Marketplace - American Public Media

America: Land of the free...Internet? Some American cities tried this and ran up against a buzz saw of opposition from companies that sell Internet service. Now the federal government could push for fast connections to the Internet for, and here's the keyword: free.

According to the Washington Post, the FCC envisions a Wi-Fi system that isn't spotty but widespread and powerful. This would help get poorer people connected to what are increasingly essential online services. And free Wi-Fi could be a catalyst for something we're exploring this week, connecting the Internet to objects not just webpages. 

"This concept is basically the backbone, it is sort of the only thing that could truly enable this Internet of things," says Molly Wood, executive editor at CNET and host of "Always On". "The only way we get towards a truly connected society is through ubiquitous highspeed wireless access, but then you all of the sudden have the ability for people to develop devices, for them to develop standards for software that can work across these devices. The barrier to entry is not very high. They can test things for free, they can distribute them freely. It's sort of like if you look at the way the existence of the Internet spurred innovation that changed our culture forever, I have to believe that this is almost equally as big an idea."

The FCC would not comment directly on the free wireless story, but did tell us there's a plan to auction off radio frequencies that could be used by mobile phone companies and for other uses including Wi-Fi. Some critics believe the FCC gets too involved in matters like this.

"They are involved in a lot of activities. They have a lot of discretion, a lot of power, and this causes firms in D.C. to spend tons and tons of lobbying them to get them to get individual goodies," says Hal Singer, who is co-author of a new book about the future of telecom policy, The Need for Speed. "I think the solution is very simple, is just to get them out of this business."

Singer argues that freeing up markets for broadband is the quickest route to new services in education, tele-medicine and entertainment. He refutes the growing chorus of experts who worry that a few telecom companies are getting too big for the country's good.

"We should tolerate some degree of market power. After all, we're asking these networks to make these huge investments. We shouldn't immediately jump to the notion of national provision or regulating their prices," says Singer.

The Federal Communications Commission will hold the first in a series of field hearings on phone outages during natural disasters on Tuesday. The hearing, in New York and New Jersey, will focus on the blow Hurricane Sandy inflicted on communications networks. 

Sandy knocked out about a quarter of the cellphone towers in the hardest-hit states. Andrew Adam Newman lives in New York’s Greenwich Village. He just had time to post a horrifying video and pictures of rising water on his Facebook page before his phone went dead. Most of his neighbors were in the same boat.  Newman says many of them wandered around like zombies, trying to get a signal.

“I saw people walking around the neighborhood just staring at their phones," he says. "They looked like people who get metal detectors out and walk all over a football field looking for a nickel.”

Harold Feld, senior vice president of Public Knowledge, a non profit in Washington, says it doesn’t have to be this way. He wants the FCC to force cellphone companies to sometimes share their networks.

“These providers are used to competing with each other," he explains. "So the answer in this case may be, OK, when an emergency comes down, you’re all going to have to work together whether you like it or not.”

The FCC is expected to consider that issue at the hearing. And also look at how well cellphone companies prepared for Hurricane Sandy.

Being a public school teacher has never been the road to wealth. But there’s a public charter school in New York City that’s paying its teachers six figures.

Kristen VanOllefen was teaching music in New Jersey when she read about the school on a friend's Facebook post.

"And, I said, who gets paid $125,000?” VanOllefen remembered. 

After a few years, and a grueling hiring process, VanOllefen can now say she does.

The school is called The Equity Project Charter School, or TEP for short. Most of its students are low-income and from the Washington Heights neighborhood. Since it opened four years ago, it’s been at the forefront of an experiment to see if paying top teachers top-dollar leads to a better education.

Zeke Vanderhoek, TEP’s founder and principal, says he would have paid teachers even more, but “candidly, it was the maximum amount that would keep our budget in the black.”

Vanderhoek wants to prove that if you've got great teachers, little else matters, and, you can afford them, even on a public school budget. "Teachers are the critical lever in student achievement, in student growth. If we’re serious about this, let’s pay them what they’re worth,” Vanderhoek says. 

But that strategy has its own costs. For now, TEP is a just a group of red trailers. The kids walk outside between periods.

There are no small classes, and there aren't laptops on every desk. Vanderhoek hopes the school moves to a better building some day. But, to him, what matters is having top teachers in the classroom, so that’s where the money goes. 

In Kristen VanOllefen’s music class, there are also lessons in vocabulary and math. And Van Ollefen's job doesn't stop at the classroom. Last year, she also administered state achievement tests. This year, she has a different additional job. And that’s part of the secret to TEP's high pay: Most teachers are doing the work of, well, two teachers.

TEP saves money by not hiring the kind of support staff other schools have. There are no substitutes. That makes for long, demanding days. Casey Ash, for instance, is both the 8th grade math teacher and the assistant principal. “I certainly don’t think it’s the right fit for everybody,” Ash says. 

Judith LeFevre learned that lesson the hard way. She spent most of her teaching career in Arizona, where she was highly regarded, but the pay was lousy. “After 30 years, I was still making just over $40,000,” she said.

So she applied to TEP. During the year-long interview process at TEP, she was observed in the classroom several times. Many applicants also submit videos of their teaching, or samples of student work showing major improvements.

LeFevre was finally hired to teach special education, and serve as the dean of discipline. Expectations were high. She soon found that her Arizona skills weren't as effective with students in New York.

After her first year, she wasn’t asked back.

“I think the big unanswered question is 'gee, what would’ve happened the second year, now that I had those skills, and had made that improvement?'” she says. 

But for TEP founder Zeke Vanderhoek, there’s no time to wait. Teachers must bring their A-game on day one, or else.

“We give our master teachers one year to prove themselves,” Vanderhoek says. 

Teachers are judged on classroom management and student test scores. They're also evaluated by other teachers. Vanderhoek says about a quarter of them don't make it to the second year.

Michelle Fine studies urban education at the City University of New York. She says she’s “a little worried about sustainability of the model. [TEP] might, in fact, be getting highly qualified educators, but either they’re burning out, or it’s not working very well, or they’re dissatisfied," she said.

Teachers at TEP acknowledge the stress, but many insisted it’s worth it. And they commend the quality of their colleagues.

Fine says she doesn't expect the school to become a national model, even though it may work well for this one community in Washington Heights.

And even that isn't clear yet. TEP hasn’t even been open four years. And while student test scores are creeping up, it’s too early to declare it a success. 

This year, TEP’s first class of eighth graders will head off to high school. In a few years, we’ll know better if their highly paid teachers will have a lasting effect on their lives.

Ever since the Great Recession started more than five years ago, Americans have paid closer attention to how we bring in a paycheck every two weeks. But the American labor market started changing long before the financial crisis. Today we're starting a new series on Marketplace called "Disappearing Jobs" to examine the changing job market.

For the last 40 years I've been a motion picture projectionist. A film projectionist.

A friend of mine was managing a sleazy old theater called the Vagabond Theater and said "our projectionist just quit. Go in there and run it."

I didn't care about getting paid, I just wanted to go in there and do it. So for $3.50 an hour, I taught myself. I found a stable union job and I was told by my older peers that I could probably keep this job forever. I would never have to retire because it didn't require physical labor, it just required your know-how on the equipment.

Everybody in America went to the movies every week, so we were important. Also, "projectionist" was listed as the highest-paid industrial job in California. I like to remind people of that now that they're trying to pay us nothing.

Digital movies drive change
My favorite quote is still the studio executive who said "we have a robust system and we can pay any idiot $5 an hour to run it."

So why do away with the film projectors? The reason is everyone loves new technology, and now they have it.

I still intend to be the last projectionist alive. But it will be a real accident if I get more jobs.

By now you know that when you shop online, you’re being tracked. The data you hand over with every click helps e-tailers learn more about you. They use that information to do everything from recommend products you might like to tweaking prices.  Now the same thing is happening offline, too.

New "smart" security cameras can help stores do a whole lot more than stop shoplifters, says Brian Kiraly. His company, Infusion, just developed one of these cameras with Microsoft.

"What that does is a partial facial recognition. It takes cheeks, chin, eyes and basically gets gender and age," he said, demonstrating the camera at the National Retail Federation trade show in New York.

The camera records passersby, and a software program sorts them in real time, dividing them up by age category -- child, adult or senior -- and gender.

Retailers can use this information to decide what to stock, where to put it and where and how to advertise. Brick and mortar stores are hungry for all of the information they can get on their customers. The kind of information online retailers know. So many are trading security cameras in for smart cameras.

"We can actually look at your movements, such as how you go from a merchandise table in the front to a merchandise table in the back,"says Roseanne McCauley, vice president of Experian Footfall, a new business started by the big consumer credit report agencies. It supplies all kinds of foot traffic data to merchants. "Whether you go up the escalator or not. We can also do dwell time: How long did you stay in a specific area."

McCauley says big retailers like Lacoste, Crabtree and Evelyn and Adidas have used that information to improve sales and, on the whole, have seen customers spend up to 5 percent more in their stores -- huge in the slim profit margin retail business. That number could grow as retailers find new ways to step up shopper surveillance.

"The next wave of technology is mobile," explains McCauley. Experian is teaming up with cell phone companies to take customer tracking to the next level. When you walk into a participating store, your cell phone company will tell Experian who you are, Experian will tap into the vast pool of data it has on you -- things like age and credit history. Then, without telling stores who you are, Experian will hand some of that information over to stores.

"There are all sorts of privacy issues around cell phone data, so no one is able to take a cell phone number and bring it to a person," says McCauley. "But what we can do is profile groups of people and give people a demographic code."

Experian assigns shoppers one of 60 consumer profiles, such as Dream Weaver, people with six figure salaries and a penchant for tech gadgets, or Struggling City Center, people on tight budgets, who tend to like watching talk shows.

Which consumer profile do you fit? Check out Experian's breakdowns here.

Experian and Verizon are both piloting programs that could tell retailers even more.

"Through wireless technology, you can get the pattern of the person when they left the house, drove to the mall and the stores they went to," says McCauley.

We can expect to see retailers doing more and more of this, says Joseph Turow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School For Communication and author of "The Daily You: How The New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity And Your Worth."

"We are moving into a world where companies are going to judge us by our data," says Turow. "We will have people being put into what I call reputation silos, which would tell the store, 'This person is more likely to buy the cheap stuff and here’s the person who buys the premium stuff.'"

If you’re suddenly feeling the urge to wear a ski mask everywhere and ditch your phone,  you’re having exactly the reaction retailers are worried about, says digital marketing consultant Will Riegel.

"Every single day, people in data, are concerned about the ‘creep’ factor," he says.

Riegel says one way to target shoppers without freaking them out is to use loyalty programs, where customers essentially volunteer to have their purchases tracked in exchange for relevant discounts. The next stage would be to embed tracking chips in, say, your Target card.

"When you walk into a store, an in-store advertisement will adjust to say, 'Hey, you haven’t picked up Tide recently. It’s been over a month. Your clothes getting dirty? Check out aisle number 7,'" explains Riegel.

Of course, that’s at least a few years away.

For now, cameras are just starting to be able to separate boys from girls, which is proving challenging enough. Infusion's camera thought I was a man until I took my hair out of a bun.

Now that all's said and done, the game has been played, millions of people watched and companies spent millions of dollars on television ads, all lot of what people are talking about is a tweet. A spur of the moment -- opportunistic, even --  tweet from Oreo soon after some of the power went out at the Superdome during the Super Bowl, pointing out that you can still dunk in the dark.

It seemed like a whole lot of sound and fury for a single tweet to be the thing that lingers after the Super Bowl, so we called up Ben Winkler. He's the chief digital officer at OMD, an ad agency in New York.

Oreo's tweet, said Winkler, was lightning in a bottle but the company spent months cultivating a Twitter following.

"Oreo has been tweeting and posting culturally relevant ads for six months, every day of the week," he said, noting that Oreo wouldn't have had its Twitter moment if it hadn't paid millions of dollars for TV spot that ran during the Super Bowl.

Still, despite the buzz it got, those tweets and re-tweets pale in comparison to the 112 million people watching the Super Bowl on TV. He added that 6 out of 7 people on the Internet don't use Twitter, and that doesn't even speak to the many Americans who aren't even on the web.

You know it’s rough when an investment club stops investing. That’s in large part what happened in recent years at Gene Senter’s Dayton, Ohio, club. Last year, stocks accounted for only around half their roughly $100,000 portfolio. Spooked by the financial downturn, the mostly retired club members had moved the money to safer waters.

Their skittishness about stocks -- even as the S&P and Dow Jones Industrial Average recently hit multi-year highs -- reflects the thinking of a lot of American small investors. They know the importance of stocks in a portfolio, but worry about losing their shirts if the current bull market turns south.

Americans are returning to stocks, but slowly. Mutual fund tracking firm Lipper says that in 2013, stock funds have taken in $20.7 billion more than investors have pulled out. But that’s tip money compared to the far greater amounts investors took out in recent years, often at a loss. Wounds from the latest downturn are still fresh for many Americans.

“They got crushed in the crisis and they just have not come back,” says Tom Roseen, who heads Lipper’s research services.

He adds that many investors also got burned in the dot-com meltdown.

Washington State University finance professor John Nofsinger studies investor psychology. No matter how much media hype kicks up around a rising market, he says it’s not enough to distract investors from what’s happening in their lives.

“People still know friends or relatives that are either out of work or trying to get a better job or those kinds of things and so we’re still a little cautious,” Nofsinger says. “But now we’re at least positive cautious.”

“Positive cautious” is a far cry from enthusiastic. But that may be all the market can ask for from ordinary Americans whose retirement savings have been battered.

As for the Ohio investment club, it’s now wading back into stocks. Members are frustrated with the paltry returns of safe spots like money market funds. At their meeting last month, they took more than half of the cash that was on the sidelines and bought a new batch of stocks.

“We decided that we are investors and we want to be in there,” Senter explains. “Because you’re not getting anything with cash.”

Kai Ryssdal: The Dow Industrials spent most of last week dancing around the 14,000 mark. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq were doin' fine as well. Small investors who'd largely bailed out of stocks during the financial crisis started gingerly returning during weeks of encouraging economic and corporate news.

And then, today. The Dow's first triple-digit loss of the year. Marketplace's Mark Garrison looked into why jitters continue as apparently good news abounds.

Mark Garrison: You know it’s rough when an investment club stops investing. That’s in large part what happened in recent years at Gene Senter’s Dayton, Ohio club. Last year, stocks accounted for only around half their roughly $100-thousand dollar portfolio. But at their meeting last month, they added a large batch of stocks.

Gene Senter: We decided that we are investors and we want to be in there, because you’re not getting anything with cash.

And there’s evidence more Americans are doing the same thing, moving away from safe, but low-return spots like money market funds. Mutual fund tracking firm Lipper says stock funds have taken in more than $20-billion dollars this year. But that’s tip money compared to what people took out in recent years, often at a loss.

Tom Roseen: They got crushed in the crisis and they just have not come back into there.

Lipper’s Tom Roseen adds many investors also got mixed up in the dot-com meltdown.

Roseen: Really I think people were burned and they’ve been burned twice in a decade.

Washington State University finance professor John Nofsinger studies investor psychology. No matter how much media hype kicks up around a rising market, it’s not enough to distract investors from what’s happening in their lives.

John Nofsinger: People still know friends or relatives that are either out of work or trying to get a better job or those kinds of things and so we’re still a little cautious. But now we’re at least positive cautious.

“Positive cautious” is a far cry from enthusiastic. But that may be all the market can ask for from ordinary Americans whose retirement savings have been battered. In New York, I'm Mark Garrison, for Marketplace.

You may have caught the news that McDonald's has a new item called Fish McBites. It's the second seafood offering from the fast-food giant. The first being, of course, the Filet-O-Fish. That classic with the fried fish, steamed bun, American cheese and tartar sauce was added nationally in 1965, a way to lure Catholics who didn't eat meat on Fridays. So it's no surprise Fish McBites are debuting near the start of Lent.

Filet-O-Fish has never outsold burgers at McDonald's, but the company is one of the largest buyers of fish in the United States, says Kerry Coughlin, a regional director with the Marine Stewardship Council. The council recently certified all McDonald's fish as sustainable. This morning, she says, several council staff brought in their wrappers from the sandwich and the cardboard boxes of the new Fish McBites, to show off the "wild-caught Alaskan pollock" language on the packaging.

Coughlin says the Alaskan fishery is sustainable because the managers make sure the boats don't catch too much, too fast.

"Ensuring that they will have a supply of fish to keep that business going," she says.

In addition to the green halo, fish gives McDonalds another reputation boost with moms, says marketing analyst Maria Bailey.

"Millenial moms like to have their children have a broader range of flavors and tastes in their diet," she says.

They might see a McBites Happy Meal as a way to introduce the fish flavor. Plus she finds these younger moms tend to me more conscious of health. Sure it's battered, fried fish, but compared to rumors and concerns over beef (remember "pink slime"?), it's better.

"They want to keep their children safe, and fish seems like a safer route," Bailey says.

A Fish McBites Happy Meal has 135 calories less than a cheeseburger meal. However, if you pick up another seasonal item on the menu, the oh-so-popular Shamrock Shake, it probably negates any health savings.

The U.S.  Department of Justice -- along with the attorneys general in many states -- are reportedly set to file civil charges against the credit rating agency Standard & Poor's. The suit, which could be filed as early as this week, would allege that S&P fraudulently rated mortgage bonds in the lead up to the financial crisis.

S&P responded to news of the civil suit with a statement:

A DOJ lawsuit would be entirely without factual or legal merit. It would disregard the central facts that S&P reviewed the same subprime mortgage data as the rest of the market -- including U.S. Government officials who in 2007 publicly stated that problems in the subprime market appeared to be contained -- and that every CDO that DOJ has cited to us also independently received the same rating from another rating agency.

Since the financial crisis, critics have said the U.S. government failed to prosecute or punish Wall Street for many of the actions that led up to the crisis. Government prosecutors have argued that misdeeds in this arena are hard to prove.

"The behavior that brought the fiscal crisis was risky and stupid but perhaps not illegal," said Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Perez, who is covering the story. And S&P may be the first named in a suit, but they won't be the last. Perez says this is probably just beginning of a wider effort.

But how successful will it be? Ratings agencies in the past have cited the First Amendment -- that they have the right to say whatever they like about bonds. But that might not apply in the case of fraud -- which might be what the Justice Department will argue.

So we begin this Monday with a stock quote: ticker symbol MHP. The McGraw Hill Companies, Incorporated. Off almost 14 percent at the close -- and you can blame it all on McGraw Hill’s wholly owned subsidiary, the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's.

There are reports today that the Department of Justice and a whole mess of state attorneys general are set to file suit -- perhaps this week -- charging S&P with fraudulently rating mortgage bonds in the lead up to the financial crisis.

Evan Perez is covering the story for the Wall Street Journal. So we asked him -- why'd it take so long?

Perez says the Department of Justice has felt pressure since the financial crisis of 2008 to bring criminal charges against those responsible. "The behavior that brought the fiscal crisis was risky and stupid but perhaps not illegal."

But how successful will it be? Ratings agencies in the past have cited the First Amendment -- that they have the right to say whatever they like about bonds. But that might not apply in the case of fraud -- which might be what the Justice Department will argue.

S&P has responded to news of the civil suit with a statement:

A DOJ lawsuit would be entirely without factual or legal merit. It would disregard the central facts that S&P reviewed the same subprime mortgage data as the rest of the market -- including U.S. Government officials who in 2007 publicly stated that problems in the subprime market appeared to be contained -- and that every CDO that DOJ has cited to us also independently received the same rating from another rating agency.

And S&P may be the first named in a suit, but they won't be the last. Perez says this is probably just beginning of a wider effort.

We'll bet that if you have a conversation about the Superbowl this morning, it won't be about the Ravens or the commercials you saw. It'll be about the fact that the power went out right in the middle of TV's biggest night. But could that dark moment in football history  turn out to be a bright spot for social media?

The British treasury secretary has given an ultimatum to the country's banks: Obey new rules or be broken up. Should the U.S. do the same?

A new documentary airs tonight on CNBC about one of the riskiest bets out there. It's not a stock, or a bond, or a startup company. It's the business of theater on Broadway. CNBC host Maria Bartiromo joins us for a preview of the program, Betting Big on Broadway.

And finally, San Francisco will not be getting a Superbowl trophy, but it is the beneficiary of a PR stunt by Jell-O, which is offering the city free pudding today. And for fans that don't like Jell-O, the company is offering an app for Google Chrome that will block words and images related to Baltimore with puppies.

After a week of near-record highs, Wall Street appears worried again -- one of the culprits may be new concerns about the European debt crisis, especially over issues in Spain or Greece.

In Spain, there are worries about a corruption scandal that may threaten the government.

"There are still fundamental problems in some of these countries," says Julia Coronado, chief economist with the investment bank BNP Paribas. "Spain is in a tough spot. The economy is in terrible shape, people are suffering. If there is a sense that the government isn't contributing their fair share to the pain -- that threatens the stability of the agreements that have been reached."

When it comes to Sunday night’s Super Bowl, chances are it won’t be remembered as the year of the Ravens. Instead, it’s being dubbed the "Night the Lights Went Out in New Orleans."

The Superdome says a circuit breaker sensed an overload and shut down several systems, putting the game on hold for more than 30 minutes. But that dark moment in football history is turning out to be a bright spot for social media.

Take for example Oreo. The company paid an estimated $4 million for a 30-second ad during the game. But when the power went out, it became an unanticipated chance again get its name out there.

“We saw an opportunity, and we quickly developed an image and caption within minutes,” says Oreo’s Vice President of Cookies Lisa Mann.

Oreo was the first advertiser to tweet a response, getting it out in something like four minutes. The tweet featured a pic of a cookie on a darkened background with the caption “You can still dunk in the dark.” 

“I mean it was explosive,” says Jed Williams, senior analyst at ad firm BIA/Kelsey. “It may have been the low point for the SuperBowl, but it was the high mark for the consumption of the event.”

Williams says companies will use last night’s outage as a study in the relationship between Super Bowl ads and social media.

“I think advertisers are going to hardly worry about this,” says JC Bradbury, a sports marketing professor at Kennesaw State University.

Bradbury says don’t expect companies to stop paying those high prices for ads just because of last night’s glitch.

“Television goes out all the time,” says Bradbury. “Television has ways to deal with this. And it’s still one of the most watched programs in the entire country.”

And if an outage happens again, pharmacy chain Walgreens tweeted it’s ready: “We do carry candles.”

When it comes to Sunday night’s Super Bowl, chances are it won’t be remembered as the year of the Ravens. Instead, it’s being dubbed the "Night the Lights Went Out in New Orleans."

The Superdome says a circuit breaker sensed an overload and shut down several systems, putting the game on hold for more than 30 minutes. But that dark moment in football history is turning out to be a bright spot for social media.

Take for example Oreo. The company paid an estimated $4 million for a 30-second ad during the game. But when the power went out, it became an unanticipated chance again get its name out there.

“We saw an opportunity, and we quickly developed an image and caption within minutes,” says Oreo’s Vice President of Cookies Lisa Mann.

Oreo was the first advertiser to tweet a response, getting it out in something like four minutes. The tweet featured a pic of a cookie on a darkened background with the caption “You can still dunk in the dark.” 

“I mean it was explosive,” says Jed Williams, senior analyst at ad firm BIA/Kelsey. “It may have been the low point for the SuperBowl, but it was the high mark for the consumption of the event.”

Williams says companies will use last night’s outage as a study in the relationship between Super Bowl ads and social media.

“I think advertisers are going to hardly worry about this,” says JC Bradbury, a sports marketing professor at Kennesaw State University.

Bradbury says don’t expect companies to stop paying those high prices for ads just because of last night’s glitch.

“Television goes out all the time,” says Bradbury. “Television has ways to deal with this. And it’s still one of the most watched programs in the entire country.”

And if an outage happens again, pharmacy chain Walgreens tweeted it’s ready: “We do carry candles.”

I'm in Chicago checking out some stadium seats for a Cubs baseball game -- the thing is, these seats aren't actually part of Wrigley Field. They are across the street on top of a private rooftop. At the height of baseball season, it can cost about $100 to watch a game from here. But watching trains go by might be all fans can do from here if the Cubs put up two big billboards in the outfield.

The team's owners, the Ricketts family, have a $300 million proposal to make structural updates while preserving Wrigley's trademark ivy walls and old, manual scoreboard.

Beth Murphy owns a building across from Wrigley. She says theres's no need to block a neighborhood institution.

"There is a reason that the Cubs pull when they have losing season -- and we've had quite a few in a row now. There's a reason. And I believe it's a synergy between the neighborhood and the ball park," says Murphy.

The Cubs say they're just trying to fund the ballpark's renovation without using any taxpayer dollars.

"All the rooftops are saying is they want to continue to make money selling tickets to a product for which they have to make not one penny of investment," says Dennis Culloton, a spokesman for the Ricketts family.

The rooftop owners do give some money to the Cubs, about 17 percent a year. But these billboards would drive them out of business. So the neighbors are suggesting a series of digital rooftop signs with all revenue going to the Cubs and the city.

"Their plan would sound good if it were at all based in reality to have seven electronic billboards put up in the Lakeview community, sort of giving it a Time Square feel," says Culloton.

He says the Cubs' advertising partners are more interested in being in the park than out. But, the Cubs haven't entirely rejected the rooftop idea. Culloton says the team is still open to ideas, it's just that things need to get moving, fast. The Cubs expect to have a done deal by the middle of February.

If you filled up your car at a gas station this weekend, you probably noticed that it cost you a bit more than it did the last time you were at the pump. The average price for a gallon of gas is about 13 cents higher than it was two weeks ago. Several factors contributed to that rise.

One of those factors -- refineries are transitioning from producing cheaper winter-blend to more expensive summer-blend gasoline. Refineries also use this time of year to do maintenance on their facilities, which means they produce less gas, lowering supply.

"Well, basically, they are cleaning their machines and making sure everything is functioning properly ahead of the high demand season," says Gregory Dacko, a senior economist at IHS. Yet another reason for the higher price at the pump, says Dacko, is cutbacks in production by OPEC.

But the single biggest factor is the price of crude oil. "The price of crude oil makes up about 66 percent of the price of a gallon of gasoline" says Avery Ash, a spokesperson for AAA.

Crude oil is up by 14 percent since mid-December. Analysts don't expect prices to rise quite as fast as they did this time last year. But last Friday did mark the first time in 2013 that the national average price of a gallon of gas was higher than that same day in 2012.

San Francisco will not be getting a Superbowl trophy, but it is the beneficiary of a PR stunt by Jell-O, which is offering the city free pudding today. And for fans that don't like Jell-O, the company is offering an app for Google Chrome that will block words and images related to Baltimore with puppies.

This final note today, which comes with the observation that the price of a barrel of crude oil has been rising for two straight months. The Energy Department said today the average American household now spends $2,900 a year on gas. That's just under 4 percent of household income, which is, in turn, the most we've spent on gas in 30 years.

It's all about the costs of efficiency, really. Even though our cars get more miles per gallon, we're driving more.

Oh, and gas is expensive.

A group of investors wants to take Dell private. Michael Dell, the computer company's founder and chief executive, has been in talks with banks, a private equity firm and Microsoft.

"You could say Microsoft is doing this for selfish reasons," say James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research. He says Microsoft wants to survive.

"Microsoft cares about Dell because they need to have enough companies putting enough effort into making Windows-based devices."

And by investing in Dell, Microsoft could encourage that. Jayson Noland, an IT analyst with Baird, says this is Microsoft acknowledging the tech landscape has changed.

"We've seen so much innovation in consumer electronics -- specifically smart phones and tablets -- and the PC hasn't kept up."

Forrester's James McQuivey says Microsoft has begun to branch out. It used to be just a software company.

"There is a lot of risk in Microsoft putting its hand on the hardware business." But, he says, there'd be a lot more risk if it didn't.

A new documentary airs tonight on CNBC about one of the riskiest bets out there. It's not a stock, or a bond, or a startup company. It's the business of theater on Broadway.

According to Maria Bartiromo, the creator of the documentary "Betting Big on Broadway", 8 out of 10 shows lose money.

"It's tough to actually break out and make money on Broadway," says Bartiromo, "I think investors do it because they love it as opposed to doing it because they think they are going to have an overnight success."

Though Broadway has seen it's fair share of highly successful shows, such as Phantom of the Opera and The Lion King, they are the exceptions says Bartiromo.

So what makes some shows enduring classics while others fizzle out?

"I think it's important to connect with audiences, to entertain. Yes, you want to have a show that has lots of glitz and glamour and great songs, but at the same time, a story is always something that will connect with people," says Bartiromo.