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Blow Horn Equity LLC, headed by Jeff Seder, who founded and runs the bloodstock advisory firm EQB, Inc., has just announced that Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos and family will be joining forces with Blow Horn Equity to bid for the Maryland Jockey Club properties now owned by Magna Entertainment. The auction is scheduled for January 8th in federal bankruptcy court. According to a press release issued this afternoon, the joint Blow Horn Equity - Angelos family bid will go forward despite the ongoing uncertainty over whether the slot machine license earmarked for Anne Arundel County, where Laurel Park is located, will be awarded to developer David Cordish's Arundel Mills shopping center, just up the road from Laurel. The slots license had been intended for Laurel, but Magna generalissimo Frank Stronach decided he could ignore the rules and didn't pony up the required deposit with his application. As a result, the state had no choice but to accept the competing bid from Co

New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, the state's chief fiscal officer, has subpoenaed the books and records of the New York Racing Association (NYRA), as first reported in the NY Daily News , and later in the Blood-Horse . Like many others, DiNapoli is presumably curious as to how NYRA spent the money that it received from the state as it came out of bankruptcy in 2008. As NYRA points out in its press release , hurried onto its website late this afternoon, the Comptroller's apparent surprise that NYRA is now running out of money is a little disingenuous. The original bankruptcy rescue plan anticipated that slot machines -- approved by the NY Legislature back sometime in the Jurassic (well, actually, it was 2001) -- would be up and running at Aqueduct by April of 2009. As we all know, that hasn't happened, and the blame lies largely in Albany, where the hapless "leadership" of the State Senate, together with the incompetence of the Governor's office and the

It is obvious that both the offline and online news providers are in the midst of substantial transformation and that the traditional means of funding operations are no longer as viable as in the past. This is disturbing to the industry because it has enjoyed several decades of unusual financially wealth and few in the organizations know how to find and generate new sources of revenue. The financial uncertainty facing the industry is not unusual, however. We tend to forget that news has historically been unable to pay for itself and was subsidized by other activities. In the past newspapers and other news organizations engaged in a far larger range of commercial activities than then they do today and publishers had to be highly entrepreneurial and seek income from a wide variety of sources in order to survive. The initial gathering and distribution of news was paid for by emperors, monarchs, and other rulers who needed information for state purposes. Later, wealthy international mercha

An important contemporary development is the shift of media market definitions from traditional platform-based definitions to functional definitions. This is occurring because media product platform definitions are losing their specificity and uniqueness due to digitalization and cross-platform distribution developments. Newspapers are becoming news providers, delivering news and information via print, online, mobile, and other platforms; broadcasters are moving off the radio spectrum, exploiting not only other streaming and video-on-demand opportunities, but also text-based communication on web and mobile platforms. Although functional definitions clarify what companies actually do, they obscure wide differences in audiences, business relations, and revenue sources on the different platforms and give some the mistaken impression that a functionally defined operation can be successful operating the same way across the different platform environments. The functional definition is also c

There is a growing chorus for governments to help established media transform themselves in the digital age. From the U.S. to the Netherlands, from the U.K. to France, governments are being asked to help both print and broadcast media innovate their products and services to help make them sustainable. State support for innovation is not a new concept. Support of cooperate research initiatives involving the state, higher education institutions, and industries has been part of national science and industrial policies for many decades. There has been significant state support for innovation of agriculture/food products, electronics, advanced military equipment, information technology, and biomedical technology and products. State support tends to work best in developing new technologies and industries and tends to focus support on advanced basic scholarly research through science and research funding organizations, creation and support for research parks and industrial development zones f

Hello Show Attenders, Following a spectacular Holiday Spectacular show with THREE guests (Louis Katz, Amy Dresner and Chris Thayer), The Business will be dark for the Christmas holiday week. However, we will be back for a big New Years Eve Eve show on Wed Dec 30th 2009. No secrets revealed yet, but plans are in the works for some knockout guests. ...and as Jan crests on the horizon, The Business is proud to ba a part of SF Sketchfest 2010 on both Thur Jan 21st and Friday Jan 22nd. Still at the Dark Room, but joined by new guests and other great sketch groups. Check www.sfsketchfest.com for more details. These will be the only Business shows until February, so come by and get your Biz Fix. THANKS FOR ALL THE SUPPORT IN 2009! Sincerely, The Businessmen

Details have not yet been made public of the initial bids, submitted last week, for the assets of the Maryland Jockey Club -- Laurel, Pimlico and the Bowie training center. And the final auction -- assuming anything's ever final in the ongoing saga of the Magna Entertainment bankruptcy -- won't be held until January 8th. We know that bids are in from real estate developer Carl Verstandig, partnering with a California gaming company, from the Cordish Co., which operates the Arundel Mills mall near Laurel, and from the De Francis family, whose prior stint at the helm of the MJC was somewhat less than stellar. And we suspect that, one way or another, Farnk Stronach will try to hang onto the tracks, either using his personal money or, if he can get away with it, using funding from one of his tame subsidiary corporations, at the usual expense of minority shareholders. For those of us who would like to see racing continue, and even thrive, in Maryland, none of these bids exactly ma

Yesterday was the final date for interested parties to submit bids for the Maryland Jockey Club piece of Frank Stronach's bankrupt Magna Entertainment empire, comprising Pimlico and Laurel race tracks, the Bowie training center and an OTB. According to the Baltimore Post , one of the bidders is none other than the same DeFrancis family that owned the tracks prior to their sale to Stronach in 2002 and that, to be kind, is viewed with less than total love and affection by most in the Maryland racing community. The names of all the bidders will be forwarded to Maryland state officials on Monday, but we already know that there's a competing bid from real estate developer Carl Verstandig, in partnership with an unnamed California gaming entity. Among other possible bidders are the family of Peter Angelos, the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, and a group headed by a well-known racing industry figure from Pennsylvania. And there's always the specter of Frank Stronach himself cobbl

Interesting piece in the New York Times yesterday , about Jesus Leonardo, a 57-year-old New Yorker who makes $45,000-$50,000 a year as a professional "stooper," picking up discarded parimutuel tickets and cashing in the winners. Leonardo, who collects the tickets at various OTB parlors in the city, rather than the race track, appears to be doing far better than most bettors, or for that matter, than NYC OTB itself, which is the latest racing-related entity to fall on the mercy of the bankruptcy court. That got me thinking about why any of us bet on the races at all. In my own case, I've noticed that I hardly bet these days, certainly a lot less than I did, say, 10-15 years ago, even though I'm still as much, or more, of a follower of racing. It seems to me that there are two likely reasons, in my own case. These may be merely personal, but perhaps they shed some light on the death spiral that racing as a whole seems to be in. First, I've become involved in owni