Business

Pages

Business
6:11 am
Mon October 22, 2012

Dish Reaches Settlement With Cablevision, AMC

Dish Network is settling with Cablevision and AMC Networks after a well-publicized and drawn-out fight in court and on the airwaves. Dish will resume distributing AMC and other channels as part of the settlement, and pay a hefty sum, too — roughly $700 million.

All Tech Considered
2:34 am
Mon October 22, 2012

Six New Video Games That Will Get You Hooked

Originally published on Mon October 22, 2012 12:03 pm

Video game makers are rolling out their new titles — with a wide range of creativity and style — just in time for the holiday shopping season. Jamin Warren, founder of Kill Screen magazine, shares his list of video games you should keep your eye on:

Read more
Television
2:33 am
Mon October 22, 2012

Ratings Success? It's All In The (ABC) Family

Originally published on Tue November 27, 2012 3:09 pm

In a sterile white boardroom in ABC Family's headquarters in Los Angeles, two young women are assiduously ignoring a spread of cookies in favor of two more important things: their laptops and a live broadcast of the show Pretty Little Liars playing on a large flat-screen TV.

Dalia Ganz, 28, is the show's social-media manager. She's patiently teaching one of the beautiful young actors on the show how to live-tweet this episode.

"Include #prettylittleliars in your answers," she instructs. That is a literal transcription of her words.

Read more
Economy
5:18 am
Sun October 21, 2012

Working It: Living Between Hope And Hardship

Credit Kim Green for NPR
Many Americans face a demoralizing battle to find and keep a job.

Originally published on Sun October 21, 2012 8:32 am

Most of us know someone who's had a hard time finding or keeping a job over the past few years. It's an experience that often leaves people feeling defeated and demoralized. In Weekend Edition Sunday's Working It series, hear audio portraits of people whose daily lives are filled with uncertainty.

Read more
Technology
3:00 pm
Sat October 20, 2012

French Tweet Sweep Shows Twitter's Local Struggles

Originally published on Sat October 20, 2012 4:35 pm

Friday, Twitter agreed to pull racist tweets after a French organization threatened to sue. The company has resisted efforts to police its content. But hate speech is illegal in many European countries, and anti-hate groups there are grappling with how to deal with the challenge of social media.

Read more
The Salt
10:03 am
Fri October 19, 2012

Sugar Beet Labor Battles Spill Out Onto The National Stage

Credit Dale Wetzel / AP
Supporters of American Crystal Sugar Co. workers, who have been locked out of the company's sugar beet processing plants since 2011, rally in the North Dakota Capitol.

It's not just nutritionists who have a problem with sugar these days, so does organized labor. The AFL-CIO is calling for a boycott of one the country's biggest sugar producers, the American Crystal Sugar Company, based in Moorhead, Minn.

Read more
The Two-Way
8:19 am
Fri October 19, 2012

Sales Of Existing Homes Dipped In September, But Prices Rose

Credit Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
A "sold" sign in San Francisco in August.

There was a 1.7 percent drop in sales of existing homes in September from August, the National Association of Realtors says.

But the median selling price compared to one year earlier was up for the seventh month in a row, leading NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun to say "we're experiencing a genuine recovery."

According to NAR:

Read more
Business
4:03 am
Fri October 19, 2012

Starbucks Says It Complies With U.K. Tax Laws

Originally published on Tue October 23, 2012 11:03 am

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

And in Britain this week, eyebrows were raised with the revelation that Starbucks has paid almost no corporate tax on its operations in the UK. Starbucks insists it's done nothing wrong.

Vicki Barker reports from London.

(SOUNDBITE OF STARBUCKS AD)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: That's why at Starbucks we've decided to do things differently.

VICKI BARKER, BYLINE: Since that green mermaid logo first washed up on these shores in 1998, Starbucks-UK has racked up more than four and a half billion dollars in sales, here.

Read more
Business
4:03 am
Fri October 19, 2012

Business News

Originally published on Tue October 23, 2012 11:03 am

Transcript

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

A deal in the eurozone begins NPR's business news today.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GREENE: At a summit in Brussels, the European Union agreed today to create a single overseer for its 6,000-plus banks. The move is seen as an important step in preventing future financial meltdowns. The European Bank will lead these efforts and the new overseer will have the power to intervene in any bank in the 17 eurozone countries.

Read more
Business
4:03 am
Fri October 19, 2012

The Last Word In Business

Originally published on Tue October 23, 2012 11:03 am

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

And our last word in business today is: Ovonics. That's the science of using thin materials to capture the power of the sun. It's named after Stan Ovshinsky, who died on Wednesday at 89 years old.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

He held hundreds of patents that changed the way we use and gather energy. Ovshinsky never went to college, but that didn't put a damper on his passion for science. His son told the Associated Press that his dad was determined to change the world.

Read more
Business
4:03 am
Fri October 19, 2012

Google's Earnings Released Prematurely, Stock Drops

Originally published on Tue October 23, 2012 11:03 am

Transcript

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Yesterday was the kind of day executives at Google would probably like to delete. Trading of the Internet giant's shares was temporarily halted after the company's earnings were released accidently and prematurely. What's worse, the numbers were not anything Google would want to show off. The earnings reports showed profits last quarter fell by more than 20 percent. Here's NPR's Steve Henn.

Read more
Business
4:03 am
Fri October 19, 2012

A Check On U.S. Banks

Originally published on Tue October 23, 2012 11:03 am

Transcript

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

It was four years ago - almost to the day - that American taxpayers bailed out America's big banks, as the nation faced its worst financial crisis in decades. In the past several days, we've been given a look at how the banks are doing - their latest quarterly profit reports.

And to talk about that, we turn, as we often do, to David Wessel. He's economics editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Morning, David.

DAVID WESSEL: Good morning.

Read more
Business
2:59 am
Fri October 19, 2012

Investors' Funds Are Recovering, But Not Their Nerves

Originally published on Fri October 19, 2012 8:14 am

Chicken Little was running wild 25 years ago today. But one could hardly blame the poultry for panicking.

On Oct. 19, 1987, the stock market plunged a record-setting 23 percent. The next day, the New York Daily News' front page screamed "Panic!" and a New York Times headline asked: "Does 1987 equal 1929?"

Turns out, the 1987 plunge was a mere stutter step. The Dow Jones industrial average, which closed at 1,739 that day, quickly bounced back. Within a decade, the stock-price average had nearly quintupled.

Read more
Planet Money
12:53 am
Fri October 19, 2012

The Candidate Is Fake; The Consultants Are Real

Credit iStockphoto.com
One consultant's vision for our political ad: "I see a horse."

Originally published on Wed October 24, 2012 10:31 am

When our series began yesterday, we brought together five economists from across the political spectrum and had them create a platform for their dream presidential candidate. It's a platform — Get rid of a tax deduction for homeowners!

Read more
Around the Nation
3:23 pm
Thu October 18, 2012

To Shrink Rents, SF Considers Shrinking Apartments

Originally published on Thu October 18, 2012 6:32 pm

In many large cities, like Dallas, Phoenix and even parts of Chicago, $800 a month is enough for a clean one-bedroom apartment, decked out with a living room, washer and dryer — and maybe even a pool, in a larger complex.

But if you want to live alone in San Francisco, getting those amenities at that price is practically a pipe dream. With the region's resurgent high-tech industries luring many well-educated, well-paid workers to the Bay Area, the average rent for a studio apartment in the city now runs around $2,000.

Read more

Pages