Category: today’s top story

“Miramax will eliminate around 50 jobs, leaving it with about 20 employees, and reduce the number of films it releases each year by half, the latest victim of a changing economics in the specialty film business.”

The daily “will become a free sheet this month after 182 years as a paid-for title, as its new Russian owners seek a new strategy in a tough market, it said on Friday. The tabloid, acquired by former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev for a nominal one pound in January, will drop its 50-pence cover price from October 12.”

Friday we’re hosting a National Summit on Arts Journalism and presenting ten projects to provoke questions about the future of coverage of the arts. We need your help! Please consider embedding the live webcast in your blog or website. You’ll get an audience. And it will help us by spreading the technology resources around the web. It’s as easy to do as embedding a YouTube video. Click the headline to find out more.

“The Smithsonian Institution is offering all of its [6,000] employees a voluntary buyout plan to reduce its workforce, meet its tightened budget goals and restructure the organization to match the principles of its new strategic plan.”

“[T]he French culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, says he is ‘dumbfounded’ by [Roman] Polanski’s ‘absolutely dreadful’ detention,” while “a large group of French actors and cinematographers … have signed an angry petition calling for Polanski’s ‘immediate liberation.'” Their response is consistent with tradition.

“[A] new study by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, released Monday, shows that the top pay at the nation’s largest nonprofits rose again last year, with some eye-popping results. But the survey also found signs that these high-dollar salaries may be starting to turn around.”

She “cultivated a poetic interpretive style in which gracefulness was prized over technical flashiness or grand, temperamental gestures.” She was renowned for her Mozart, and she nearly single-handedly brought the keyboard music of her compatriots de Falla, Granados, Albéniz and Turina into the mainstream repertoire.

“The YouTube Ketinoa channel contained over 1300 videos of Mariinsky & Bolshoi ballets. Last month this channel was suspended because it was found to contain a small subset of copyright protected videos featuring ballets by Balanchine. The claim was submitted on behalf of the Balanchine Trust, the body in charge of protecting the legacy of that choreographer.”

“Those struggling now include the full range of nonprofits, including museums, colleges, orchestras and small local social service providers. … While debt is the not primary reason for these institutions’ woes, the need to service it eats into their dwindling financial resources, forcing near Faustian choices.”

Nicolas Joël opened his first season at the helm of the company with Gounod’s dimly remembered Mireille. “Starting the new era with a half-forgotten, 19th-century opera in a period-style production is, of course, not an innocent coincidence. It’s an explicit break with the policy of Joël’s predecessor, Gérard Mortier, who favored overbearing directors and willful reinterpretations.”