Burnin’

The South Carolina Department of Agriculture is embarking on a branding campaign to benefit the state’s farmers and rural communities.

From the official Press Release:

The new Certified SC branding campaign was designed to stir-up state pride and loyalty, and change South Carolinians from consumers into advocates and customers who ask for and prefer Certified SC Grown products - driving the demand for the quality, diversity and availability of homegrown products and contributing to rural economic development for the state.

According to The State, the campaign is being paid for with a one-time $600,000 allocation from the state Legislature.

The effort comes at a time when consumers are growing savvier about the food they eat and demanding more information about where it comes from and how it’s grown. Recent bouts with contaminated spinach, peanut butter and pet food have placed the issue on the national and international stage.

[UPDATE] Here’s another post I made about the state’s economic development needs, which are plentiful. South Carolina’s unemployment rate was 5.8% in April, 2007—one of the worst in the nation.

We watched Oscar-nominated documentary Jesus Camp last night. It was frightening to see just how serious the radical right is about the ongoing Culture War in this nation.

There are many poignant (or scarring, depending on one’s point of view) moments in the film. One of the most telling is the scene from New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Pastor Ted Haggard appears in the film and we learn, among other things, that he has a standing call every Monday with President Bush. Of course, Haggard has since been embroiled in a high-profile scandal involving homosexual prostitution and methamphetamine use. Oops.

I kept asking myself throughout the screening, “How did the filmmakers get this kind of access?” In the interview presented above, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady say they came to the film with no pre-determined agenda, which is a bit hard to believe given their status as sophisticated New Yorkers. Agenda, or no, the film is near perfect in its revelations.

Upon publication of Elmore Leonard’s 41st novel, Up in Honey’s Room, the author spoke with Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, Book Editor for The Wall Street Journal (paid sub. req.).

Speaking of his early ambitions and what the process of writing a script is like, Leonard says:

I wanted to write movies until I started to do it. Then I found out there was very little pleasure in it. There are all these people involved, changing your story all the time. Writing a book, I’m the only one I have to please. To write a movie you are taking in writing. You are given scenes that someone wants to see, some studio executive with no story sense. In 1993, I wrote my last screenplay, an original for director William Friedkin. It had to do with a lot of money that would be in a house in Miami Beach for one night before it was picked up and laundered. But some burglar, just looking for a TV, enters the house and takes the Igloo cooler full of cash.

Friedkin said he didn’t want any money laundering. And he didn’t want any references to drugs. I thought well, I’ll have to think of a new premise for this. I woke up at 5 a.m. at the Sunset Marquis and in five minutes I saw a televangelist raking in the money by healing a cute little girl of stuttering. When he gets home he and his girlfriend have all this money coming in. This is the money that goes into the Igloo cooler and is taken by this burglar. I wrote it, but it needs work.

Mr. Leonard, 81 years old, started out as an ad copywriter in Detroit in 1949. He didn’t give up his day job until 1961, at which point he figured he could make a living full-time as a writer.

Visit Leonard’s website to hear him read from his latest work.

The newspaper business has been buzzing ever since learning of Rupert Murdoch’s five billion dollar bid to purchase The Wall Street Journal. So it’s not surprising that Richard Silkos of The New York Times managed to schedule some quality time with the media mogul recently. He turned up some interesting facts on the enigmatic Aussie in the process.

• When Mr. Murdoch bought the struggling 20th Century Fox studio in 1985, Hollywood viewed him as just the latest arriviste, doomed to be suckered by the industry’s vagaries. Wrong. Murdoch restored the studio and used Fox as a springboard to start his Fox television network and a passel of cable channels and other ventures around the globe.
• News Corp’s 175 newspapers contributed just 15 percent of the company’s $21.3 billion in revenue in the nine months ended March 31, 2007.
• Mr. Murdoch, who clearly sees himself as a populist, says he is most energized when he is taking on “the elites” — words he practically sneers when he says them — in what he perceives as a career-long battle to offer consumers more media choices.
• Murdoch regularly dines on a lunch of whitefish and spinach at the Fox commissary.
• Murdoch socializes with (and seeks the counsel of) Mark Zuckerberg, the 22-year-old founder of Facebook and Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
• Murdoch and his third wife Wendi Deng, 38-years his junior, are planning to move into a $44 million penthouse on Fifth Avenue next year. It is the most expensive apartment in New York and was once owned by Laurence Rockefeller.

While it’s easy to admire Murdoch’s ability to build a business, and easy to recognize that he’s an interesting, perhaps even complicated, man, it remains difficult to get around the right wing propaganda thing. Sure, there’s a market for it, but that doesn’t make it right.

My good friend, David Keller, a.k.a. The Deacon of Freakin’, took part in a debate at University of Utah on April 13th. The topic for the evening: “Is God Necessary for Ethics?” Three hundred people filled the room to hear the philosophical discourse, affriming the topic’s top-of-mind place in our most religious of states.

The Google video above is a clip. YouTube has the full proceedings.

Walter E. Hussman Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette wrote an editorial for The Wall Street Journal (paid sub. req.) that probes the newspaper industry’s standard practice of giving away their product for free online.

It is time for newspapers to reconsider the ultimate costs and consequences of free news.

News has become ubiquitous, free, and as a result, a commodity. Anytime you are trying to sell something that becomes a commodity, you have lost much of the value in providing that product or service.

Not many years ago if someone wanted to find out what was in the newspaper they had to buy one. But not anymore. Now you can just go to the newspaper’s Web site and get that same information for free.

All of this would be fine if newspapers generated lots of additional revenues from offering free news. But the fact is newspapers generate most of their online revenues from classified advertising, not from news.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock does not offer news for free on their website. They offer free headlines and in some cases a few free paragraphs, designed to get people to read the paper. They also offer free classifieds.

I’m not sure that the genie can be put back in the bottle, but there are certain papers like The Wall Street Journal that are worth paying for (I am one of their 900,000 plus online subscribers). Local news may also be worth paying for, but the audience willing to do so will most likely be a fraction of paid circulation.

We visited downtown Asheville on Saturday. After securing a healthy start (comprised of fresh squeezed apple juice, organic coffee, tempeh scramble, grits, toast, fruit, etc.) at Over Easy Breakfast Café, we sauntered over to The Courtyard Gallery for the 13th annual Twin Rivers Media Festival where we watched four shorts–Siren, The Little Gorilla, Buoy and Press Play. Afterwards, Andrea Lee Higgins, a singer-songwriter from Columbia, SC performed some of her originals.

We then walked up the hill to Malaprop’s Bookstore where author Elizabeth Gilbert was speaking to a packed house. Add to this a little shopping at Hunk’s and Rags Reborn Eco Chic Boutique, dinner at Savoy and live entertainment at Westville Pub later in the night and you’re talking about a heavy hit of culture courtesy of this funky southern mountain town.

Ware County, GA fire blanketing Jacksonville, FL on 4/29/07

We experienced darkened skies in Bluffton today, but I doubt it was anything like what JAX went through on Sunday (and continues to go through).

[via WTOC TV in Savannah]