Prison punks and daddies

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NFL draft value chart

ESPN

Before NFL general managers consider trading draft picks, they more often than not consult this value chart. The chart assigns each pick in the draft a point value, giving GMs an easy reference to compare the relative value of draft picks in different rounds.

Draft Pick Value Chart
Round 1		Round 2		Round 3		Round 4		Round 5		Round 6		Round 7		Other
1	3000	33	580	65	265	97	112	129	43	161	28	193	15.2	225	2.9
2	2600	34	560	66	260	98	108	130	42	162	27.6	194	14.8	226	2.8
3	2200	35	550	67	255	99	104	131	41	163	27.2	195	14.4	227	2.7
4	1800	36	540	68	250	100	100	132	40	164	26.8	196	14	228	2.6
5	1700	37	530	69	245	101	96	133	39.5	165	26.4	197	13.6	229	2.5
6	1600	38	520	70	240	102	92	134	39	166	26	198	13.2	230	2.4
7	1500	39	510	71	235	103	88	135	38.5	167	25.6	199	12.8	231	2.3
8	1400	40	500	72	230	104	86	136	38	168	25.2	200	12.4	232	2.2
9	1350	41	490	73	225	105	84	137	37.5	169	24.8	201	12	233	2.1
10	1300	42	480	74	220	106	82	138	37	170	24.4	202	11.6	234	2
11	1250	43	470	75	215	107	80	139	36.5	171	24	203	11.2	235	1.9
12	1200	44	460	76	210	108	78	140	36	172	23.6	204	10.8	236	1.8
13	1150	45	450	77	205	109	76	141	35.5	173	23.2	205	10.4	237	1.7
14	1100	46	440	78	200	110	74	142	35	174	22.8	206	10	238	1.6
15	1050	47	430	79	195	111	72	143	34.5	175	22.4	207	9.6	239	1.5
16	1000	48	420	80	190	112	70	144	34	176	22	208	9.2	240	1.4
17	950	49	410	81	185	113	68	145	33.5	177	21.6	209	8.8	241	1.3
18	900	50	400	82	180	114	66	146	33	178	21.2	210	8.4	242	1.2
19	875	51	390	83	175	115	64	147	32.6	179	20.8	211	8	243	1.1
20	850	52	380	84	170	116	62	148	32.2	180	20.4	212	7.6	244	1
21	800	53	370	85	165	117	60	149	31.8	181	20	213	7.2	245	0.95
22	780	54	360	86	160	118	58	150	31.4	182	19.6	214	6.8	246	0.9
23	760	55	350	87	155	119	56	151	31	183	19.2	215	6.4	247	0.85
24	740	56	340	88	150	120	54	152	31.8	184	18.8	216	6	248	0.8
25	720	57	330	89	145	121	52	153	31.2	185	18.4	217	5.6	249	0.75
26	700	58	320	90	140	122	50	154	30.8	186	18	218	5.2	250	0.7
27	680	59	310	91	136	123	49	155	30.4	187	17.6	219	4.8	251	0.65
28	660	60	300	92	132	124	48	156	30	188	17.2	220	4.4	252	0.6
29	640	61	292	93	128	125	47	157	29.6	189	16.8	221	4	253	0.55
30	620	62	284	94	124	126	46	158	29.2	190	16.4	222	3.6	254	0.5
31	600	63	276	95	120	127	45	159	28.8	191	16	223	3.3	255	0.45
32	590	64	270	96	116	128	44	160	28.4	192	15.6	224	3	256	0.4

Brazilian sex worker memoirs

NYTimes

April 27, 2006
Letter From Brazil
She Who Controls Her Body Can Upset Her Countrymen
By LARRY ROHTER

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — She goes by the name Bruna, the Little Surfer Girl, and gives new meaning to the phrase "kiss and tell." First in a blog that quickly became the country's most popular and now in a best-selling memoir, she has titillated Brazilians and become a national celebrity with her graphic, day-by-day accounts of life as a call girl here.

But it is not just her canny use of the Internet that has made Bruna, whose real name is Raquel Pacheco, a cultural phenomenon. By going public with her exploits, she has also upended convention and set off a vigorous debate about sexual values and practices, revealing a country that is not always as uninhibited as the world often assumes.

Interviewed at the office of her publisher here, Ms. Pacheco, 21, said the blog that became her vehicle to notoriety emerged almost by accident. But once it started, she was quick to spot its commercial potential and its ability to transform her from just another program girl, as high-class prostitutes are called in Brazil, into an entrepreneur of the erotic.

"In the beginning, I just wanted to vent my feelings, and I didn't even put up my photograph or phone number," she said. "I wanted to show what goes on in the head of a program girl, and I couldn't find anything on the Net like that. I thought that if I was curious about it, others would be too."

Ms. Pacheco parlayed that inquisitiveness into a best seller, "The Scorpion's Sweet Poison," that has made her a sort of sexual guru. A mixture of autobiography and how-to manual, her book has sold more than 100,000 copies since it was published late last year, and has just been translated into Spanish.

At book signings, Ms. Pacheco said, "80 percent of the public is women, which I didn't expect at all," because most of the readers of her blog appeared to be men, including customers who "wanted to see how I had rated their performance." As she sees it, the high level of female interest in her sexual experiences reflects a gap here between perceptions about sex and the reality.

"I think there's a lot of hypocrisy and a bit of fear involved," she said. "Brazilian women have this sexy image, of being at ease and uninhibited in bed. But anyone who lives here knows that's not true."

Carnival and the general sensuality that seems to permeate the atmosphere can give the impression that Brazil is unusually permissive and liberated, especially compared with other predominantly Roman Catholic nations. But experts say the real situation is far more complicated, which explains both Bruna's emergence and the strong reactions she has provoked.

"Brazil is a country of contradictions, as much in relation to sexuality as anything else," said Richard Parker, a Columbia University anthropologist who is the author of "Bodies, Pleasures and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil," and has taught and worked here. "There is a certain spirit of transgression in daily life, but there is also a lot of moralism."

As a result, some Brazilians have applauded Bruna's frankness and say it is healthy to get certain taboos out in the open, like what both she and academic researchers say is a national penchant for anal sex. But others decry her celebrity as one more noxious manifestation of free-market economics and globalization.

"This is the fruit of a type of society in which people will do anything to get money, including selling their bodies to be able to buy cellular phones," said Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer, a newspaper columnist and professor of theology at Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro. "We've always had prostitution, but it was a hidden, prohibited thing. Now it's a professional option like anything else, and that's the truly shocking thing."

But Gabriela Silva Leite, a sociologist and former prostitute who now directs a prostitutes' advocacy group, argues that such concerns are exaggerated. "It's not a book like this that is going to stimulate prostitution, but the lack of education and opportunities for women," she said. "I don't think Bruna glamorizes things at all. On the contrary, you can regard the book as a kind of warning, because she talks of the unpleasant atmosphere and all the difficulties she faced."

Part of the controversy stems simply from Ms. Pacheco's forthright and unapologetic tone about her work. Traditionally, Brazilians feel sympathy for the poor woman selling her body to feed her children; she is seen as a victim of the country's glaring social and economic inequalities.

But Ms. Pacheco does not fit that mold. She comes from a middle-class family and turned to prostitution, she said, both as rebellion against her strict parents and because she wanted to be economically independent.

That a woman is now talking and behaving as Brazilian men often have may also offend some. Roberto da Matta, a leading anthropologist and social commentator, noted that even though role reversals were an important part of Carnival, other areas of Brazilian life, including sexual relationships, could be quite rigid and hierarchical.

Under the system of machismo that prevails in Brazil and other Latin American countries, "only a man has a right to command his own sex life, and that control is seen as a basic attribute of masculinity," he explained. "So when a young, attractive, intelligent woman appears and says she is a prostitute, you have a complete inversion of roles, leaving men fragile in a terrain where she is the boss, not them."

For all her willingness to break taboos, though, Ms. Pacheco's current life plan is conventional. She has a steady boyfriend and hopes to marry him, and is studying for the national college entrance exam, with a mind to majoring in psychology.

"Being Bruna was a role that left its mark on me, but I can't abandon her," Ms. Pacheco said. "There are people who still call me Bruna, and I don't mind, but I wouldn't want to be her for the rest of my life."

Nor is Ms. Pacheco immune to the influence of pudor, a concept important throughout Latin America that combines elements of modesty, decency, propriety and shame. In her book, rather than write out the words commonly used on the street to describe sexual acts and organs, she prints only their first letters, with dots indicating what everyone already knows.

"I think it's quite vulgar to say the whole word," she explained. "But I didn't want to be too formal, either."

Yellow Tail wine

NYTimes

April 23, 2006
The Wallaby That Roared Across the Wine Industry
By FRANK J. PRIAL

WILLIAM J. DEUTSCH was apprehensive when he first agreed to import an unknown Australian wine called Yellow Tail into the United States in 2001. Its handsome black-and-yellow label featured what looked like a kangaroo, and he felt that animals had no place on wine labels. But he liked the wine. "So," he said recently, "I agreed to take 25,000 cases."

His son Peter disagreed about the animal, which actually was a rock wallaby. "That label is fabulous," he told his dad.

"O.K.," said the elder Mr. Deutsch. "60,000 cases." Their wine-and-spirits importing company, William J. Deutsch & Sons, paid about $2 million for that first shipment; it arrived in June 2001. By the end of that year, 225,000 cases of Yellow Tail had been sold to retailers. In 2002, 1.2 million cases were sold. The figure climbed to 4.2 million in 2003 — including a million in October alone — and to 6.5 million in 2004. And, last year, sales surpassed 7.5 million — all for a wine that no one had heard of just five years earlier.

John Casella, whose winery in southeastern Australia produces Yellow Tail, is predicting sales of 8 million or 8.5 million cases in the United States this year, and he says that sales in Europe, Canada and Asia — which started only recently — could add 3.5 million to the total.

Nothing like this has ever happened before in the American wine business. The breakneck success of Yellow Tail has lifted the Deutsches, or, more precisely, their business, into the top ranks of the American wine trade. (The elder Mr. Deutsch is chairman of the company, and Peter is the president.) In addition, the Deutsches stand to profit handsomely from the wine's success. As part of their arrangement with the Casellas, they own 50 percent of the Yellow Tail brand.

At the same time, the brand has transformed Mr. Casella's company, Casella Wines Ltd., from a modest enterprise into a major wine producer with a huge, Gallo-like winery. What had been a modest farmhouse has, in a brief time, become an immense wine-making complex with some 600 wine holding tanks, 48 of which hold a million liters each.

The Yellow Tail phenomenon took everyone in the wine business by surprise. In retrospect, however, it was probably inevitable. Interest in wine had been growing steadily in the United States for two decades, but the domestic industry had never had much success in meeting the need for a good, inexpensive wine to attract all these newcomers. "There were good wines at $15 and up, but nothing between those wines and the jug wines at the bottom of the scale," said Rich Cartiere, editor of The Wine Market Report. "Yellow Tail, at $6, was and remains better than most American wines at $8.99 and $10.99.

"When I think of Australian wines, I think of a big, juicy, red apple," he added, "and that's what the American wine consumer looks for, too, even if he can't say why. Couple that with a label that's friendly — not a joke, like so many now — and excellent distribution, and you have an unbeatable package."

THE Yellow Tail story began in the late 1990's. Casella Wines, in the Riverina district of New South Wales, west of Sydney, was seeking to expand. It had been started in 1969 by Filippo Casella, a Sicilian immigrant who arrived in Australia in the 1950's — after seven years as a war prisoner in Italy during World War II — and worked as an itinerant farmhand until he could afford to buy some vineyard land of his own. In 1994, his oldest son, John, joined the business and began to look for new markets, particularly in the United States. He enlisted the Australian Trade Commission to help him find an American distributor.

About the same time, 12,000 miles away in White Plains, Bill Deutsch was looking to expand his portfolio. He marketed a variety of products, but his most important client was Georges Duboeuf, a prominent producer of Beaujolais. After having considerable success in the United States during the 1980's and early 1990's, Beaujolais had fallen into a slump, partly because the "nouveau" phenomenon — selling the new vintage in November, a few months after the harvest — had grown stale and partly because of the burgeoning American disenchantment with French wines in general.

Meeting for the first time at a trade show in San Francisco in 1997, Mr. Deutsch and Mr. Casella agreed to team up. "It was a perfect match," Mr. Deutsch said. "Two smallish, family-owned businesses looking for new business." They agreed that in exchange for half-ownership of the label, the Deutsch company would market a line of Casella wines in the United States.

That line, introduced in 1999, was called Carramar Estate, and it was a flop, in part because it could not compete with established brands in the same price category. "John was distraught," Bill Deutsch said recently. "He said he felt he had let me down. He said he would buy back the wine and that he was ready to dissolve the partnership. I told him to forget it. It was only 30,000 cases and there were other things we could do.

"He said: 'Good. I know I can make better wine.' "

Back in Australia, Mr. Casella and his marketing director, John Soutter, came up with a new wine and a new package. They had found a graphic artist in Adelaide, Barbara Harkness, who offered them a design of a black and yellow rendering of a yellow-tailed marsupial styled to emulate Australian aboriginal art; the image was seen as friendly and typically Australian. The Casella company paid her $4,800 for the design and a marketing program based on it.

Sometime late in 2000, Mr. Soutter came to the United States with the new Yellow Tail wine — a chardonnay and a shiraz.

Though William and Peter Deutsch, the importers, would initially disagree about the packaging, they always agreed about the wine. "It was — it still is — delicious," the elder Mr. Deutsch said. "It's an easygoing wine, uncomplicated, fun to drink. In fact, it's better tasting and a better value than the price would indicate. I have to say it: with this one, the Casellas overachieved."

Jon Fredrikson, a California wine industry consultant, calls it "the perfect wine for a public grown up on soft drinks." Yellow Tail, Mr. Fredrikson said, is "round, fruity and user-friendly, and it's immediately drinkable." Even more important, he said, is the consistency of the wine's high quality. "With a lot of wines," he said, "the first batch is great and the second and third are disappointing. Yellow Tail has been consistently good since the first shipment arrived five years ago."

American wine writers — including the dean of wine critics, Robert M. Parker Jr. — have been consistently enthusiastic about Yellow Tail. "In some wine circles, it is fashionable to criticize wine of this genre," Mr. Parker wrote, "but if the truth be known, these are surprisingly well-made offerings."

Yellow Tail is an uncomplicated wine meant for undemanding wine drinkers. But Mr. Casella says that in tastings, experts often identify it as a $60 or $70 bottle. "We've found that some knowledgeable people prefer it to more expensive wines," he said in a telephone interview.

Building on the original two wines, chardonnay and shiraz (or syrah, another name for the same red-wine grape), the Casellas have expanded the line to include merlot, cabernet sauvignon, pinot grigio, riesling and three blends: shiraz-cabernet, cabernet-merlot and shiraz-grenache. In 2003, the Casellas introduced a reserve line of Yellow Tail, which includes merlot, cabernet, chardonnay and pinot grigio. The reserve wines, which sell for $2 or $3 more per bottle, undergo a longer fermentation than the regular wines and are aged in oak barrels.

The wines are all bottled in Bordeaux-style bottles, in both the standard 75-centiliter and 1.5-liter sizes. The Casellas buy about 80 percent of their grapes from other growers.

Yellow Tail was introduced in a number of United States markets with almost less fanfare than had accompanied the ill-fated Carramar Estate line. "We had some point-of-purchase materials," Mr. Deutsch said, referring to displays in stores, "but that was it."

No longer. The Deutsches have scheduled some $24 million for promotions this year, up from $4 million in 2005. Billboards featuring yellow tails on a bird, an airplane and a mermaid, as well as a yellow ponytail on a pretty girl, have become familiar sights in some cities.

Perhaps more important, Mr. Cartiere and others in the industry say, the Deutsches provided Yellow Tail with almost instant access to the American market, using the distribution network they had built over two decades for Duboeuf wines.

The increasingly familiar Yellow Tail label is loosely meant to depict the brand's namesake, a yellow-footed rock wallaby, a smaller cousin to the kangaroo. The bottle labels and in-store advertisements always put the brand name in lower case and within brackets: [yellow tail].

As for those brackets, the story is that the Casellas were looking up "kangaroo" in a textbook when they came upon a technical description of a wallaby. In the margin, alongside the Latin derivation of the name, was the Australian version, in brackets: [yellow tail]. They decided to keep the brackets "to set the wine apart" and to retain the lower-case lettering "to underscore the wine's lack of pretension," John Casella said.

Yellow Tail's success is a hot topic in the wine trade, but so is its future. The history of popular wines is replete with labels that were once wildly popular but no longer are. Blue Nun, Reunite, Lancers and various brands of cold duck are sobering examples. Charles Shaw wines — better known as Two-Buck Chuck — were a sensation a couple of seasons back, and while "Chuck" still sells well, it is no longer the marketing marvel it briefly was.

Two-Buck Chuck, which was created as a way to drain off some of California's last wine surplus, is carried only by stores in the Trader Joe chain. It sells for about $2 in California and $3 elsewhere. Yellow Tail sells for $5 to $7. An attempt to move up the price of Yellow Tail by a dollar in some markets was unsuccessful, Mr. Cartiere said.

FOR the fiscal year ended last June 30, Casella Wines reported an after-tax profit of $77 million on revenue of $255 million, up from $61 million on $230 million in revenue in fiscal 2004. The profit was based almost entirely on sales of Yellow Tail in the United States, the company said.

The wine is now sold in Europe and Canada, and throughout Southeast Asia. Less than 2 percent of production is sold in Australia.

Mr. Casella acknowledged that Yellow Tail's recent growth was unsustainable, and Mr. Cartiere agreed. "It will plateau out, maybe in 2006," he said, adding that competition would stiffen when American winemakers moved successfully into Yellow Tail's price category. "The question is when."

Yellow Tail's impact has not gone unnoticed among bankers. A report issued earlier this month by Silicon Valley Bank, a major wine-industry lender based in Santa Clara, Calif., blames the United States wine industry for allowing wines like Yellow Tail to grab so much of the market. What's more, it questions the very future of vast portions of California's Central Valley, the source of most of the inexpensive domestic wine sold in jugs and boxes, the wine meant to compete with Yellow Tail and brands like it. Criticizing the region's production and marketing methods as obsolete, the report notes that imports have doubled, to 27 percent of the United States market recently from 13.2 percent in 1990.

"Are American vintners starting to look like Detroit in the 70's, when gas prices soared and automakers kept putting out big gas guzzlers?," the report asked. Mentioning the success of Yellow Tail along with that of Italian pinot grigio, the report warns that "the U.S. will no longer be able to ignore the depth of the world glut (which keeps import prices low), or the high cost of American production for lower price-point wines."

Mr. Fredrikson, the wine consultant, predicted that Yellow Tail could enjoy a relatively long run so long as it remained consistent in price and quality. "Yellow Tail caught the wave," he said. "It's perfect for the newest generation of wine drinkers and potential wine drinkers." Furthermore, "the label is subtle," he said. "My daughter pointed it out to me. With the brackets and lower case, it looks just like e-mail."

This kind of techno touch, he said, will resonate, probably unconsciously, with new, young wine buyers. "It's the biggest achievement in the history of wine," he said.

FDA and marijuana medical benefit

NYTimes

April 21, 2006
F.D.A. Dismisses Medical Benefit From Marijuana
By GARDINER HARRIS

WASHINGTON, April 20 — The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that "no sound scientific studies" supported the medical use of marijuana, contradicting a 1999 review by a panel of highly regarded scientists.

The announcement inserts the health agency into yet another fierce political fight.

Susan Bro, an agency spokeswoman, said Thursday's statement resulted from a past combined review by federal drug enforcement, regulatory and research agencies that concluded "smoked marijuana has no currently accepted or proven medical use in the United States and is not an approved medical treatment."

Ms. Bro said the agency issued the statement in response to numerous inquiries from Capitol Hill but would probably do nothing to enforce it.

"Any enforcement based on this finding would need to be by D.E.A. since this falls outside of F.D.A.'s regulatory authority," she said.

Eleven states have legalized medicinal use of marijuana, but the Drug Enforcement Administration and the director of national drug control policy, John P. Walters, have opposed those laws.

A Supreme Court decision last year allowed the federal government to arrest anyone using marijuana, even for medical purposes and even in states that have legalized its use.

Congressional opponents and supporters of medical marijuana use have each tried to enlist the F.D.A. to support their views. Representative Mark Souder, Republican of Indiana and a fierce opponent of medical marijuana initiatives, proposed legislation two years ago that would have required the food and drug agency to issue an opinion on the medicinal properties of marijuana.

Mr. Souder believes that efforts to legalize medicinal uses of marijuana are a front for efforts to legalize all uses of it, said Martin Green, a spokesman for Mr. Souder.

Tom Riley, a spokesman for Mr. Walters, hailed the food and drug agency's statement, saying it would put to rest what he called "the bizarre public discussion" that has led to some legalization of medical marijuana.

The Food and Drug Administration statement directly contradicts a 1999 review by the Institute of Medicine, a part of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's most prestigious scientific advisory agency. That review found marijuana to be "moderately well suited for particular conditions, such as chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting and AIDS wasting."

Dr. John Benson, co-chairman of the Institute of Medicine committee that examined the research into marijuana's effects, said in an interview that the statement on Thursday and the combined review by other agencies were wrong.

The federal government "loves to ignore our report," said Dr. Benson, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. "They would rather it never happened."

Some scientists and legislators said the agency's statement about marijuana demonstrated that politics had trumped science.

"Unfortunately, this is yet another example of the F.D.A. making pronouncements that seem to be driven more by ideology than by science," said Dr. Jerry Avorn, a medical professor at Harvard Medical School.

Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, a New York Democrat who has sponsored legislation to allow medicinal uses of marijuana, said the statement reflected the influence of the Drug Enforcement Administration, which he said had long pressured the F.D.A. to help in its fight against marijuana.

A spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration referred questions to Mr. Walters's office.

The Food and Drug Administration's statement said state initiatives that legalize marijuana use were "inconsistent with efforts to ensure that medications undergo the rigorous scientific scrutiny of the F.D.A. approval process."

But scientists who study the medical use of marijuana said in interviews that the federal government had actively discouraged research. Lyle E. Craker, a professor in the division of plant and soil sciences at the University of Massachusetts, said he submitted an application to the D.E.A. in 2001 to grow a small patch of marijuana to be used for research because government-approved marijuana, grown in Mississippi, was of poor quality.

In 2004, the drug enforcement agency turned Dr. Craker down. He appealed and is awaiting a judge's ruling. "The reason there's no good evidence is that they don't want an honest trial," Dr. Craker said.

Dr. Donald Abrams, a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said he had studied marijuana's medicinal effects for years but had been frustrated because the National Institutes of Health, the leading government medical research agency, had refused to finance such work.

With financing from the State of California, Dr. Abrams undertook what he said was a rigorous, placebo-controlled trial of marijuana smoking in H.I.V. patients who suffered from nerve pain. Smoking marijuana proved effective in ameliorating pain, Dr. Abrams said, but he said he was having trouble getting the study published.

"One wonders how anyone" could fulfill the Food and Drug Administration request for well-controlled trials to prove marijuana's benefits, he said.

Marinol, a synthetic version of a marijuana component, is approved to treat anorexia associated with AIDS and the nausea and vomiting associated with cancer drug therapy.

GW Pharmaceutical, a British company, has received F.D.A. approval to test a sprayed extract of marijuana in humans. Called Sativex, the drug is made from marijuana and is approved for sale in Canada. Opponents of efforts to legalize marijuana for medicinal uses suggest that marijuana is a so-called gateway drug that often leads users to try more dangerous drugs and to addiction.

But the Institute of Medicine report concluded there was no evidence that marijuana acted as a gateway to harder drugs. And it said there was no evidence that medical use of marijuana would increase its use among the general population.

Dr. Daniele Piomelli, a professor of pharmacology at the University of California, Irvine, said he had "never met a scientist who would say that marijuana is either dangerous or useless."

Studies clearly show that marijuana has some benefits for some patients, Dr. Piomelli said.

"We all agree on that," he said.

Cornell trying to improve its image

NYTimes

April 22, 2006
Cornell's Worried Image Makers Wrap Themselves in Ivy
By ALAN FINDER

ITHACA, N.Y. — Cornell has been a member of the Ivy League for decades, but some of its students have Ivy envy.

So driven by a sense that Cornell is underappreciated, some of them banded together to form an "image committee," making it their mission to press the university into marketing and branding itself more aggressively, and to help it climb higher in college rankings.

Their fear is being viewed as a country cousin to Harvard, Yale and Princeton, more like a Midwestern flagship state university than a core member of a prestigious club. "Because of when most people go to college, their identity becomes closely associated with the identity of their university," said Peter Cohl, a committee founder who graduated last spring and is now working on Madison Avenue.

Let the college's standing drop in publications that rank universities, he said, and "my value as a human being feels like it's dropping." (Cornell is now ranked 13th among national universities by U.S. News & World Report.)

"We deserve more respect," said Heather Grantham, a senior who is now co-chairwoman of the image committee. "I am glad I came here," she added, "and it saddens us if it's not properly marketed."

It is an odd bit of role reversal. Marketing and honing an image have become commonplace among university presidents and admissions deans these days. But it is rare to hear students speaking the same language.

In this case, the committee, which was formed four years ago and now has about 50 members, successfully lobbied administrators to jettison a relatively new logo, which featured a large, bright red box with the word Cornell in modern typeface, and to revert to a simplified version of the old circular logo, with a crest and other traditional symbols.

The committee also persuaded the bookstore to stock a line of vintage hats and sweatshirts that decidedly emphasize Cornell's Ivy League roots. Next up is an assault on class size. "If they can reduce class size, they can be a Top 5 school," said Mr. Cohl, a nontraditional student who was 38 when he enrolled at Cornell.

Some recent developments have bolstered the students' view that Cornell was not putting its best foot forward, committee members say, and that changing its image has helped. Applications have increased by 35 percent in the last two years, and so it has been able become more selective, with the proportion of applicants offered admission declining to 24.7 percent this year from 31 percent three years ago.

Many elite universities also experienced increases in applications this year, but few if any have been as large as Cornell's. Its rate of admissions, while declining, is still higher than the seven other Ivy League universities.

Doris Davis, the associate provost for admissions and enrollment at Cornell, cited several factors in the sharp increase in applications, from a revamped timetable for sending mailings to potential applicants to an expansion of its recruitment trips to eight primary market areas. The image committee was not prominent on her list.

Other Cornell officials, though, gave the committee credit. "There's no doubt in my mind that it's directly related," said Thomas W. Bruce, vice president for university communications. "They were enormously important to the process."

Image committee members say that students' morale and sense of self-worth is caught up in the university's standing, though they deny that they see the school as the Rodney Dangerfield of the Ivy League.

"I don't have an inferiority complex," said Daniel Cohen, an image committee co-chairman who is now a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the university. "I just want to see my school improve, and I don't see why it can't."

The committee's roots lie in a Cornell-Yale football game in Ithaca four years ago. Yale fans in the stadium were wearing hats and other neat gear unlike anything Cornell offered for sale, Mr. Cohl said. He talked about that with students sitting nearby, including leaders of the campus Republicans and Democrats.

All were in agreement, he said. "Nobody was wearing our stuff," he said. "We didn't have cool hats, we didn't have cool hoodies."

The committee's first effort was at the bookstore, which proved responsive. Bookstore managers agreed to produce a new line of hats and sweatshirts that looked vintage and emphasized Cornell's Ivy tradition. A blue fitted hat with a simple red C became a big seller, as did a red hooded sweatshirt with a small C on the front.

But when committee members first approached administrators to talk about their concerns — including what they saw as the university's passive response to a slight drop in some ranking guides — they met with resistance.

That changed three years ago, they said, with the arrival of a new president, Jeffrey S. Lehman, and the subsequent appointment of Mr. Bruce, who took their critique seriously, particularly their thoughts about the so-called view book for potential applicants and about the Web site. (Mr. Lehman resigned last June over differences with the board.)

"Today, a Web site is the face of the university," Mr. Cohen said. "It's often the first way that high school students see Cornell. Not all administrators understood that."

The university redesigned the Web site and the view book more than a year ago, and the students think the new versions are more traditional and more elegant.

Committee members who carefully analyzed college rankings are now focused on class size. They have concluded that if Cornell could diminish the number of classes with more than 50 students, and increase the number with fewer than 20, it could significantly improve its U.S. News & World Report standing.

"It's the issue that most affects the rankings and the quality of student life here," Ms. Grantham said.

But this would involve major new expenditures by the university, whose large lecture classes include a celebrated introductory psychology course that draws as many as 1,500 students to a huge lecture hall.

Committee members are also lobbying Cornell to offer more generous financial aid packages to low-income students, comparable to those at Harvard and other elite universities. They say it is necessary to foster more diversity on campus.

Moving up in the rankings would cement Cornell's standing among its peers, Mr. Cohl said. "Much of the Ivy League has looked at us and said, 'Oh, you're the farm school,' " he said, referring to Cornell's agricultural college, one of several at the university that are run by the state.

"One thing I think the image committee has done is to say, we are an Ivy League school, and it's O.K. to be an Ivy League school," Mr. Cohl said. "I think it's Ivy and more. If I were doing strategic positioning, I would say it's Ivy and more."

And he should know. These days he works in strategic branding, in part, he says, because a principal of the firm is an alumnus and read about the image committee in the student newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun.

Parents still helping grown kids financially

NYTimes

April 20, 2006
The Bank of Mom and Dad
By ANNA BAHNEY

AT 23, Jason McGuinness lives a postcollege life in Manhattan that is very nearly typical. He works as a media research analyst, making about $30,000 a year. Sharing a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of a walk-up building with a roommate on the Upper East Side, his portion of the rent is $1,100 monthly.

The walls are decorated with pennants and posters from Syracuse University, his alma mater. He orders takeout dinners, carries peanut-butter sandwiches to work and occasionally takes in a Mets game with friends.

And like many of his peers — educated, employed, urban-dwelling young adults — he receives monthly assistance from his parents, in the form of a $300 check and the payment of his cellphone bill.

This is not the largesse of wealthy families doled out through trust funds. Nor is the money a couple of $20 bills tucked into a card at the holidays. Mr. McGuinness and others like him are the beneficiaries of an increasingly common subsidy arriving regularly from Mom and Dad, something like a family fellowship.

It helps to pay for housing, bills and travel expenses, and the support has been increasing for the past two decades as education is extended, marriage is delayed and young people take the scenic route from adolescence to adulthood.

"Everybody I know is supporting their children in some way," said Gail Horowitz, Mr. McGuinness's mother, a vice president of the Zlokower Company, a public relations firm in Manhattan. Unlike young adults who "boomerang" back home to live with their parents — the subject of the recent comedy "Failure to Launch" — these young people live independently. But they need help to make ends meet, or put another way, to maintain a middle-class way of life.

The bottom line is that the assumption that financial obligations to children ended after graduation from high school or college is going the way of the pay phone. Today, parents are finding that they are on the hook for more, sometimes much more — contributions of thousands of dollars a year to help young men and women get on their feet economically, often into their 30's.

The economic dilemmas facing young adults were chronicled in two recent books: "Generation Debt" by Anya Kamenetz and "Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead," by Tamara Draut. Both explore how paychecks have stalled, housing costs have risen, education costs have skyrocketed and credit has become so available as to be dangerous.

Ms. Draut, the director of the economic opportunity program at Demos, a New York think tank, said students now leave college with an average of $20,000 in loans, which "added to these flat-lined paychecks and high costs of living, tips people over the edge."

While economic stresses may be exacerbated in cities like New York, people in other areas of the country are feeling the pressures as well. Nationally, 34 percent of those between 18 and 34 receive cash from their parents annually, according to a study by the Institute of Social Research at the University of Michigan published in "On the Frontier of Adulthood" in 2005. Cash is only part of the picture; parents also make generous presents of clothes, cars and help with down payments.

"We have not seen any signs of it decreasing," said Bob Schoeni, an associate professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, who is an author of the study. "Certainly over the last couple of decades it has been increasing."

Middle-income parents earning less than $72,600 a year can expect to spend $190,980 on a child through age 17, according to 2005 government statistics. But Dr. Schoeni said that parents can plan on paying almost 25 percent of that amount again over the next 17 years, or $42,280 in 2005 dollars. This sum includes higher education but also much more.

Parents pay $2,323 a year to help support children 25 and 26 years old, said Dr. Schoeni, and $1,556 annually for offspring 33 and 34. (All amounts are in 2001 dollars and reflect support to children living both independently and at home.)

Nearly half of children between 18 and 34 also receive aid in the form of their parents' time — driving them home to the city after a visit, doing laundry, taking care of grandchildren — that has financial value. Time assistance from parents averages about 367 hours a year, or nine weeks of full-time work.

Although some may argue that the willingness of parents to subsidize adult children is prolonging their coming of age, Dr. Schoeni said his study suggests that extended education, the exploration of career options and delayed marriage are the causes of the long transition to self-sufficiency. Parental support "is not the driver of a delayed transition, it is a response to it," he said.

Other experts say that young adults with material support from families make a smoother transition into adulthood than those struggling entirely on their own.

"It may mean that they don't have to take the first job available," said Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a developmental psychologist and the author of "Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties."

Parental support allows adult children to explore careers with low earning potential, to make career shifts or to maintain a quality of life.

"So many of the things that I'm able to focus on now are great career-wise, but they are not monetarily rewarding," said Daisy Press, a singer who performs classical and avant-garde music. At 27, Ms. Press has just completed eight years of college, four at Sarah Lawrence and four more at the Manhattan School of Music. "I wouldn't be able to do this without them," she said.

That would be her parents, Reinhold and Linda Press, who are also musicians. As a bassist and singer, respectively, they have toured with Neil Diamond for the past 30 years. In addition to paying for her education, they bought her a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side and are supplementing the income she receives from teaching music history part time.

Mr. and Mrs. Press said they believe their daughter's energy and thoughts should be on her education, and now that she is pursuing a music career they want her to have the best chance possible in an unforgiving field. "What if she had to stop and spend her days at Starbucks?" said Mr. Press, who lives with his wife in Laguna Niguel, Calif.

Mrs. Press is careful to say the money is not endless; she is 57 and her husband is 68. "It is the hard work and the passion that makes us want to help Daisy," she said. "She's not a lazy slug with no direction. She keeps moving forward."

Like other young people in her position, she has mixed feelings about accepting money from her parents. "I think the down side, if I can even say there is a down side, is not necessarily feeling like an adult," Ms. Press said. "There is a part of me that feels like I'm 19 or 20. I don't have the emotional experience of knowing what I cost and earning what I spend. I can only imagine what it may feel like."

Alanna Lopez, 27, knows very well the value of money. After leaving college before graduating and returning to Manhattan to be with the man who is now her husband, Benjamin Lopez, she began working in hotel management. Then 14 months ago, she had a baby, Abigail.

"Customer service was draining," Mrs. Lopez said. "I would be getting home very late. It was going to be 5, 6 or 10 more years until I had a major promotion."

She decided to quit and study art history and education at Hunter College. But losing her income put the self-sufficiency she and her husband, a hospital receptionist, had achieved in peril. Her mother, Suzanne McGrattan, came to the rescue.

"She is paying for my education and a monthly stipend to cover my portion of the bills," Mrs. Lopez said. She'll also watch Abigail and she recently renovated the couple's kitchen and helped to furnish the apartment. "I'm thrilled she's going back to school," Ms. McGrattan, a lawyer, said. "She saw she didn't have a life. She wants to spend more time with the child."

Dr. Arnett, the psychologist, said young people are ambivalent about receiving money because it represents parental power. Most young people, he said, are striving for independence, to feel they have reached adulthood.

"But they are also generally quite ambivalent about adulthood, in general," Dr. Arnett added. "You feel grown up. You have more status, more position. But it is annoying, too. You have to pay your own bills, and take on all these responsibilities."

While some parents earmark contributions for food and rent, others expect their children to take care of the basics while they pick up special expenses like a vacation.

"I'm enjoying watching them spend their inheritance," Judy Maysles, a real estate agent in Manhattan, said about the support she provides to two grown children, John, 30, who works with a hedge fund in New Jersey, and Celia, 27, a filmmaker. "I'd rather spend it now and watch them and enjoy it with them. I think that a lot of my generation feel that way."

She bought her daughter appliances for a house in Portland, Ore. Now the proceeds from selling that property are enabling Celia Maysles to make a documentary about her late father, the documentary filmmaker David Maysles.

Eventually, most children outgrow the need for a stipend. But the instinct of parents to give — and of children to receive — can linger on. When John Maysles got a dog four years ago, his mother told him he couldn't leave it alone all day.

"So I pay for doggy day care," she said. "It is $16 a day. Probably he could afford it, but it has been on my credit card and I haven't changed it."

Myspace profit

NYTimes

April 23, 2006
Making Friends Was Easy. Big Profit Is Tougher.
By SAUL HANSELL

SANTA MONICA, Calif.

ALMOST on a lark, Chris DeWolfe bought the Internet address MySpace.com in 2002, figuring that it might be useful someday. At first, he used the site to peddle a motorized contraption, made in China and called an E-scooter, for $99.

Selling products online comes naturally to him. Having jumped into the Internet business in the early days, Mr. DeWolfe had become a master of the aggressive forms of online marketing, including e-mail messages and pop-up advertising. After the Internet bubble burst, he even built a site that let people download computer cursors in the form of waving flags; the trick was that they also downloaded software that would monitor their Internet movements and show them pop-up ads.

Very quickly, however, Mr. DeWolfe's tactics for MySpace changed. He had noticed the popularity of Friendster, a rapidly growing Web site that let people communicate with their friends and meet the friends of their friends. What would happen, he wondered, if he combined this type of social networking with the sort of personal expression enabled by other sites for creating Web pages or online journals?

He convinced the executives of eUniverse, the company that had bought his own marketing firm, ResponseBase, to back his plan. As soon as the site was reintroduced, in the summer of 2003, Mr. DeWolfe saw it grow quickly with little marketing. And although his scrappy backer was hungry for cash, he resisted pressure to flood MySpace with advertising and to turn all of its members into money.

"Chris came from ResponseBase, and they knew all the direct marketing tactics to get money out of almost anything," said Brett C. Brewer, the former president of eUniverse, which was later renamed Intermix Media. "But I give him credit: from literally the first or second month, he realized MySpace could be something we really need to protect because user confidence in the site was paramount."

Now MySpace has a new owner — Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which bought MySpace and Intermix last year for $649 million — and the pressure on Mr. DeWolfe to find a way to make much more money from MySpace is far greater.

But the opportunity is greater, too. More than 70 million members have signed up — more than twice as many as MySpace had when Mr. Murdoch agreed to buy it — drawn by a simple format that lets users build their own profile pages and link to the pages of their friends. It has tapped into three passions of young people: expressing themselves, interacting with friends and consuming popular culture.

MySpace now displays more pages each month than any other Web site except Yahoo. More pages, of course, means more room for ads. And, in theory, those ads can be narrowly focused on each member's personal passions, which they conveniently display on their profiles. As an added bonus for advertisers, the music, photos and video clips that members place on their profiles constitutes a real-time barometer of what is hot.

FOR now, MySpace is charging bargain-basement rates to attract enough advertisers for the nearly one billion pages it displays each day. The company will have revenue of about $200 million this year, estimated Richard Greenfield of Pali Capital, a brokerage firm in New York. That is less than one-twentieth of Yahoo's revenue.

In buying MySpace, Mr. Murdoch also bought a tantalizing problem: how to tame a vast sea of fickle and unruly teenagers and college students just enough to notice advertising or to buy things, yet not make the site so commercial that he scares off his audience. At the same time, he must address the real and growing concerns of parents and teachers who see MySpace as a den of youthful excess and, potentially, as a lure for sexual predators.

Mr. Murdoch's initial strategy seems to be to do nothing to interfere with whatever alchemy attracted so many young people to MySpace in the first place. So he has embraced Mr. DeWolfe, 40, and Tom Anderson, 30, the company's president and co-founder, and their close-knit management team. And he is providing them with the cash to reinforce MySpace's shaky computer system and to hire armies of sales representatives to bring in more money from the banner ads and sponsored pages that MySpace sells.

He also gave them multimillion-dollar bonus payments to smooth the feelings that were ruffled when Intermix was sold, dragging MySpace along with it against the will of its founders, who received only a small portion of the sale price.

Still, change is coming. In Beverly Hills, nine miles and worlds away from MySpace's beachside office, the News Corporation is assembling its overarching online unit, Fox Interactive Media. Run by Ross Levinsohn, the longtime manager of FoxSports.com, Fox Interactive Media is stitching together several Web properties into a big Internet company focused on youth. The top priority is MySpace.

"We have some very aggressive goals on how to build this thing into a real contributor to News Corp. financially," Mr. Levinsohn said last month. Mr. Murdoch, he added, "is focused on that, and he rightfully holds my feet to the fire."

To expand ad sales, especially to big brands, Mr. Levinsohn plans to supplement the MySpace staff with a second sales force linked to the Fox TV sales department. He wants to expand one of Mr. DeWolfe's advertising ideas — turning advertisers into members of the MySpace community, with their own profiles, like the teenagers' — so that the young people who often spend hours each day on MySpace can become "friends" with movies, cellphone companies and even deodorants. Young people can link to the profiles set up for these goods and services, as they would to real friends, and these commercial "friends" can even send them messages — ads, really, but of a whole new kind.

Mr. Levinsohn is also developing plans for MySpace to be paid by some of the bands and video producers whose songs and short films are woven into its gaudy profiles like so many electronic stickers on a high-school locker. And he sees a chance for MySpace to rival eBay and Craigslist as a place where nearly anything is bought and sold.

Mr. Greenfield, the Pali Capital analyst, says that these moves have potential — especially if MySpace can convince members to put clips from Fox movies, television programs and other youth-oriented "content" on their profile pages. "I don't know how big a business this can be, but it can clearly be a lot bigger than it is today," he said. "The question is: Can you take it to the next level by making a business that leverages all the consumers who are telling you what they want to do?"

Another question is this: Can the News Corporation achieve these goals if the executives in charge don't agree on how to do so, or even on whether they want to? Mr. Levinsohn, for example, said he saw opportunity in the one million bands that have established profiles on MySpace; he said MySpace could charge bands to promote concerts or to sell their songs directly through the site.

In an interview the next day, however, Mr. DeWolfe dismissed the idea. "Music brings a lot of traffic into MySpace," he said, "and it lets us sell very large sponsorships to those brands that want to reach consumers who are interested in music. We never thought charging bands was a viable business model."

Mr. Levinsohn brushed aside the discord, saying it was appropriate for the people running MySpace to be more concerned at this point about serving users than making money. And, for now, Mr. DeWolfe and Mr. Anderson say they are happy working for the News Corporation and Mr. Murdoch, its 75-year-old chairman and chief executive. "Rupert Murdoch blew me away," Mr. DeWolfe said. "He really understands what youth is doing today."

BY many accounts, the MySpace culture reflects the style of Mr. DeWolfe, who has a hard-nosed business approach under a laid-back exterior. "Chris is a very strong personality," said Geoff Yang, a partner in Redpoint Ventures, which invested in MySpace last year as part of an effort to separate it from Intermix; the News Corporation's acquisition of Intermix thwarted that effort. "He will listen to a lot of ideas, make up his mind and be laser-focused to get a few of them done."

Mr. DeWolfe, who focuses on business affairs, and Mr. Anderson, who designs features for the site, have deliberately kept MySpace rudimentary, with an almost homemade feeling, to give the most flexibility to users. In spirit, the site reflects its Southern Californian home with all of its idiosyncratic performers, designers, demicelebrities and other cultural hustlers, many of whom the founders recruited to be early members. Mr. DeWolfe, in particular, is a fan of Los Angeles nightlife and has become something of a public figure himself.

"Chris has become this living persona of MySpace," said Mr. Brewer, who recalled a trip to Aspen, Colo., with Mr. Anderson and Mr. DeWolfe last December. "Chris is wearing an awesome leather jacket, some sort of designer shirt, with his hair all over the place. He has this whole rock-star persona. And you hear people going: 'Psst, psst. That's the MySpace guy.' "

When he is not basking in the MySpace spotlight himself, Mr. DeWolfe has begun using it to promote music events around the country. MySpace members can become "friends" with a profile for "MySpace Secret Shows," for instance, and they will receive tips about free concerts — sponsored by companies like Tower Records — in their hometowns.

On a recent Friday in Manhattan, several hundred people trekked through drizzling rain to the Tower Records store in the East Village for free tickets to a concert by Franz Ferdinand, the Scottish postpunk band, at the Hammerstein Ballroom.

Heather Candella, a college student from Sloatsburg, N.Y., was among those at the show. She said the shows were "a really good idea because it's kind of a secret kind of thing — it's not so commercial."

She added that MySpace had become a main way to stay in touch with her friends. While she does not use the site to meet people, it has become part of the dating ritual. "When you meet someone, the question is not 'What's your number?' " she said. "It's 'What's your MySpace?' "

By checking out a guy's profile, she said, "you can actually get a feeling for who they are."

MySpace users pepper their profiles with their own photographs, musings and poetry, and with their favorite music and video clips. That maximizes the individuality of each profile but turns the typical media-company business model upside down, which is one reason that it is so hard for the News Corporation to use the audience to sell ads or to promote its own programming. The best way to get, say, a television show in front of the MySpace audience is not to cut a deal with a programming czar at a Hollywood restaurant, but to win the hearts, one by one, of thousands of members who will display the show to all of their friends.

"We can't look at this as a media property," said Peter Chernin, the News Corporation's president. "This is a site programmed by its users."

For that reason, MySpace is only gingerly pushing users into other Fox properties. Right now, Fox's relationship to MySpace is not explicit, although Fox movies and television shows are frequent advertisers. Ultimately, the News Corporation will make it easy for MySpace members to put clips from its television programs and trailers for its movies on their profile pages. But there will be nothing to stop them from using material from other companies.

Mr. Levinsohn calls MySpace the antiportal. "It's not about a central hub, because that's not where things are going," he said. "The under-30 set wants choice. It's not about one destination; it's about 65 million."

Indeed, rather than squeeze all its Internet ambitions into MySpace, Fox Interactive is assembling a network of Web sites, including IGN, a collection of sites focused on video games, and Scout, which runs Web sites for about 200 local sports teams. The News Corporation is also developing a portal devoted to entertainment, drawing from its Fox network programs, the Page Six gossip column of The New York Post and show-business reporters at the 35 local television stations it owns, Mr. Levinsohn said.

AT MySpace, the first challenge is to raise advertising rates. Because its supply of pages so greatly outstrips demand from advertisers, it has offered deep discounts. Indeed, the average rate paid for advertising is a bit over a dime for 1,000 impressions, Mr. Levinsohn said, far lower than rates at major competitors. "If we can raise that by 10 cents, think of the upside," he said.

One way to coax more money from advertisers is to build special sections — areas devoted to music and independent filmmakers — that provide a neutral home to advertisers that want MySpace's youthful audience but don't want their ads associated with the risqué content of some members' profiles.

A sign of that challenge is seen in Mr. Levinsohn's effort to expand the use of text ads — the rapidly growing format pioneered by search engines. He has been running tests with Yahoo, Google and several smaller ad providers and has sought proposals from them for longer-term deals.

The answer he received was a shock. Not one of them, not even the mighty Google, was sure that it could provide enough advertisements to fill all the pages that MySpace displays each day, Mr. Levinsohn said. The search companies did not want to dilute their networks with so many ads for MySpace users, whom they said were not the best prospects for most marketing because they use MySpace for socializing, not buying.

Mr. Levinsohn says he also hopes to raise ad rates by collecting more user data so advertisers can find the most promising prospects. To use the site, people need to provide their age, location and sex, and often volunteer their sexual orientation and personal interests. Some of that information is already being used to select ads to display. Soon, the site will track when users visit profile pages and other sections devoted to topics of interest to advertisers. People who put information about sports cars in their profiles or who frequent MySpace message boards about hot-rodding, for example, would be shown ads for car parts, even while reading messages from friends.

The bigger opportunity, however, is not so much selling banner ads, but finding ways to integrate advertisers into the site's web of relationships. Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers, for example, created a profile for the animated square hamburger character from its television campaign. About 100,000 people signed up to be "friends" with the square.

Fox officials wonder whether this sort of commerce, built on relationships, can be extended to small businesses. A Ford dealership in, say, Indiana could create a profile, said Mark A. Jung, the chief operating officer of Fox Interactive. The profiles themselves, he said, would probably be free, but MySpace would sell enhancements to help businesses attract customers and complete transactions, Mr. Jung said.

Yet here is another place that executives at Fox and MySpace don't see eye to eye. Mr. DeWolfe discounted the idea of people creating profile pages for small businesses. "If it was a really commercial profile — the gas station down the street — no one is going to sign up to be one of their friends," he said. "There is nothing interesting about it."

For now, Mr. DeWolfe said, he has more down-to-earth plans. With the News Corporation's help, he is opening an office in London to coordinate MySpace's expansion in Europe. He is cutting deals to let members connect to MySpace over cellphones.

The News Corporation, he said, is helping MySpace achieve his goals sooner than it could on its own. So far this year, MySpace has spent $20 million of the News Corporation's money, in part to nearly double its staff of 250. About one-third of its employees focus on customer service and, increasingly, on responding to parents' concerns about what teenagers do on the site and what else they can see there. In the last six months, there has been a torrent of letters from schools to parents — as well as newspaper articles — about the glorification of drinking, drug use and sex on many MySpace profiles.

MySpace has long had rules that forbid anyone under 14 to join and that ban pornographic images and hate speech. Beyond those, however, the site is very open to frank discussion, provocative images and links to all sorts of activities. It didn't stop Playboy magazine, for example, from creating a profile page on its site to recruit members to pose in the magazine. Nor does it object to Jenna Jameson, the pornographic film star, maintaining a profile with links to her hard-core Web site.

Ms. Jameson "is more than a porn star," Mr. Anderson said. "She is an author and a celebrity and has been on Oprah." He added that "if we had a site that was 'My name is so-and-so and this is my porn site,' we would delete that."

Mr. Levinsohn, Mr. DeWolfe and others at the News Corporation say the site has no more or fewer problems than any other community on the Internet, and their primary response to parents' concern is a campaign to educate users about safe surfing techniques. "There are a couple of basic safety tips that can make MySpace safe for anyone over 14," Mr. DeWolfe said. "Just like you tell kids not to get in the car with strangers and to look both ways before you cross the street."

A sign that MySpace can play a role in some of the most distressing experiences of growing up came last week, when five teenage boys were arrested in Riverton, Kan. Law enforcement and school officials there said that the group planned to go on a shooting spree at their high school but were stopped after one of them discussed the plot on MySpace.

IN some ways, MySpace has assumed the role America Online held a decade ago when it introduced e-mail services and Internet chat to the masses. But AOL's example is a cautionary one. For many reasons, largely its failure to keep up with trends, AOL lost its place in the social lives of young people.

Mr. DeWolfe argues that MySpace won't suffer that fate because, in just two years, it has already become so entrenched in so many lives. "People are truly invested in the site," he said. "All their friends are on it. They spent months building their profiles. And so the cost of switching is too high. If we keep building the features they want, they will stay on the site."

If he is right, MySpace will be more than just a trendy toy to be discarded like last year's E-scooter.