are renowned for innovation, phenomenal growth, and, in the case of public corporations, their soaring share prices. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) usually makes the list, as does Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL). At the other end of the scale are well-known firms that are so crippled they go bankrupt or disappear entirely. Recently, these have included AMR, the parent of American Airlines, Borders, and Eastman Kodak.

1. J.C. Penney Company Inc. (NYSE: JCP)

J.C. Penney, founded in 1913, counted itself among the primary retailers and catalog companies in the US for decades. But under CEO Myron Ullman III, who took over in 2004, its revenue began to slide, dropping from $19.9 billion in 2007 to $17.3 billion in 2011. Earnings fell from $1.1 billion to a loss of $152 million in the same period. J.C. Penney’s share price has fallen 70% in five years. By way of contrast, the shares of Macy’s Inc. (NYSE: M) and Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT) — two direct competitors — have been essentially flat over the same period. J.C. Penney was challenged by these two companies and several others, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) and Costco Wholesale Corp. (NASDAQ: COST). Problems became so severe that J.C. Penney closed its formerly successful catalog business and reached outside for a new CEO. The board’s choice was Apple Retail Chief Ron Johnson, who was picked in June 2011. Johnson changed the company’s pricing structure, but the reaction was so poor that revenue dropped an extraordinary 20.1% to $3.2 billion in the first fiscal quarter. J.C. Penney posted a loss of $163 million. Internet sales, so essential in a world in which Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has become a significant presence, fell 27.9% to $271 million. By contrast, Macy’s total sales, combining online and those made in stores, rose 4.3% to $6.1 billion in the last reported quarter. And Macy’s is hardly J.C. Penney’s largest competitor by revenue or workforce. Walmart’s sales were $450 billion last year, while Costco’s were $89 billion.

2. The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT)

The New York Times is, and has been for decades, the premier daily newspaper company in the US. But the company has been shrinking rapidly. Ten years ago, The New York Times Company made $300 million on revenue of $3.1 billion. Last year it lost $40 million on revenue of $2.3 billion. The New York Times did not move online fast enough to offset the rapid erosion of print advertising. Its tardiness allowed it to be challenged on the Internet by properties like The Huffington Post, Google News, and the news, sports, and financial properties of portals such as MSN, AOL, and Yahoo!. As an indication of how the stock market measures the value of The New York Times Company, its market cap is $1.2 billion against its revenue of $2.3 billion in 2011. Low-brow content aggregator Demand Media has a market capitalization of $865 million against 2011 revenue of $325 million. Demand lost $13 million last year. The reason the market values of the two companies are so close? The Times still relies on the dying print business for the lion’s share of its revenue. Its market cap and cash balance are too low to allow it to more aggressively move to the internet or buy large online properties. In the last quarter, The Times’ revenue was roughly flat at $515 million. The company lost 57 cents a share compared with a profit of 5 cents a share in the same period last year. The worst news from the quarter was that “Digital advertising revenues at the News Media Group decreased 1.6 percent to $52.6 million from $53.5 million mainly due to declines in national display and real estate classified advertising revenues.” The Times did make advances in online paid subscriptions, but circulation revenue barely offset the drop in advertising sales. At the heart of The New York Times’ uniqueness among American newspapers is the quality of its editorial content. The company has held the line on retaining its large editorial staff. It did lay off 100 people in 2009, which was about 8% of the news staff. The industry is in the midst of another wave of job cuts. The Times has not been able to show significant top-line growth, even with its digital subscription efforts. Print is in too much of a shambles for the company to shore itself up in the digital world.

YouTube is the third most trafficked website in the world, after Google and Facebook, and if your company isn’t using the online video site as part of your social recruitment efforts you’ll want to start after checking out this infographic from HireRabbit.

The HireRabbit infographic, YouTube Recruiting, takes a look at why making YouTube a part of your hiring efforts is important.  We’ve gleaned a few enticing points from the infographic, which you can read on to learn more about before checking out the full infographic below.

Job postings with videos get higher response rates

The infographic reports that job postings with video icons are viewed 12 percent more than those without.  Furthermore, job postings with video icons receive a 34 percent greater application rate.

Videos help you show off the personality of your company

A prospective hire can learn a lot more about what it will be like to work at your company if you upload a video showing off the personality of your workplace.  Looking for inspiration on this front?  Check out the Life At YouTube series that the online video site launched last year.

Videos encourage sharing more than text

Viewers are a lot more likely to share a video than they are to share text.  If you encourage the sharing of your video you’ll reach even more prospective hires.

View the full infographic below to find out more, including tips for how to humanize your business using video, how to create an awesome YouTube channel, and a roundup of the top five branded career channels on YouTube.  Is your company using YouTube for recruiting?

I bet you did not know – I wonder the Journalist in the Middle East how much do they earn

News (per year)
Matt Lauer (Today): $21.5 million
Bill O’Reilly (The O’Reilly Factor): $15 million
Diane Sawyer (ABC World News): $12 million
Anderson Cooper (Anderson Cooper 360 and Anderson Live): $11 million
Robin Meade (HLN anchor): $750,000

Drama (per episode)
Mark Harmon (NCIS): $500,000
Ellen Pompeo (Grey’s Anatomy): $350,000
Kevin Bacon (The Following): $175,000
Lucy Liu (Elementary): $125,000
Stephen Amell (Arrow): $30,000

Comedy (per episode)
Ashton Kutcher (Two and a Half Men): $700,000
Kaley Cuoco (The Big Bang Theory): $300,000
Modern Family Adult Cast: $175,000 each
Lea Michele (Glee): $75,000
Crystal the Monkey (Animal Practice): $12,000

For more ratings pls click read more

Anaheim, Calif., Aug 8, 2012 / 11:56 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Throughout the past year, the Knights of Columbus has fulfilled its mission through a strong defense of religious liberty and record-breaking amounts of charitable activity, Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson announced.

Continuing in the long tradition of faith and charity that began with the organization’s founder, Venerable Father Michael J. McGivney, the Knights have remained firm in their commitment “to preach the Gospel in word and deed,” he said on August 7.

Anderson delivered his annual report at the organization’s 130th Supreme Convention in Anaheim, Calif. With 1.8 million members around the world, the Knights are committed to the principles of charity, unity and fraternity.

One of the most important ways that the order has lived out this calling in the past year is in its adamant defense of religious liberty, Anderson explained.

He recalled the American founders’ commitment to religious freedom as a foundational liberty that comes from God.

“The history of Catholics in the United States is a history of defending religious freedom,” he said, adding that whenever this fundamental liberty is threatened, “we will vigorously defend it.”

Anderson then recalled that the Catholic Church’s interest in religious freedom is not something that began this past year, rather, it has been part of the Catholic experience “from the very beginning.”

Here are our top 10 Twitter stories of the week.

1. Twitter Cuts Off Instagram: Is This Sour Grapes Or Will We Soon Face A Difficult Choice?

Are you fond of connecting with Twitter followers on Instagram? Well, unless you already synced up your accounts and followed everyone you wanted to, you’re out of luck. Twitter no longer allows Instagram to access its API and pull in “friends from Twitter.” The move does not bode well for apps seeking frictionless sharing with the platform in the future.

2. The Psychology Of Social Networking [INFOGRAPHIC]

With 90 percent of U.S. internet users having signed up for at least one social network, and one out of every eight people on the planet active on Facebook, social media has come a long, long way in a very brief period of time. Indeed, one in every five minutes online is now spent using these social channels, a figure that has more than doubled since 2007. In each and every minute, we generate some 694,980 Facebook status updates and write 532,080 tweets. And 80 percent of those posts are about our favourite person – ourselves.

3. On Twitter, Men Are Retweeted Far More Than Women (And You’re Probably Sexist, Too)

Social media is dominated by women, and Twitter is no exception, but it appears that when it comes to sharinginformation on our favourite micro-blogging network, men are far more likely to be retweeted than women. Yep, that’s right. Twitter has a gender bias. And there’s every chance that you have one, too.

4. The Current State Of Social Networks 2012 [INFOGRAPHIC]

Did you know that Twitter is the social network with the strongest growth rate in 2012, ahead of LinkedIn, Pinterest and Reddit? Facebook? That didn’t even make the cut. Still, when you’re closing in fast on one billion users, your annual growth rate does tend to slow down a smidgen. Still, don’t shed a tear for Mark Zuckerberg – save those for the owners of Digg, Bebo, Friendster and, of course, MySpace, who are the four social networks most in decline, reminding us that success in this space can be both dramatic and fleeting.

5. 10 Helpful Twitter Lists for Social Media Marketers

Twitter lists allow users to categorize their followers into different segmented lists based on a particular subject or theme. For instance, Twitter users can create a list of their friends or favorite brands to follow. Lists can also be made private or public; if they’re public then other Twitter users can subscribe to the list and see the tweets of members included on that list without having to follow each individual member of that list. This presents an opportunity to follow curated lists of experts on a variety of subjects.

People all around the world are going crazy on Facebook for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Thanks to the wide availability of data, we can see just how crazy. Olympics fans can play games, use applications to gain more information about their favorite athletes, like an Olympian’s Facebook page, or simply mention them in a status update. So what have been the most popular apps and who have been the most popular athletes so far?

Athletes’ Facebook pages

The most popular athlete on Facebook isn’t even competing in London. English footballer David Beckham has more than 20 million Facebook fans, but he was not chosen by Great Britain to play on his home pitch. Oddly enough, Beckham has never competed in the Olympics. Statistics from AlchemySocial, an Experian company, show that American basketball star Kobe Bryant is the most popular athlete on Facebook who is actually playing

By Conrad Black

It has been a learned joke for 40 years that long-serving Chinese premier Chou En-lai, when asked the principal consequence of the French Revolution, replied: “It is too early to say.” As events unfold in this rather dismal election year in the United States, that does not now seem such a jokey comment. The Revolution in France was carried out in successively more radical stages in the name of Reason, culminating in the bloodbath of the Terror of Prairial in 1794 under the Committee of Public Safety headed by Maximilien de Robespierre. Robespierre menaced the National Convention; he was deposed, declared outside the law, and executed without trial. The calm of Thermidor ensued and there followed pell-mell in the next 165 years a cavalcade of directory, consulate, empires, restorations, republics, and occupations.

The central struggle, in France and in most of the West, was over the role of the state, and more generally, over the cohabitation in Western civilization of the forces of Faith and the forces of, broadly speaking, Reason. (Between 1793 and 1871, one archbishop of Paris fled, one was publicly guillotined, one executed by firing squad, and two were assassinated — pretty rough treatment for normally serenely eminent pillars of society; yet, at intervals, the Church was exalted.) This naturally unstable balance, as the sage Chinese statesman realized, is unresolved, even in America. Most of the leaders of the American Revolution were not religious men; of the six principal founders of the United States, Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and Adams, only Adams was a practicing Christian. Washington managed the vocabulary and rites occasionally, as when he prayed at Fort Necessity in 1754 (as well he might, after effectively starting the Seven Years’ War with France and being in a desperate military siege), or when he recommended, for war profiteers in the Continental Congress, a higher gallows than Haman’s in the Old Testament (reckoned to have been 50 feet tall). Jefferson was a deist but managed to refer to “Nature’s God” and Man’s “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence.

By W. Michael Cox & Richard Alm

Economic change unleashes powerful forces. We can stubbornly resist them and cling to the status quo, but at best, that ushers in a slow but inevitable decline. A better approach lies in understanding the forces that periodically remake the economy, so we can seize the emerging opportunities they bring. This strategy has worked in the past, and it will work today.

A significant force in recent decades has been globalization. It has brought with it a surge in outsourcing, the shorthand term for businesses’ cutting jobs in the United States and moving production overseas to gain access to lower-cost labor. Many Americans view this development as a scourge, meaning the business practices of Mitt Romney’s private-equity firm, Bain Capital, have become fodder for the presidential campaign’s mudslinging.

Outsourcing makes for perfect political posturing — a quick-jab sound bite, serving up big business and foreign workers as villains and unemployed Americans as victims. But the economic reality of outsourcing isn’t so black and white. The issue goes far beyond the simple fact of job losses and touches on the broader realities of trade, basic human rights, and economic progress.

In economic terms, outsourcing jobs differs little from importing goods. Both involve using labor abroad rather than at home — so there’s no logical consistency in cursing one while tolerating the other. In 2011, America imported $2.6 trillion in goods and services, suggesting that outsourcing has just a tiny share of the effect foreign trade overall has on American jobs.

By Shea Bennett on August 1, 2012 8:00 AM

Did you know that, when challenged, social media as evidence for search warrants holds up in court 87 percent of the time?

Social media has rapidly changed the world, and law enforcement is no exception to its charms. Authorities use platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to identify associates with persons of interest, track the location of criminal activity, gather photos or statements to corroborate evidence, solicit tips on crimes and better understand criminal networks.

It’s very much a work in progress, as 80 percent of law enforcement professionals are self-taught when it comes to using social media for investigations. Still, two thirds believe these tools help them solve crimes more quickly.

This infographic from PoliceOne.com takes a closer look at social media use by law enforcement.