imjingjing

I've been advised that the New York State Senate has approved the $25 million loan (not bailout) that will tide the New York Racing Association over until either NYC OTB starts paying what they owe or the state finally approves a slot machine operator for Aqueduct. The loan was tacked onto the weekly bill extending the state budget, since the legislature failed to meet the April 1 deadline for a new fiscal year budget. The measure now heads to the Assembly, where it should pass. Whew.

Frank Stronach just can't help himself. Fresh from his bankruptcy court success at the end of April reneging on his promise to sell the Maryland Jockey Club, he's now managed to throw the Santa Anita fall meet in doubt, to bring in a partner in Maryland that's not exactly known for its commitment to racing, and to have waved goodbye to yet another experienced industry executive passing through the Magna revolving door. Beginning with the latest news, Santa Anita track president Ron Charles abruptly resigned, announcing his departure on Tuesday and clearing out his desk on Wednesday. As Brad Free pointed out in The Daily Racing Form , Charles is the sixth chief executive at Santa Anita in the 12 years that Stronach has owned the track. He was preceded through the revolving door by Bill Baker, Cliff Goodrich, Lonny Powell, Jack Liebau and Jim McAlpine. After four years on the job, Charles had probably had more than enough of trying to deal with the Stronach ego, not to menti...

Horse racing is full of suspicion. “All trainers are drug-wielding cheats.” “All the races are fixed.” “The trainers and vets get away with murder.” And those are just the versions that are printable in a family blog. Now, I’ve been around the race track for a while, and I know it’s true that some trainers are probably using illegal chemical help, though that’s far more difficult to do these days, with super-sensitive testing devices, than it was a decade or two ago. But this is a story about state racing officials more concerned with their public image than with fair dealing, and about an honest trainer, trying to play be the rules, who’s getting a very raw deal all because he did exactly what he was told by people who should know. Like most racing jurisdictions, New York makes the trainer the insurer of a horse’s condition. Whether an illegal substance was given to a horse by a vet, a groom, or some guy in a trenchcoat who sneaks into the stall, it’s the trainer who’s held resp...

Commercial media have faced product and price challenges in 2-sided markets for more than a century, but are encountering greater difficulties in getting it right as they try to effectively monetize multi-sided markets. 2-sided and multi-sided markets are ones in which more than one set of consumers must be addressed and there is an interaction between strategies and choices for each set of customers. Prices for one group of consumers affects their consumption quantity and this, in turn, affects the prices for and consumption by the other groups. Optimal revenues can only be achieved by dealing with all groups of consumers simultaneously. Newspapers are a classic example of 2-sided platforms. The first product is the content sold to audiences and the second is access to audiences that is sold to advertisers. This has been the basis of the mass media business model since late 19th century and the strategy has been to keep circulation prices low to attract a mass audience and then to mak...

With the Kentucky Derby coming up and with the overpaid and largely un repentant thieves from Goldman Sachs in the Congressional hot seat, it seems an appropriate time to renew a question that I initially raised some 15 years ago, in an article in that well-known handicapping publication, The Tax Lawyer . Namely, why does the Internal Revenue Code treat the ordinary schlub’s horse racing and casino gambling winnings and losses so much less favorably than it does the much more dubious gains and losses that those Wall Street’s masters of the universe receive from trading in billion dollar derivative bets? [For those who want to explore the legal arguments, the full text is at 49 Tax Lawyer 1 (1995) , available on Lexis and Westlaw or in your favorite law library.] That tax treatment is hugely different. Just for a start: ● Gambling losses cannot be deducted against any other income, only against gambling winnings. In contrast, net losses from Wall Street trading are deductible agains...

Media executives around the globe are clamoring for new and alternative business models and industry associations everywhere are holding seminars and conferences on how to create and discover them. There is just one problem: They don’t know what business models are. When you cut through the rhetoric, you find that most executives are merely interested in finding new revenue streams. Even when you consider firms touted as having best practices in that regard, none have been very successful in establishing them. The reason is simple: The dominant thought about business models is highly limited and far too narrow to solve the contemporary challenges of media industries. Business models are not merely about the revenue streams. Instead, they establish the underlying business logic and elements. They involve the foundations upon which businesses built, such as companies’ competences, value created, products/services provided, customers served, relationships established with customers and pa...

On March 31st, The Business was down three members, with Alex Koll, Chris Garcia, and Bucky Sinister all working elsewhere. To address the lack of manpower, we invited all of the members of the about-to-conclude SF Comedians Fantasy League to perform. We welcomed Jeff Cleary, Joey Devine, Eliot Langford, Julien Rodriguez, Chris Remmers, and the great W. Kamau Bell, along with Businessman and host, Sean Keane. Some comics discussed basketball extensively, both their fantasy teams' generally woeful performances or the woeful performances of their favorite team, if that team was the Golden State Warriors. Joey Devine told a touching story about receiving the Most Inspirational Player Award at Tim Hardaway's basketball camp, an honor usually given to a kid with a disability or a fatal disease. Joey was neither; he was simply terrible at basketball, and prone to skipping wind sprints in order to sneak upstairs and eat hamburgers. Eliot Langford mentioned the disappointing Warrio...