My Daily Joe

Spin Doctor PR Firm has teamed up with one of the largest and most powerful Publicity teams in the business, Hoopla Media Group.

Hoopla Media Group is a collection of well-established industry executives who have worked with every big name in the entertainment business (extending to professional athletes, authors, and public figures).

Spin Doctor is a grassroots marketing and publicity firm that focuses on new and advanced marketing techniques while tying in proven time-tested traditions. Together, Spin Doctor PR along with Hoopla Media Group is a ground-breaking example of forward-thinking innovators, mixing the traditional PR approach of radio, print media, and television with a new school attitude of digital marketing, online branding, search engine visibility and viral campaigns.

Hoopla Media Group is a division of Hoopla Worldwide, which just signed a major distribution deal through WIDEawake Entertainment / eOne Entertainment. WIDEawake is known as the company who recently purchased the Death Row Records catalog for $18 Million.

For more information, visit www.spindrpr.com.

R.E.M. announced today that they have broken up after 31 years together. “As lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band,” the band said in a statement on their official website. “We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished.”

In just over three decades as a band, R.E.M. released 15 albums including landmark works such as Murmur, Reckoning, Document, Out of Time and Automatic For the People. The band’s final album, Collapse Into Now, was released in March of this year. The band have plans to release a career-spanning greatest hits collection later this year, which will include a handful of new songs finished after the band completed Collapse Into Now.

Photos: R.E.M. Through the Years

“During our last tour, and while making Collapse Into Now and putting together this greatest hits retrospective, we started asking ourselves, ‘what next’?,” bassist Mike Mills wrote on the R.E.M. site. “Working through our music and memories from over three decades was a hell of a journey. We realized that these songs seemed to draw a natural line under the last 31 years of our working together.”

Mills insists that the band have ended their working relationship on very good terms. “We feel kind of like pioneers in this,” he says. “There’s no disharmony here, no falling-outs, no lawyers squaring-off. We’ve made this decision together, amicably and with each other’s best interests at heart. The time just feels right.”

Interview: R.E.M. Roar Back with ‘Collapse Into Now’

“I hope our fans realize this wasn’t an easy decision; but all things must end, and we wanted to do it right, to do it our way,” says frontman Michael Stipe.

Ethan Kaplan, owner of the R.E.M. fan community Murmurs and former Senior Vice President of Emerging Technology at Warner Bros. Records, says that the band’s decision was influenced in part by label politics. “I suspected this was coming last fall,” Kaplan tells Rolling Stone. “If you remember, they weathered a lot of storms in this business, and have always operated on their own terms. [Warner Bros.] changed starting last September, and I think the demands on a band now to get a record out were more than they might have wanted to commit. I can understand that after how hard they worked for how long, the thought of going back to ‘paying dues’ with new label staff, in a very weird industry, was too much.”

In a 2007 Rolling Stone interview, Stipe summed it up nicely. “We didn’t set out for this to be a career. We just knew it was something we wanted to do, and we would stop when we didn’t want to do it anymore.”

Source: Rollingstone

Hanane Habib, author of Misunderstood: A Scar for Life, sits down with us to discuss her new book and the pressures she faced throughout her childhood and young adult years that prompted her to want to make a difference in other woman’s lives by writing a book about her own.

What made you decide to write a book?

I decided to write a book because I wanted to make a change in society and hopefully help change someone’s future. I not only want to build awareness but I want to make a difference in other woman’s lives who may be experiencing some of the same pressures and expectations I faced.

What are some scars from your past?

I have many visible scars, but the ones that affected me the most are the hidden ones: spending my school years being bullied, teased and tormented for being of a different, being a witness to violence while growing up, being insulted for not being “perfect”, being told I was a “school failure” even though as a child growing up English was a second language spoken at home. Those are just a few hidden scars from my past. My book explains more of this in detail.

At this point, would you consider yourself completely healed from the scars of your past?

I have come to terms with my past. My past no longer affects me, mentally from progressing forward in life. I no longer hit brick walls. However, they are some scars from my past that I will carry for the rest of my life, regardless of how well I deal with them or how deeply I bury them — there is no erasing them. Daily occurring events that take place in today’s society bring back memories; the scars are then re-opened. However, I can now relate to the victims, I am now in a position where I can help others, I am healed, because I am now open to discussing my scars without feeling ashamed or concerned about what others think of my past and the decision I made. I am no longer in two minds about my past. It’s all clear to me now. Read more »

(CNN) — The National September 11 Memorial opens to the public Monday — a decade and a day after terror attacks brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

The memorial opened a day early on Sunday only to victims’ family members and those attending the commemoration service at ground zero.

“We’re so proud of this memorial,” said Monica Iken, who lost her husband Michael in the attacks. “I can go see Michael. He’s home.”

Iken founded the group September’s Mission and has played an instrumental role in the construction of the site.

Iken said she comes to the site to connect with her husband. “Every time I come here, I feel the energy. It’s powerful,” she said.

The finished plaza is a calm spot in the midst of a busy construction zone for 1 World Trade Center — the new skyscraper rising above the site.

The focal points of the memorial are a pair of granite reflecting pools — “voids,” as designer Michael Arad calls them — that plunge into the earth.

Located on the footprints of the old twin towers, they are open-topped cubes, nearly an acre in size. Their walls are clad in dark granite, surrounded by brass parapets engraved with nearly 3,000 names: those killed on September 11, 2001, in New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, as well as in a 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.

The largest man-made waterfalls in North America wash over the dark granite, flowing from beneath the etched names into the pools below.

“I had chills for the first time when the water was turned on,” said Paula Grant Berry, who lost her husband on 9/11. Berry was the only victims’ family member to serve on the jury that selected Arad’s design.

“Looking down on those two fountains, it gives you the chills,” said Adam Romano, a concrete worker at the site. “You look at those footprints … you see those buildings as if they are still there.”

Softening the stark lines of the pools are more than 400 trees that line the walkways and plaza leading to the voids. All but one are new to the site. A lone “Survivor Tree,” a Callery pear, was found in the ruins and nursed back to health.

The National September 11 Museum is nearing completion at the site and will open next year. Three more office towers are in various states of development.

In the coming years, a transportation hub and shopping arcade will connect the complex underground. The entire project is expected to be completed around 2015.

Source: CNN  |  Ed Payne