April 11th, 2013 at 10:04 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Rhode Island is getting some free tourism promotion from Microsoft today.
Bing, the Windows manufacturer’s search engine, is using a beautiful panoramic photo of Newport as the backdrop for its home page. The seaside estate in the foreground is Sea Fair, bought by former Nortek CEO Richard Bready in 1997 for $2.95 million.
March 5th, 2013 at 2:07 pm by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Rhode Island’s billionaire isn’t quite as wealthy today as he was last fall.
Financier Jonathan Nelson is once again the only Rhode Islander on Forbes’ list of the world’s 1,426 billionaires. His net worth of $1.5 billion puts him at #974, placing him among the poorest third of people with 10-figure fortunes. A year ago he was #854.
Nelson, founder and CEO of the powerhouse private-equity firm Providence Equity Partners, had seen his fortune inch up to $1.7 billion as of September but it’s now back to $1.5 billion, according to Forbes. It peaked at $2 billion before the market crash of 2008, then dipped to a low of $1.35 billion in September 2010.
Nelson, 56, was raised in Providence by an orthodontist, graduated from Brown in 1977 and founded ProvEq in 1989. He and his wife own a $1.5 million home on Providence’s East Side but mostly stay out of the local limelight, though they’ve been generous to Brown and he sits on the board for Newport’s jazz and folk festivals.
Another Rhode Islander who used to be among Forbes’ billionaires – Hope Hill “Happy” van Beuren, the Campbell’s Soup heiress who lives in Middletown – hasn’t appeared on any of its wealth rankings since March 2011 because her fortune is shared by her family. She chairs the van Beuren Charitable Foundation.
A part-time Rhode Islander on the list is Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who owns Beechwood Mansion in Newport. Ellison’s net worth of $43 billion makes him the fifth-richest man in the world, behind only Mexico’s Carlos Slim, Bill Gates, Spain’s Amancio Ortego and Warren Buffett.
• Related: Romney’s wealth dwarfed by RI billionaire Jonathan Nelson’s (Nov. 16)
February 25th, 2013 at 5:00 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Here’s a treat for you.
This short film, “Report from Rhode Island,” was apparently made during World War II for the viewing pleasure of American soldiers. (YouTube has no background; anybody know more?) While much of the movie focuses on Providence manufacturers’ contributions to the war effort, there’s also great footage of a typical day in Providence and Newport 70 years ago. Dig the trolleys at Union Station!
Take a look and leave your reaction in the comments section below:
(h/t: Aaron Renn)
December 6th, 2012 at 3:02 pm by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Not many 87-year-olds are playing jazz clubs these days, but then not many 87-year-olds are legendary impresario George Wein, who founded the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954 (and its Newport Folk Festival sister in 1959). Wein got some nice press from jazz historian Will Friedwald in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal:
There can be little doubt that George Wein is the most important impresario and producer in the history of jazz. His creation of not just the first important jazz festival (at Newport, R.I., in 1954) but of an entire international network of festivals changed the way we listen to all music. …
In addition to running two clubs, a record label and more festivals across the globe than anyone can count, he has a side career as a pianist, bandleader and, occasionally, vocalist. This week, Mr. Wein performs twice, both times in honor of departed friends and colleagues whose achievements were especially meaningful to him.
Two years ago Wein turned the festivals’ management into a nonprofit, the Newport Festivals Foundation, a change he now says “turned out to be a good idea.” The story is all the more timely with the passing this week of Dave Brubeck, a mainstay at the jazz festival.
November 27th, 2012 at 5:00 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Wall Street thinks the election created more losers than winners for the local gaming industry.
The big winner, according to Moody’s Investors Service analyst Keith Foley, is Lincoln casino Twin River, which won voter approval to install table games as soon as next summer to get ahead of looming competition from Massachusetts and stay competitive against Connecticut’s Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun.
The losers include Newport Grand, which failed to get local voters’ permission to add table games; Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods, both of which depend on Rhode Island customers and are already losing revenue; and the regional gaming market in the Northeast, which will be further saturated.
“While certain casinos [including Twin River] stand to gain, the increase of gaming supply, in whatever form it takes, will not necessarily attract more gamblers,” Foley wrote in a research note. “Increased supply will increase pressure on existing operators in the Northeast, and possibly on the US gaming sector as a whole.” He said the sector needs a stronger recovery or an overall increase in gambling.
The picture is mixed for Massachusetts, which is expected to license up to three casinos and one slot facility by early next year. That expansion will likely “have a material negative impact on Twin River’s earnings and cash flow,” Foley said, but Rhode Island has gained “a first-mover advantage over Massachusetts,” where the earliest new casinos could open their doors is probably the first half of 2014.
Twin River’s revenue in the year ended Sept. 30 was $515 million, while Newport Grand’s was $55 million. Foley expects Twin River will gain market share over Newport Grand once table games begin.
• Related: Why RI is freaked about losing casino revenue, in two charts (June 12)
October 25th, 2012 at 5:00 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Rhode Island is among President Obama’s safest states as he looks ahead to the election on Nov. 6 – and it’s also an Obama stronghold in the race for campaign cash.
Rhode Islanders have donated $1.3 million to 12 presidential candidates during the 2012 election cycle, and 59% of the money – $769,922 – has gone to the Democratic incumbent, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission filings by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Republican Mitt Romney has raised $447,199 in Rhode Island, taking 34% of the state’s total donations.
The third- and fourth-biggest recipients were Republicans Ron Paul ($38,350) and – somewhat surprisingly – Rick Santorum ($16,589). Jon Huntsman, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry each got less than $10,000 from Rhode Islanders.
September 21st, 2012 at 9:42 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
There are an estimated 2 zillion campaign commercials on the airwaves in Rhode Island right now – and yet you’re still not seeing all the ones that are featuring Rhode Island this election season.
First we have Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown discussing how he helped pass a law to curb insider trading by members of Congress, earning a “Good job!” from President Obama at the signing ceremony. Congressman Cicilline was at that ceremony, too – you can see him near Obama and Brown around 0:19:
And here’s a new Obama ad that uses Newport’s historic mansion The Waves as a stand-in for the millionaires whose taxes he wants to raise (at 0:30 or so). One sharp viewer told me the late Sen. Claiborne Pell’s home can be seen to the left of The Waves (the little shingled cottage) – Pell was a millionaire, too:
July 25th, 2012 at 8:35 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Planning a vacation in Newport this summer? It’ll cost you.
The cost of renting a hotel in Newport this summer is higher than anywhere else in the country, according to a new survey released Wednesday by CheapHotels.org.
The least expensive double room in Newport costs an average of $319 per night this summer, significantly higher than the $287 in No. 2 Santa Monica, Calif., or the $285 in No. 3 Calistoga, Calif. Martha’s Vineyard, Cambridge, Provincetown and Boston all make the top 10, as well.
“The survey compared hotel rates for all destinations in the USA for the period of June through August 2012,” according to CheapHotels. “The rankings were determined based on the cost of each location’s cheapest available double room. As such, it reflects the minimum amount travelers will have to spend to stay at a certain destination, with only such hotels having a 2-star rating or higher being considered.”
June 4th, 2012 at 11:30 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
It’s fair to say Rhode Island has been getting a lot of negative coverage in the financial press of late, between the pension crisis and 38 Studios. Luckily, the investment weekly Barron’s has provided a rare respite in the latest edition of Barron’s Penta, its magazine supplement for “people with $5 million in assets.”
The article, by former CNN anchor Deborah Marchini, offers a glowing look at Aquidneck Island then and now ahead of the upcoming America’s Cup World Series, which kicks off June 23 in Newport. A sample:
New England’s Riviera has more than warm breezes going for it. The bluffs make a magnificent showcase for impressive houses. The Atlantic delivers up fresh seafood daily. And thanks to an accident of geography, the region is full of sheltered harbors that lead to wide open bays, eventually flowing all the way to the Atlantic. Which is why, if you enter the phrase “sailing capital of the world” into a search engine, Newport is the first thing to pop up.
(Full disclosure: Marchini and I met up when she was here.)
April 11th, 2012 at 5:00 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Romney with the Carcieris last July
Could Newport be a Mitt Romney stronghold?
Electorally, probably not: John McCain won just 31% of City by the Sea voters in 2008. But financially, this year’s Republican frontrunner is a favorite there.
Romney, who’ll be in Warwick for a campaign rally tonight, has raised $41,650 in Newport’s tony 02840 zip code this election season. That’s more than double the $16,750 Obama has harvested there so far, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
No doubt a lot of Romney’s success in Newport can be attributed to one event, a fundraiser last July at the $5.4 million home of Les and Carol Ballard on Beacon Hill Road. It was co-hosted by former Gov. Don Carcieri and his wife, Sue, and tickets started at $500 a couple.
Les Ballard is president of Ballard Exploration Co., an oil-and-gas firm, while Carol is the daughter of late oil tycoon Eddie Chiles, who in 1989 sold the Texas Rangers to a group that included George W. Bush. Ballard donated $2,500 to Brendan Doherty last year, but he’s also given to Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse.
March 7th, 2012 at 6:00 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
Richard Saul Wurman – the Newport-dwelling futurist who considers the City by the Sea “an intellectual wasteland” – is back in the news thanks to the famous TED Conference he founded in 1984.
Wurman, 76, lives in The Orchard Mansion built by the Firestone family (think tires). He plays a prominent supporting role in a new New York magazine article examining the rise of TED and other “fabulous confabs.” Wurman is now apparently on TED’s blacklist after angering Chris Anderson, who bought it from him:
Rather than stewing, though, Wurman is planning four new conferences. Prophesy-2025, in 2013, will be about the future. Geeks and Geezers Summit, in 2014, will pair young and old. fedmed, in 2015, will be about global health. But the one he is most focused on right now is what he calls the WWW Conference, which is scheduled for this coming September. Completing his new-TED dis, Wurman envisions WWW as “the first great 21st-century conference.”
The title stands for lots of w words like wealth, war, and water. Wurman has already lined up more than 50 speakers – many of them, it’s hard not to notice, TED veterans – including Steven Pinker, Arianna Huffington, Julie Taymor, David Blaine, and David Brooks.
It would be pretty cool if Wurman decided to hold the WWW Conference here in Rhode Island. (“People will have a conversation onstage until I get bored,” he says.) Alas, Wurman informed me on Tuesday the event will be in Redlands, Calif.
(photo via Wikipedia)
February 9th, 2012 at 11:01 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
East Providence’s state-appointed budget commission voted this week to stop offering health insurance to members of its City Council as of Nov. 1, which is expected to save nearly $50,000 a year. Do most Rhode Island communities give their elected officials health benefits?
The answer is no – or at least it was as of July 2006, the last time the state published a survey of salary and fringe benefits offered to municipal elected officials. East Providence was one of nine cities and towns that offered health insurance to their local councilors at the time, the results showed.
Another of the nine was Central Falls, where receiver Robert Flanders ended health benefits for the City Council last June, shortly before the city filed for bankruptcy. The other seven that offered councilors health insurance in 2006 were Burrillville, East Greenwich, Johnston, Newport, Pawtucket, Providence and Warwick.
The generosity of the plans ranged from a “fully paid” family health insurance plan for Burrillville councilors to an annual cap on coverage of $2,700 a year in East Greenwich. All nine cities offered councilors dental coverage, too, and some of them also offered vision coverage, life insurance and retirement benefits.
November 28th, 2011 at 3:28 pm by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes
The New York Times’ Randy Kennedy takes a look at a “distinctly Newportian” fight over art in the City by the Sea:
When Doris Duke was clearing a patch of derelict buildings here in the late 1970s to create a modest patch of open space known as Queen Anne Square, she was sometimes spotted personally directing the backhoe drivers at dusk, acting as both foreman and steward of the enormous fortune that she lavished on such restoration projects.
The same kind of New England pluck and perspicacity is now stoking an unusual battle, 18 years after Ms. Duke’s death, over a plan to create a permanent, minimalist art installation in honor of her legacy on this minimalist swath of green that she left behind in a former commercial area near the harbor. The tenor of the dispute is distinctly Newportian. Many of the combatants have known one another for decades, as did many of their mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers.
(rendering: Doris Duke Memorial Foundation)
August 24th, 2011 at 11:22 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes
Seth Lipsky, the former editor of the Forward and founder of the defunct New York Sun, has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal explaining the significance of the famous letter President Washington wrote to the Jewish community in Newport in 1790:
The annual reading of George Washington’s letter to the Jews — which took place this weekend at the Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I. — will echo with extra significance this year, as a campaign is now under way to make the original letter available for public viewing.
The campaign was launched earlier this year by the Jewish Daily Forward after the newspaper discovered that Washington’s letter — in which he vowed that the new American government would “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” — is locked away in storage by an owner who is loath to share access with the rest of his countrymen.
Neither the Forward nor anyone else is suggesting that the owner, who bought the letter in 1949, is not within his rights. The letter is, after all, private property. But it is also a national treasure, containing one of the greatest statements on religious liberty of all time. And the campaign to give it a public home — so it can be leaned over and read as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are — comes at a time when the free exercise of religion is increasingly constrained around the world.
Lipsky’s full op-ed is here. The Projo’s Richard Salit published a lengthy story about the letter last weekend, too, and much-missed Providence AP scribe Eric Tucker traced the Touro Synagogue’s history in 2009.
Update: Would you rather listen than read? Or do both? Then check our Rhode Island Public Radio reporter Flo Jonic’s piece on the Washington letter from Monday.
May 17th, 2011 at 3:23 pm by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes
Back in 2009, the Newport Daily News made headlines with its announcement that the paper would pull all its stories off the standard HTML-based Web and make them available only to paying customers – and only at the steep price of $345 a year for digital access, more than double the $145 charge for print subscribers.
So how’s the experiment going? Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism offered this update in “The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism,” a high-profile report released last week:
And then there is the Newport Daily News, a 12,000-circulation newspaper in Rhode Island.
In 2009, the News decided that it was almost impossible to make money from digital ads. “The people we hired to sell advertising on the Internet just never did very well,” the paper’s then-publisher, Albert “Buck” Sherman, told Nieman Journalism Lab. So the News took an unusual step: print subscriptions were priced at $145 a year, print/online combos at $245, and online-only access would cost $345.
In other words, by forgoing the paper, a digital subscriber was on the hook for an additional $100. And Sherman wasn’t coy about the rationale: “Our goal was to get people back into the printed product.”
Some online-only content, such as videos and blogs, is outside the paywall; the same goes for columns like “Clergy Corner” and “Advice on Pets.” But anyone who wants access to the electronic edition, which reproduces the day’s paper, must pay. The company also operates a free site, newportri.com, designed to appeal to tourists and others looking for recreational or entertainment information.
In early 2011, the News dropped the price for print and online to $157, or a dollar a month above the print-only fee. But online-only access remains at $345—a price that current publisher William Lucey III says, in an interview, “is more of a deterrent.” The amount was based on a scenario in which,“if everyone wanted only a digital product, this is what it would cost.”
The paper’s site, newportdailynews.com, gets around 80,000 visitors a month. Especially with online ad rates “dropping 20 percent a year,” that’s not enough to sustain the operation, which includes a newsroom of twenty-two people, Lucey says. Indeed, online ad revenue accounts for only 2 to 3 percent of total advertising for the paper.
After the change was put into effect, “our single-copy sales went up about 300 a day”—a bit less than 10 percent of overall single-copy sales. As the economy improves, “print is coming back. February [2011] was up 35 percent over last year” in ad sales.
And even with AOL’s free Patch site moving into town, Lucey says there are no regrets. “We found our comfort zone, and we stopped agonizing about it.” AOL, which launched the Patch site in Newport in July 2010, is sanguine: “The Newport Daily News does great work and has been a staple in Newport County for generations,” says spokeswoman Janine Iamunno. “There is room for all of us.” …
There is, in some publishers’ pay plans, an aura of frustration over the inability to convert large online audiences into advertising revenue. Moroney, of [A.H. Belo's] Dallas [Morning News], is simply being more candid than most when he notes that much of the News’s online ad space goes unsold, and so a cut in traffic to the site will have little financial impact. Others, such as Albert Sherman of the Newport Daily News, frame a paywall as a way to protect the print edition, but some print circulation has already been lost because of free alternatives.
The entire “Story So Far” report is well worth a read – there’s a lot in there about A.H. Belo, too, though as above the focus is on the Dallas Morning News.
January 2nd, 2011 at 3:24 pm by Ted Nesi under General Talk
Well, the America’s Cup is going to San Francisco, not Newport, just as everybody had expected until a few weeks ago. Now a lot of people are asking, what was all that about anyway?
One of them is San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius, who took Oracle’s Larry Ellison to task for stringing Newport along and leaving a lot of people miffed in the City by the Bay:
Ellison’s team should have spared us the last-minute drama and the tough talk from lead negotiator Stephen Barclay, who said the city was “hanging on by their fingernails.”
Looking at it now, all it did was create ill will and make city officials wonder if race officials will be this difficult for every minor decision from now until 2013.
It seems pretty clear there was no point in sailing off to Newport, R.I., because honestly, the team didn’t give them much time to put together a thorough bid.
“You’ve got to remember,” said one local race supporter, “we’ve been working on this for six or seven months. Newport has been working on it for six or seven hours.”
Going to Newport may have seemed like a good tactical move to get San Francisco to sweeten its deal, but really, it just made Ellison’s team look greedy.
Has anyone totaled up how much Rhode Island spent on our frantic last-ditch attempt to win the Cup? It may be nothing at all; I’m just curious.
(h/t: Bill Hamilton)
November 24th, 2010 at 8:00 am by Ted Nesi under General Talk
While writing about the Film & TV Office yesterday, I wondered whether it was really true that the hip 1956 musical “High Society” was filmed in Newport, as opposed to being set there but filmed in Hollywood.
Steven Feinberg, the office’s executive director, wrote in to tell me that indeed it is. Not only that, he said, but the late state Rep. Paul Crowley‘s father actually let MGM’s crew use his station wagon to secure the camera as they drove down Bellvue Avenue to film the opening sequence.
“High Society” was a remake of “The Philadelphia Story” with Cole Porter supplying the music, and featured an all-star cast including Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Louis Armstrong. It’s not the only toe-tapping flick set in 1950s Newport, either; the classic “Jazz on a Summer’s Day” documents the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.
And Feinberg’s e-mail gives me a good excuse to post the opening sequence he described – dig that Satchmo style:
September 9th, 2010 at 1:31 pm by Ted Nesi under General Talk
Richard Saul Wurman
The New York Times has a long, lushly photographed story in today’s paper exploring the Orchard, a “super mansion” (his words) in Newport owned by the famed guru Richard Saul Wurman – he of the TED and BIF conferences – and his wife, author Gloria Nagy. Their license plates are “MOMSIE” and “POPSIE,” but it sounds like RSW despises most of what we associate with the City by the Sea:
Indeed, most locals, particularly those who live in houses like Mr. Wurman’s, have never heard of their famous neighbor. Outside Newport, Mr. Wurman enjoys a happy notoriety as a connector and king-maker. Despite its proximity to nowhere convenient, his house is the hub from which he organized the TED conference — sold in 2002 for a reported $14 million — as well as its spin-off, TED MED (TED, with a medical focus), which he still owns, and a host of other synergistic projects and conferences. (In his spare time, Mr. Wurman writes and publishes books; his most recent, a fable about himself, is his 82nd.) …
ONE hot August afternoon, Mr. Wurman, who is extremely fond of certain profane terms, employed a common one to dismiss his neighbors. Afterward, he added, “I love living in this house, and I’m not blasé about it at all, but this town is an intellectual wasteland without any sense of humor. I’ve been living here for 17 years, and if you asked me to tell you when I last had lunch with anybody but my wife or someone that came to see me from India or New York or Boston or Germany, I couldn’t come up with a name.”
Sounds like there won’t be any block parties on Narragansett Avenue anytime soon.
One detail The Times leaves out: the 137-year-old mansion has an assessed value of $4.9 million, according to city records, while two adjacent properties also owned by the Wurmans are worth another $2.2 million combined. That must quite the property tax bill every year.
August 16th, 2010 at 8:59 am by Ted Nesi under General Talk
RWU's Roger Williams statute
Rhode Island gets a nod in this morning’s Financial Times from Simon Schama, the Columbia University historian who wrote “A History of Britain.” In a column praising President Obama’s defense of Cordoba House, the proposed “Ground Zero mosque,” Schama notes the Ocean State’s history of religious pluralism:
The father of American toleration was Roger Williams, the founder of Providence Plantation, later Rhode Island. For Williams, the Calvinists of Massachusetts with their church courts, violated true christianity, which – in its purity – eschewed any civil regulation. It was Williams (not Jefferson) who first articulated the “hedge” between church and state.
It is no accident, then, that Jews first found refuge in Newport, Rhode Island. Nor was it chance that almost exactly 220 years ago George Washington, campaigning for the adoption of the first amendment to the constitution, repeated the words of Moses Seixas, the warden of the Touro synagogue, that the US was a place that gave “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance”.
The history of the Touro Synagogue, which opened a snazzy new visitors center in Newport a year ago, is indeed a fascinating one – check out this article by the AP’s Eric Tucker from last year to learn more.
(Fun fact: Keith Stokes, chair of the R.I. Economic Development Corporation, is president of the synagogue’s foundation’s board of directors, and an expert on early African-American and Jewish-American history.)
Perhaps the essay will pique the interest of some among the FT’s well-heeled readership and convince them to take a trip to Rhode Island.