December 21, 2024

You are here: Home / Archives for fundamental shift

Inside Europe: Protest Vote Likely to Grow in European Parliament’s Next Elections

July 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment

BRUSSELS — In the diplomatic parlor games popular in Brussels, few issues are generating more gossip or being talked about more animatedly than next year’s elections to the European Parliament.

They may be 11 months away, but anyone following European affairs closely knows the vote has the potential to shake the ground under the political establishment and bring about a fundamental shift in the balance of power in Europe. Frustration with how leaders have handled the economic crisis over the past three years, coupled with rising populism, has raised expectations that the anti-E.U. vote will surge in the polls.

That would undermine the traditional blocs, which range across the political spectrum but for the most part are in favor of the Union. And because they will be the first European elections since the introduction of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, which gave the Parliament additional powers, it means the outcome will directly influence the appointment of the Union’s most important jobs.

“Most people I’ve talked to are predicting that parties on the extreme wings of the politics of Europe, both the far right and the far left, will pick up seats in this election,” said William Kennard, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union for the past four years.

“There is a not-insignificant prospect that the populists, particularly on the far right, will have more influence in the Parliament than they’ve had in this particular term, and I think that could affect politics in an interesting way,” he added.

If there was any complacency about the potential impact of the vote, which takes place in all 28 E.U. member states from May 22 to 25 next year, it was displaced recently by Britain’s Nigel Farage, the leader of the rightist, anti-E.U. party U.K. Independence Party.

“There is a gathering electoral storm. It’s coming on the left, on the center and on the right,” he warned the European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, as he addressed the full European Parliament. “The European elections next year present the opportunity to show you, Mr. Barroso, that the European project is reversible and it needs to be reversed for the betterment of the peoples of Europe.”

A year is an extremely long time in politics, and there is every likelihood that electoral predictions made now will prove to have been dramatically off-base come April or May next year. But polling conducted by Gallup and research by Debating Europe, a youth politics group, point to two trends that could prove important: Turnout may be substantially higher next year than in the past, and the youth vote may be much stronger.

At every poll since the first direct elections to the European Parliament were held in 1979, turnout has fallen, dropping to just 43 percent for the last vote in 2009. But in a survey carried out in May, Gallup found 68 percent of Britons said they would vote if the elections were held next week, double the British turnout for the 2009 ballot. The figures were similar for France, with the survey finding 73 percent of French were ready to vote this time, versus 40 percent in 2009.

Gallup also found increasing disapproval in most large E.U. countries over the direction in which Europe is moving, suggesting that many of those who do turn up to vote could cast anti-Union ballots or go against how they have voted in the past. Add to that the prospect of hundreds of thousands of young people who have never voted before turning up at the polls, especially those who are unemployed and frustrated.

“Young people are angry, and they want to have a voice,” Adam Nyman, the director of Debating Europe, said earlier this year. “I don’t think they will shy away from the next election.”

No one knows how large the anti-Union vote will be, but speculating about it has become a favorite Brussels pastime. Some see a 25 percent to 30 percent “protest vote” as possible, a figure that alarms sitting members of the Parliament, who tend to break the issue down into individual member states, where anti-Union or protest parties have their national quirks.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/business/global/09iht-inside09.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

The Media Equation: News Consumption Tilts Toward Niche Sites

September 12, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Apart from the specific business issues feeding those travails — sinking traffic and profits at both — they provided yet another lesson of the Internet age: as news surges on the Web, giant ocean liners like AOL and Yahoo are being outmaneuvered by the speedboats zipping around them, relatively small sites that have passionate audiences and sharply focused information.

AOL’s acquisition of TechCrunch last year for a reported $30 million was an acknowledgement that scale, once the grail of the Web, can be a disadvantage when it comes to attracting the kind of audiences advertisers want. Last year, Yahoo hired writers who had a made a name for themselves at smaller sites — including Mark Lisanti, Courtney Reimer and Will Leitch — for the same reasons. But it is difficult to successfully transplant insurgent energy into a vast conglomerate, because the big blog tends to consume or destroy whatever it is fed.

Like newspapers, portals like AOL and Yahoo are confronting the cold fact that there is less general interest in general interest news. Readers have peeled off into verticals of information — TMZ for gossip, Politico for politics and Deadspin for sports.

Part of the problem is the result of a fundamental shift in Web behavior. Media stalwarts erected a frame around the Web and organized, and sometimes produced, content. Now the frame around content is the Web browser itself, and consumers do their own programming and are more inclined to see news consumption as a kind of voting, selecting smaller brands that reflect their sensibilities.

Watching the throwdown between AOL, a behemoth with a market capitalization of over $1.5 billion, and TechCrunch, a six-year-old Silicon Valley news site started on a shoestring, it was hard to tell which was the more important brand. What works on the Web right now is an identity, one that sparks recognition and in the best case, passion among its employees and consumers. Even though AOL paid a lot of money for TechCrunch, it was clear last week that its audience and its writers believed it belonged to them.

AOL, as a way of buying what they could not grow, aggressively grabbed onto some of the shiniest names on the Web, including The Huffington Post, Engadget and TechCrunch. The jury is out on The Huffington Post, most of the staff of Engadget deserted and TechCrunch is in the middle of an uprising.

Many of the news sites that are now having success on the Web — Business Insider, Gawker and Mashable, to name a few — are built on sensibility, which is generally a product of a small group of like minds. Innovation usually requires the “two pizza rule” — a working group should be no larger than one that could be well fed by two pies — with the emphasis on lightweight hierarchy, rapid decisions and constant reiteration of those decisions as the market responds. When that kind of approach is suddenly plopped into a huge, heaving bureaucracy, everything that made the brand cool in the first place and the site a good place to work seems to evaporate.

There are exceptions. TMZ has thrived as a division of Time Warner, College Humor continues to crack wise as part of IAC/InterActiveCorp and CBS seems to have done well by CNET after acquiring it.

There are some parallels with the television world. Broadcast networks still have mass and reach, but cable has been surging in part because brands come to mean something identifiable and attractive. The name NBC communicates very little other than generic bigness, while right now, FX, HBO, AMC and Showtime each convey a cachet that the big networks lack.

Google might want to pay a bit of attention to this after buying Zagat, the restaurant ratings publisher, last week. While Zagat might fold nicely into its local listings, much of the brand’s value comes from citizen raters who share their opinions. Will they feel the same way when they see their work powering a great big local search engine?

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter.com/carr2n

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2c16a7eedf65ff414962e0d9b02c4ca8

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Working for Less: At Well-Paying Law Firms, a Low-Paid Corner

May 24, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Make no mistake: These are full-fledged lawyers, not paralegals, and they do the same work traditional legal associates do. But they earn less than half the pay of their counterparts — usually around $60,000 — and they know from the outset they will never make partner.

Some of the lawyers who have taken these new jobs are putting the best face on their reduced status. “To me there’s not much of a difference between what I’m doing now and what I would be doing in a partner-track job,” said Mark Thompson, 29, who accepted a non-partner-track post at Orrick, Herrington Sutcliffe when he could not find a traditional associate job. “I still feel like I’m doing pretty high-level work — writing briefs, visiting client sites, prepping witnesses for hearings.”

Asked whether he hopes someday to switch onto the partner track, given the higher pay for this same work, he is diplomatic. “I’m leaving all my possibilities open,” he said.

Lawyers like Mr. Thompson are part of a fundamental shift in the 50-year-old business model for big firms.

Besides making less, these associates work fewer hours and travel less than those on the grueling partner track, making these jobs more family-friendly. And this new system probably prevents jobs from going offshore.

But as has been the case in other industries, a two-tier system threatens to breed resentments among workers in both tiers, given disparities in pay and workload expectations. And as these programs expand to more and more firms, they will eliminate many of the lucrative partner-track positions for which law students suffer so much debt.

Mr. Thompson is one of 37 lawyers in Orrick’s new program, which is based in this small Rust Belt city an hour southwest of Pittsburgh. An international firm headquartered in San Francisco, Orrick is one of a handful of law firms, including WilmerHale and McDermott Will Emery, experimenting with ways to control escalating billing rates.

“For a long time the wind was at the back of these big law firms,” said William D. Henderson, a historian at Indiana University-Bloomington.

“They could grow, expand and raise rates, and clients just went along with absorbing the high overhead and lack of innovation. But eventually clients started to resist, especially when the economy soured.”

For decades, firms used essentially the same model: charging increasingly higher rates for relatively routine work done by junior associates, whose entry-level salaries in major markets have now been bid up to $160,000 (plus bonus, of course), a sum reported by the big law schools. Even under pressure to reduce rates, firms are reluctant to lower starting salaries unilaterally for fear of losing the best talent — and their reputations.

“Everyone acknowledges that $160,000 is too much, but they don’t want to back down because that signals they’re just a midmarket firm,” said Mr. Henderson. “It’s a big game of chicken.”

So now firms are copying some manufacturers — which have similarly inflexible pay because of union contracts — by creating a separate class of lower-paid workers.

At law firms, these positions are generally called “career associates” or “permanent associates.” They pay about $50,000 to $65,000, according to Michael D. Bell, a managing principal at Fronterion, which advises law firms on outsourcing.

These nonglamorous jobs are going to nonglamorous cities.

Orrick moved its back-office operations to a former metal-stamping factory here in 2002, and in late 2009 began hiring career associates. Costs of living are much cheaper in Wheeling than in San Francisco, Tokyo or its 21 other locations, saving $6 million to $10 million annually, according to Will A. Turani, Wheeling’s director of operations.

“It’s our version of outsourcing,” said Ralph Baxter, Orrick’s chief executive. “Except we’re staying within the United States.”

Similar centers have cropped up in other economically depressed locations. WilmerHale, a 12-office international firm, has “in-sourced” work to Dayton, Ohio.

“There’s a big, low-cost attorney market there,” said Scott Green, WilmerHale’s executive director. “That means we can offer our services more efficiently, at lower prices.”

What’s good for clients, of course, isn’t quite as good for those low-cost lawyers.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=fc4ecb4d4bcbd82062958b9dfebfcd07

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,