St. Petersburg Times

The Tampa Museum of Art opens Saturday after 10 years of controversy and setbacks. That saga is ended; let’s close the book.

Time to begin a new story, one better suited to a museum: the story of its life.

A museum’s most obvious job is to showcase art. Director Todd Smith has assembled an impressive lineup of exhibitions for the inaugural season. The centerpiece, taking up 50 percent of gallery space, is a large show of prints, paintings and sculpture by Henri Matisse. The museum’s fine permanent collection of antiquities has been reinstalled and photographs from Garry Winogrand’s “Women are Beautiful” series, also from the permanent collection, will be displayed for the first time as a group. Other galleries are devoted to mid-20th century abstract paintings from the Bank of America collection, contemporary art on loan from the famous Margulies Collection in Miami as well as a video art installation.

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Enterprise Florida

Florida public schools ranked 8th overall in Education Week magazine’s annual Quality Counts, a report card that grades states on education performance and policy. Florida earned top marks for its Teaching Profession (ranked 4th in the nation); Standards, Assessments, & Accountability (5th); and K-12 Achievement (7th).

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St. Petersburg Shines E-newsletter

Cast your vote with AmericanStyle magazine to keep St. Petersburg featured as a Top 25 Arts destination in the country for a ninth straight year. Tampa is also included on the list. Votes are being accepted through February 26 and survey participants are automatically entered into a drawing for a $500 travel certificate.

Vote here

McKinsey Quarterly

Companies whose social investments focus on women in developing economies help not only the recipients but also themselves.

AP wire

A day after delivering a State of the Union address aimed at showing recession-weary Americans he understands their struggles, President Barack Obama intends to award $8 billion in stimulus funds to develop high-speed rail corridors and sell the program as a jobs creator.

Obama and Vice President Joe Biden plan to announce grants for 13 major corridors during a town hall meeting in Tampa, Fla., Thursday, the president’s first public appearance following his speech to the nation. It’s an attempt by the White House to show that getting Americans back to work is the president’s top priority and that he has a plan for how to do it.

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Folio Mag

The management team at Irvine, California-based Entrepreneur magazine is gearing up for a product launch that puts the team outside its usual business-minded comfort zone. This spring, the magazine is planning to launch SecondAct.com, a Web site targeted to an older audience that’s looking to begin a “second act” in life.

According to president and corporate publisher Ryan Shea, the site will feature content on topics including travel, starting a business, finance management, purchasing a vacation home and trying new foods and wine. Shea said SecondAct will target “boomers,” but is “really for anyone who is looking to make a major change in their lives.” Content will be created by a stable of celebrity bloggers and experts of various fields, and will include user-generated content.

“For several years we have been looking at different markets that are complimentary to what we do best,” he said. “After much research it became more apparent that this market is underserved—but more importantly, from an audience perspective, it is growing exponentially.”

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David Miller, Creative Class

Though U.S. unemployment is in the 10 percent range and we continue to hear people are “just happy to be employed,” a new survey from The Conference Board finds that only 45 percent of Americans are satisfied with their jobs. Even greater numbers of those under 25 are unhappy with their employment.

Here is an excerpt from the On Deadline column/blog at USA Today.

Only 45% of American are satisfied with their work, the lowest level ever recorded in 22 years of surveys, the Associated Press reports.

The figure is down from 49% in 2008, says the Conference Board research group, which conducts the survey.

Workers under 25 expressed the most dissatisfaction — about 64% of them saying they are unhappy in their jobs.

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- www.StPeteSBR.org -

The city of St. Petersburg unveiled a new one-stop online reference guide for small businesses, www.StPeteSBR.org, designed to help small businesses easily access city assistance programs, business incentives, marketing tools, databases, and more.

Mayor Bill Foster was on-hand as the new online guide was previewed to an audience of more than 60 business owners attending “Destination Retail,” the last in a three-part series for retail business owners that was held today at St. Petersburg’s Palladium Theater.

The online guide at www.StPeteSBR.org lists more than 150 links covering topics such as city assistance, business services, database sources, and local, state, and national resources. In addition, the city’s Business Assistance Center (BAC) services and program offerings are featured.

At the March 2009 Small Business Summit, attended by 219 small business owners, owners frequently requested greater accessibility to valid and timely information to assist them with business support services and more – www.StPeteSBR.org services that need. It is a one stop online reference guide that provides and abundance of easily accessible information relevant to St. Petersburg’s small business owners.

“This city has been built on the backs of small businesses, and the city is committed to working to retain and strengthen our small businesses. We hope business owners will find the new online reference guide an important tool for doing business – and succeeding – in St. Petersburg,” stated Mayor Bill Foster.

To learn more please visit www.StPeteSBR.org or contact Kimberly Bailey, Economic Development Coordinator, at (727) 893-7784 or email Kimberly.Bailey@stpete.org.

Pinellas County Cultural Affairs

http://www.pinellasarts.org/

The ARTS are a pervasive set of industries in the U.S. that include:

2.25 million artists in the workforce;

100,000 nonprofit arts organizations and nearly 600,000 more arts businesses; and billions in consumer spending.

There are many individual measures of markets, artists and audiences that are used to track the arts industries. A new set of data compiled into a concise, cogent portrayal of the arts today will soon be released, titled the National Arts Index, by Americans for the Arts. Four years in the making, the index will provide 76 national-level indicators of arts and cultural activity covering an 11-year period from 1998 to 2008. The Index will then continue to release annual reports each October, providing us with an opportunity to begin a conversation about the arts and its value to communities. The report will be released on January 20, 2010.

The New York Times

The nation’s mobility rate fell last year to its lowest level since World War II, according to the latest census data. Growth is slowing in Sun Belt states and Northeastern states are holding on to more people. The current recession and lack of jobs are big factors, but the trend has been gaining force since the 1950s, when nearly one-fifth of all Americans moved every year.

Why are Americans becoming less nomadic? Greater labor mobility helps the economy, but are there other kinds of effects — negative or positive — related to a more rooted population? Is there an upside to more Americans staying closer to their hometowns?

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