in Canada.

Canada has about 36 active collectives with annual revenues approaching $500,000,000.

Contrast this with only about a half dozen counterpart collectives in the USA. Canada’s Copyright Board, which has a staff of 13 plus up to five full time members, is by far the largest such organization anywhere.

There are many good things about the Canadian collective system, which has grown exponentially in the last 20 years from the previous part-time regime that existed for about five decades. This growth has, however, created some issues that need to be addressed. Howard Knopf, Excess Copyright

SONGWRITERS TO RECLAIM THEIR MONEYMAKERS: …Veteran songwriters are getting ready to take advantage of an unprecedented opportunity to take back broader publishing rights to songs such as “Eye of the Tiger,” one that could set up battles against corporatesong publishers who have owned the music and controlled who could use it commercially and at what price.

The 1976 Copyright Act substantially rewrote the rules when it comes to copyrights, and it gives songwriters a chance for the first time to reclaim full rights to their songs instead of splitting revenue with a publisher or middle man who markets the music.

Those rules are about to kick into high gear.

“It already is changing the face of how publishing works these days,” said Brent McBride, the son of songwriter Jim McBride and owner with brother Wes of Copyright Recapture in Nashville.

Their business was started about six years ago with the sole purpose of helping songwriters get the rights to their songs back.

“For families, it can mean a tremendous amount” of money, McBride said. “You’re not doubling their income, but you’re increasing it substantially.”

He said some old country tunes still earn $100,000 to $200,000 annually. Tennesean

JOLLY ROGERS’ KISS FOR PIRACY? Rogers Communications has made plenty of money from the music business. Like many ISPs it had to decide whether to cross the piracy Rubicon.

Was it going to stay on the right side with creators and work on sustainable innovation or cross over to the wrong side with Google and many others and pursue false innovation(?)

… Rogers’ station KISS FM provides an excellent example of … its intent to foster infringement and trade on false innovation in what is essentially a station identity music video in part featuring a young actor—presumably hired by Rogers for the purpose—holding up her hand toward the camera and revealing the words “I NEVER PAY FOR MUSIC”.

And the actor is standing in front of one of the few remaining record stores when sheis photographed just to add insult to injury. It seems highly unlikely that capturing this image in just this way was organic or unrehearsed.

Rogers gets a young actor to carry a message that undermines creators. Classic.

I discovered this sorry state of affairs in James Gannon’s blog, IP, Innovation and Culture. He summarizes his view of the messaging from the KISS video this way: “From what I can tell, the message of the video appears to be that the quintessential depiction of Toronto life includes visiting the CN Tower, going to Wonderland, watching a Maple Leaf game and downloading music without paying for it while rubbing it in the face of retailers.”

This video is essentially an identity ad for the station. These generally emphasize the musical format of the station associated with images and personalities that the station wants the public to associate with them. Ironically, Gannon had a link to the “official” version of the KISS FM video that was available on YouTube, but it’s apparently been taken down now … Chris Castle – Music, Technology & Innovation

MEDIA/MARKETING & TECHNOLOGY

AN END TO iTUNES PRICING TYRANNY: … The labels did themselves a disservice by granting a player like Apple such power in the channel. Apple now accounts for over 90 percent of music sold digitally, and the company isn’t even primarily in the business of selling music—it mostly seeks to maximize sales of hardware like iPods and iPhones.

I think that having such a player dictate pricing strategies is an undesirable situation for the record labels.

In fact, this may be the most important lesson for other content producers. They should consider which intermediaries they let into the channel and under which terms, or better yet, aim to be that intermediary themselves so as to maintain control over pricing and other marketing strategies. Initiatives like the Web video aggregation service Hulu, a joint venture between three television broadcasters, perhaps signal that other industries have learned from the music industry. Anita Elberse, Harvard
Business School

NIELSEN has released a study named, “How U.S. adults use Radio and Other Forms of Audio,” and it contains good news for broadcast radio.

The average 18+ year old listens to 2 hours and 45 minutes of audio perday, with Broadcast Radio making up half of that listening.

The other 50% is divided between CD/Tape Players (16%), Satellite Radio (8%),iPod/MP3 Players (5%), Streamed Audio On Computer (4%) and MP3s Stored On Computer (4%). “Other Audio” accounts for the remaining 13%. All Access

VINYL 95.3: According to a report on the SONY board, Corus  has tweaked its Hamilton Classic Hits FM format and gone all vinyl, bringing in pop star Ian Thomas as one of the show hosts. It seems doubtful this is a long-term strategy, but if true the novelty of the format is certain to draw attention to itself,get people talking … and, hopefully, listening too.

DEJA VU: Amazon Making No Headway In Talks With Publishers About Cutting Kindle Book Prices: Kindle sales and profit forecasts are running wild.  Key to the bullish assumptions is the idea that publishers will soon cut wholesale prices on e-books, allowing Amazon to start making money on them.  In the meantime, Amazon is losing its shirt, selling e-books for about $1-$1.50 less than the wholesale price it pays. TBI Research

THE FUTURE OF TV: Traditional TV viewership is waning, while other kinds of video entertainment consumption rise. The top 20 shows on broadcast TV during the 1979-1980 TV season—including “Three’s Company,” “That’s Incredible” and “M*A*S*H’—individually had a household rating of at least 21.7. These days, the titans of broadcast TV—CBS’s

“NCIS” and NBC’s “Sunday Night Football”—notched an average household rating of 13.0 and 11.4 between the start of the 2009-2010 TV season and Nov 1. Total viewership for the top four broadcast networks in the current season through mid-November has slumped 42% since the same period in 1994, according to statistics provided by Brad Adgate, senior VP-research at Horizon Media. Including the CW, total viewership for the period is off about 38.5%, he said.

In the meantime, other technologies that provide access to video keep growing. More than one in four U.S. households contained digital video recorders (31 million TV households, or 27% of the total) at the end of the first quarter of 2009, according to Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Mediabrands; the figure is expected to rise to almost half (51.1 million, or 42%), by 2014. Video on demand was used in 43.1 million TV households, or 42% of 2009 TV households, and is likely to reach 66.6 million, or 64%—nearly two-thirds of households—by 2014. And these are just the TV-viewing experiences that involve the traditional living-room apparatus.

When the big screen in our living room finally converges into one that can deliver both TV and internet content, the game will certainly change. It doesn’t take too much imagining to foresee that in five to 10 years, many consumers will be able to access their online life with a TV remote, and the big screen will behave more like a touchscreen: It will know what shows we like, what music to offer us, and which social network sites and e-mail to feed us. Brian Steinberg, AdAge

CAN ANYONE HAIL THIS CAB? The biggest fight in Canadian broadcasting is between over-the-air TV broadcasters and cable/satellite TV distributors. The first group wants cable/satellite carriers to pay to distribute over-the-air TV signals, to offset broadcasters’ losses in advertising revenue. The second group says that such a ‘fee for carriage’ would be passed onto Canadian consumers, who would not be pleased with such a ‘TV tax’. The resulting battle has ended up in the Canadian media and before Canada’s broadcast regulator, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

So where does the CAB stand on this issue? No one knows, because it has been silent. Of course, the fact that its last President, Glenn Farrell, has not been replaced after resigning a year ago, might be part of the problem. Another factor might be the slashing of the CAB’s staff from 35 to 17 in the past year, and the cancellation of its annual conventions in 2009 and 2010. James Careless, Hennessey/Bray blog

CUTTING CONTENT TO CUT COSTS: Most traffic news is now generated by reporters on the ground monitoring police reports, live highway cameras, data from ground sensors that can detect traffic speed and tips from drivers.

Reporters can be hundreds of miles away away from the scene and detail the latesttraffic jams to three or four radio stations in the same hour, sometimes using aliases. Rebecca Campbell might report at the top of the hour for the Fox sports station using her own name, then 20 minutes later appear as Toni Jordan on an alternative rock station. For a station popular with Latino listeners, she goes by the name Lena Macias.

Even as traffic reporters have had their wings clipped in recent years, the airwaves ahead appear even more bumpy.

Music stations competing for listeners have been cutting back on disc jockey banter, and some industry veterans believe traffic reports could fade altogether. MSNBC

JIM LEHRER GETS A MAKEOVER: Until recently, the employees who worked on the Web site of “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” on PBS were based in a building a brisk five-minute walk through city traffic from their on-air colleagues. The Web and television staffs interacted only at MrLehrer’s annual holiday party. “They were all the recognizably young ones,” said Linda Winslow, the show’s executive producer.

An editorial meeting at “NewsHour.” From left, Mike Mosettig, Anne Strother, George Griffin, Murrey Jacobson, Michael Melia, Judy Woodruff and Margaret Warner.

But in early November, the staffs were merged into a single 20-person bullpen, with four adjacent digital editing bays carved from what had been the correspondent Gwen Ifill’s office.

Four days after the move, a gunman killed 13 people and wounded 43 others in a rampage at the Fort Hood Army post in Texas. As word spread, the digital employees were silent, to the bafflement of some of the TV producers, who had jumped for the telephones.

It turned out they were exchanging Twitter messages with the Army and a member of Congress. “We learned so much just having them in the room,” Ms. Winslow said. Michael Temchine, The New York Times

LEWIS LAPHAM LIVES ON: Both Mr. Lapham’s journal  (Lapham’s Quarterly) and his manner suggest he is happy where he is. Over a dinner of steak and mashed potatoes and a glass of wine at Union Square Cafe, Mr. Lapham related the story of when, fresh from Yale, he applied for a job at the C.I.A., then a bastion of Ivy League elitism.

The first question he was asked in the interview was, “When standing on the 13th tee at the National Golf Links in Southampton, which club does one take from the bag?”

“They wanted to make sure you were the right sort,” Mr. Lapham recalled. He found the question off-putting and dropped his spy ambitions for journalistic ones (although he points out that he knew the right answer — a 7-iron).

Many years later, Mr. Lapham’s connections have come in handy, helping to generate donations for his current project. School ties run deep, and one donor is George LaBalme, who is older than Mr. Lapham and was several years ahead of him at Hotchkiss.

“It’s a long relationship,” said Mr. LaBalme, a trustee of the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, a patron of the arts. “I thought it was a nifty idea, but I wasn’t at all sure it would work.”

Another donor is Leonard Riggio, chairman of Barnes & Noble, and the publication is placed prominently in his bookstores, near the current-events magazines rather than tucked away with the scholarly journals.

Others happened upon the quarterly and decided to support it. Thomas Siebel, a billionaire entrepreneur who runs the Siebel Foundation in San Francisco, which supports education-related causes among others, was a fan of Mr. Lapham’s column at Harper’s and came across the quarterly at a New York bookstore.

“It was an amazing perspective on the concept of war going back to the beginning of time,” Mr. Siebel said. “It was just riveting, and I wondered, ‘How can we contribute?’ ”

To date he has donated close to a half-million dollars to the publication, including buying 5,000 subscriptions for libraries and history teachers. Tim Arango, New York Times

PENTAGON BALLOON CONTEST: The prize is $40,000, and it goes to the first person or group to determine the locations of 10 red balloons that can be anywhere in the continental United States.

The apparent frivolity of the challenge is only on the surface. This is not a game invented by some eccentric Web Midas. The contest, which takes place on Dec. 5, is being sponsored by Darpa, the Pentagon’s research agency.

The goal is to learn more about social behavior in computer networks and how large computer-connected teams use their resources and connections to compete.

There is also an invention being celebrated. Peter Lee, a computer scientist and one of the Darpa directors organizing the contest, said Dec. 5 would be the 40th anniversary of the day when the first four nodes of the Arpanet — the experimental military-sponsored computer network that was the forerunner of today’s Internet — were connected. John Markoff, New York Times

LOU DOBBS FOR PRESIDENT: The Lou Dobbs-for-Senate rumor had barely crested when the Lou Dobbs-for-president rumor suddenly overtook it this week.

A spokesman for Mr. Dobbs said he was seriously considering a race in 2012 against Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, above, as “an intermediary step.”

Mr. Dobbs, the former cable television anchor of the sonorous voice and tough-talking immigration politics, parted ways with CNN on Nov. 11, reportedly receiving an $8 million severance payment, and immediately stirred questions about his plans.

His name was quickly floated as a potential challenger in 2012 to United States Senator Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat, an ardent advocate for immigrants’ rights and the chamber’s only Hispanic member. (Mr. Dobbs, 64, lives on a horse farm in rural Wantage, N.J.)

Then, on Monday, Mr. Dobbs said he had been urged to ponder a White House run, and was indeed thinking about it. “Yes is the answer,” he told former Senator Fred D. Thompson, who reached Mr. Dobbs at his vacation home in West Palm Beach, Fla., and broadcast the interview on his radio program.

What’s unclear is whether Mr. Dobbs, who branded himself “Mr. Independent” on CNN and talks prodigiously about his scorn for partisan politicians on a radio program syndicated to more than 200 stations, would run as an independent or seek the nomination of the Republican Party, which he spurned in 2006, switching his registration to independent. David M. Halbfinger, New York Times