Sunday, July 27, 2008

No Movies Filming in CT & No Articles About It

One thing that is totally ruining my summer is the fact that there have been NO movies filming in Stamford in the past two months. When I was teaching full-time in the spring, there were movie sets all over town that I didn't have energy to go to. Now that my summer days are freer, there is absolutely nothing cool going on. Screw farmers' markets. I want to watch DeNiro again.

There are no movies because of some kind of vague possible strike that is keeping filmmakers away from starting movies or something. I really have no idea what the story is, because I read about it in the Stamford Advocate. You know what that means: I can't link you to that article, or ever read it again, because articles over 2 weeks old disappear from the Advocate site. The Advocate owners would like you to pay 3 dollars for any article over 2 weeks old. To that, I spew a string of profanity.

The headline is- I mean, was- "State's film industry stalled by stalemate on actors' contract" but you will just have to imagine the rest. This enrages me so much, for so many reasons, that I can't allow myself to think about it for too long.

I understand that newspapers need to make money, but I looked at my options for paying to access old articles, and the package deals were absurd.

Single article $2.95
3 article pack $6.95, good for one week
10 article pack $21.95, good for one month
25 article pack $49.95, good for one month
40 article pack $79.95, good for one month
50 article pack $100.00, good for one month
600 article pack $1200.00, good for one year
1200 article pack $2000.00, good for one year

Realistically, to research what I need for this blog, I'd need that $50 pack. I mark interesting articles in my Advocate RSS feed, because often I want to go back and read them again. Two weeks ago, I may not have wanted to blog about a topic, but that does not mean I never want to see that article again for the rest of my life.

However, 50 a month, for 12 months, is 600 bucks. I might as well subscribe to the hard copy for that amount of money, but I don't WANT the hard copy AT ALL. First, I don't want that many old newspapers to get rid of. Second, I'm not going to clip articles from the paper like a hoarder and keep them in a file cabinet. I want those suckers online, but I don't want it to cost that much money.

One more thing, because don't want to get too riled up before bedtime: $2.95 for access to one article? So, I can enjoy a $3 latte for ten minutes, or I can skim an article in ten seconds that may turn out to be useless and only 2 paragraphs long?

Does that make any reasonable sense to anyone? Good night, and now I am going to go do crosswords to calm myself down.

Oh- the Stamford Times does allow access to their old articles, but they don't always have the same content. They are a smaller paper, so I'm not going to begrudge them that, although I will begrudge them if they start trying to charge me for old articles.

4 comments:

Manager Mom said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Manager Mom said...

Seems like for all of the free PR you give them, should get a Friends and Family discount.

Anonymous said...

maybe the actors are too "valuable" to be located to Stamford right now....what with all the debris flying off Trump Tower and the riots at Alive at Five... ;)

maura said...

Good news!

You can access Stamford Advocate full text articles from as far back as 2003 through the Ferguson Library! All you need is your library card! Totally free!

This link will bring you to a page regarding the holdings for the Advocate. Click on the third link down for full text.
http://www.fergusonlibrary.org/research/history_genealogy/stam_advocate.htm

Need more help? Give us a call! We'll be happy to meet with you for a personalized tutorial.

From: Maura, Information Services Librarian at the Ferguson Library