Meanwhile, the Newsbreak mystery continues.
I have been wondering for a long time why I had several stories published on Newsbreak with small impression numbers and a one-to-one ratio between impressions and views. Since it seems impossible to have such a ratio with a story distributed publicly, I assumed this to be an internal Newsbreak distribution.
Then after several months, I saw messages on the stories saying they needed attention. indicating grammar, typos, and picture credits. The message promised that after fixing the errors, I would see greater distribution. The first, a story about the history of the University of Maine was easy to fix and I changed its location from Maine State to Orono. However, the new impression and views numbers are not very impressive. Perhaps Newsbreak does not think history to be relevant. My view is that a new media paradigm is in the making and even Newsbreak doesn’t know what that is becoming. To quote a recent conversation with Lester Spear, we will see what bubbles up. We vote for what we want the future to be with our actions. My vision is of a media that incorporates a long view into our present-day thinking. In the order of priorities, what we are creating into being is fundamental. It may appear in an instant to be nothing more than a tiny seed. just blowing in the wind.
The Hidden Facts of the LePage Years: Part One, first published on July 4th, required minimal editing. When I published it I changed the location from Maine State to Portland Maine. The numbers didn’t impress me much.
I went on to edit the story about the fifty-million-dollar school and the Industrial Partnerships Act which was a much more detailed and time-consuming process. The title frames the story, and I realized I was framing it wrong. The repurposing of education for the uses of special industrial interests is the real subject of the story. It is now called How the LePage administration's Industrial Partnerships Act changed the purpose of public education.
Then I took a break and checked what my Newsbreak stats were doing.
To my total surprise The Hidden Facts of the LePage Years: Part One had over ten thousand impressions and 668 views. When did that happen?
I went over How the LePage administration's Industrial Partnerships Act changed the purpose of public education. and published it multiple times but the message about needing attention persisted. I knew it wasn’t verification, and it wasn’t grammar or typo and so I thought it must be just about making it better and there is no auto code for that. Finally, I traced the message down to what can be described as a Grammarly glitch rather than a typo and I wondered if that had been the cause all along, but thought the post is better for the editing.
However, impressions remain very low. The ratio between impression and views is no longer one-to-one, but the ratio is still extraordinarily high. At the latest reading, there are 156 impressions and 124 views. The location for people who view my story is still listed as 100% in Portland-Auburn Maine, even though I changed the location to Augusta. Since location information is not usually available for such a small amount of data, I don’t know what to make of it.
Several days later The Hidden Facts of the LePage Years: Part One has over sixteen thousand impressions and 1089 views, but it is the only story getting this level of exposure. Comparing the two stories, they are both about LePage, who is a public figure whom an algorithm might track, but the story with small distribution has a greater number of other terms that algorithms might register than the story with the greater number of impressions. It has to be that Newsbreak made a choice to give The Hidden Facts of the LePage Years: Part One more exposure.
As a Newsbreak content provider, generally, I am not getting a high number of impressions but I have more local media exposure than I have ever had before, which was previously none in the public media.
The Hidden Facts story is much shorter. That could be a factor.
A difference between the two stories is that The Hidden Facts of the LePage Years: Part One looks at individual acts of legislation passed under Lepage, while How the LePage administration's Industrial Partnerships Act changed the purpose of public education discloses a systemic whole through separate acts that create processes that fit together as if by design like pieces of a puzzle.
These are the jigsaw pieces:
The public educational system has been repurposed to serve selected industries and in the process, one part of the economy is taxed to finance benefits going to another part of the economy so that the wealth divide expands mechanistically.
The University of Maine is the core of the public educational system and operates several businesses including the Advanced Manufacturing Center and Aqua Ventus, which also partnering with private corporations.
The University of Maine claims intellectual property rights based on what it claims to be “more than incidental” use by creators, compensated or not, of the publicly financed facilities belonging to the University.
While the “Jobs For Me” bill was promoted as a job-training act, public financing of targeted corporate job training is already provided for within existing statutes. 65% of the Jobs For Me funding was used to purchase equipment for public-privately owned job-training facilities, which can potentially become a basis for claiming rights to the intellectual property of creators who are deemed by the University to have used the facilities more than incidentally, especially when the line between industry training and public education is being eroded.
The Maine Technology Institute is a tight partner of the University of Maine, chartered by the Maine Legislature as a “public charity”. MTI funds the development of products for the commercial market and has a separately structured board that can claim ownership of intellectual property and make a profit per the statutory charter of MTI.
What kind of a system is that? It is more like a business interest than a state that serves the interests of the people. Where does this lead?Next, I worked on the story about the Pine Tree Zone tax exemptions, a very timely and important story because the Pine Tree Zones are up for renewal at the end of the year and no one is talking about it. A news search produces no stories about the Pine Tree Zones sunsetting, although there is a story about a new business coming to Ellsworth because of the PTZ tax exemptions.
In 2014, the Maine Legislature hired the consulting firm, ICA, to do a cost-benefit analysis of state economic policy which concluded that Maine taxpayers were losing on the Pine Tree Zones.
When the Pine Tree Zones were up for renewal three years ago, The Legislature once again used ICA but this time while the rest of the economic report was analyzed using a cost-benefit method, the ICA report used a different analysis for the Pine Tree Zones, an internal investment model called IRR. To my understanding, the IRR model does not account for the public cost and benefit and so the public benefit is assumed to be the trickle-down effect. Given the ever-expanding wealth divide, I think there is no trickle-down effect. The Pine Tree Zone tax incentives are instrumental in turning the Seed Capital (refundable) Tax Credit into a subsidy, paid by the public.
The IRR method measures the effect of tax incentives for the selected businesses and concludes that PTZ tax exemptions show a good profit for the businesses and therefore the PTZ program is a successful program.
The costs-benefit method that was used in 2014 is accountable to taxpayers and concluded that the Pine Tree Zones are a loss for public investment.
I did not notice anyone mentioning the 2014 report in the congressional testimony in 2017. There was an overwhelming attitude coming from the supporters of the program that all that needs to be measured is the benefit to the businesses receiving the PTZ tax exemptions so that if a business met a job creation quota the program should be rated as a success.
However, the 2014 report found that Maine awarded total incentives worth $159,000.00 per created job for the period from 2010 through 2013. Another congressional testimony from Douglas Ray, Development Program Manager for the DECD, put the average PTZ wage in 2013 at $114,864 annually. None of that came up in the congressional testimony in 2017. None of this is a joy to report but there is no one to speak up for the people except the people. The centralized economy has been in place since the seventies justified with promises to help small businesses find capital but has only led to the ever-increasing wealth divide. Many are talking about the wealth divide but that talk needs to convert into effective action. Therefore I made the wealth inequality crisis the contextual lens through which I reported on the congressional testimonies about the Pine Tree Zone tax incentives in 2017
All the details are in my Newsbreak story:
The Pine Tree Zones expire at the end of 2021 and will be considered for renewal.
Also published on Medium’s Age of Awareness
There is a recurring cultural attitude embedded into “public-private relationships” that permits private persons or entities to access public funds for their own purpose and owe the public nothing. It is taxation without representation.
Is this what we want to leave for future generations? If not, then we need to address the actual mechanics of wealth redistribution and the political philosophies at work, which are not actually synonymous with our constitutional philosophies.
To a better world! Figure it out!