Category Archives: Business

Only Robinson Crusoe did it alone — and then only until Friday came along

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And note that not even he made the musket, or the hatchet.

Since I’m not at the paper any more, it fell to Cindi Scoppe to write this column that ran today, basically addressing the orgy of indignation among the libertarians who call themselves conservatives over President Obama’s unfortunate choice of words in explaining the painfully obvious fact that practically no one in our crowded, interdependent world achieves anything worthwhile alone:

A LOT OF what the president says and does is ripe for criticism. But what he said the other day about no one being an island, about how our parents and our communities and our teachers and mentors and, yes, our government all contributed to our success is not one of those things.

If you’re wondering who in the world would criticize such obvious commentary, it’s because you don’t recognize the full context of that bizarre, ridiculous, one hopes bungled quote that came in the middle of it: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”…

Of course business owners built their businesses — unless they inherited them or bought them from someone who did. Their initiative and hard work and luck set them apart.

As important as parents are to our success, one sibling can create a multi-billion-dollar business while another languishes on welfare. As much as we need good teachers, even the best have some students who drop out of school. Although government policy can give some businesses a leg up, others can go bankrupt even with too-generous government grants.

That’s because some people have initiative, and some do not. Some people are creative, and some are not. Some people are smart, and some are not. And while the schools can affect which group any individual is in, government does not eliminate those basic differences.

At the same time though, the vast majority of people who own businesses would not have been able to do that if we didn’t have a monetary system and a court system and roads and police and other functions of government. The vast majority of people who have any sort of success would not have it in a world without government. In fact, they wouldn’t have it if not for the peculiar kind of government that our country embraced from the start: self-government.

Can, and should, our government be more efficient? Of course so. Is there room to debate whether the government should bail out the banks or the auto industry or help pay for our medical care? By all means. Is there a legitimate question as to whether taxes are too high or too low? Certainly.

But the vast majority of Americans would not have the lives we take for granted — lives that are inconceivably luxurious compared to the lives lived by the overwhelming majority of people throughout human history — if it weren’t for our flawed but better-than-any-alternatives government.

Seems to me Cindi was being slightly over-cautious in saying that only “the vast majority of people” would have gotten nowhere without the basic conditions — civil order, rule of law, basic infrastructure — that are provided through the processes we call “government.” I suppose there are some to whom that doesn’t apply, but very few. It’s even harder to think of anyone who accomplished anything worthwhile completely and utterly alone — without anyone, whether you’re talking about government or not.

I suppose there’s Robinson Crusoe — that is, until Friday came along. This reminds me of an economics exercise we did in high school. We had to suppose we were stranded on a desert island, and we had to allocate our resources — which included time, and effort — so as to survive. This much time building a shelter out of available materials meant that much less time spent gathering food. X amount of time spent making a tool that would facilitate building that shelter cuts the construction time, leaving more time to weave a net to make fishing easier, etc.

A castaway who is completely alone can create something useful — to him, anyway — without anyone else’s involvement. But a business, in our crowded society? Well, to start with, you have to have customers. And then, depending on your business, there are suppliers, and vendors providing services that it would be inefficient to perform yourself. And as you grow, there are employees who become essential to your further growth, etc. Without the willing participation of those often vast networks of people, you can work and create all you want, but you’re not getting anywhere.

The extreme libertarians would put government in another category from just “people.” But in our system, the government and the people are the same thing. “Government” is just the word for the set of arrangements that we have among us, the people, for handling certain things that are best handled that way, such as building roads or deepening a port or passing and enforcing the laws without which the concept of private property is meaningless.

In fact, if I had a quibble with Cindi’s column, it would be that, in her litany of things for which government is essential, she kept referring to government as “it.” As in, “It creates and maintains a monetary system,” and “It provides a civil justice system…”

Given the screwy way so many of our neighbors these days think of government, that can be misunderstood as government being some separate entity that provides certain things to us, the people. But it’s not that at all. A better word than “it” would be “we,” because government is simply the process through which we create and maintain a monetary system, provide a civil justice system, and so forth.

Government does not give or take away. It’s just the arrangements through which we, the people, do certain things that we decide, through our system of representative democracy, are best done that way.

Shawarma: The lunch of superheroes

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The above sign, spotted today at Al Amir on Main St., got me to thinking of “The Avengers.”

Tony Stark: You ever try shawarma?

SPOILER ALERT! OK, not really, because it reveals nothing about the plot, although it will ruin a tiny little fun surprise. It’s just one of those little lagniappe things at the end of the credits. Although, come to think of it, this does tell you that all the heroes survive the movie, so SPOILER ALERT!

At the end of the climactic battle, as he’s lying dazed among the rubble, Robert Downey Jr., who as Iron Man has 90 percent of the movie’s good lines, reassures his comrades that he is alive by saying offhandedly, “You ever try shawarma? There’s a shawarma joint about two blocks from here. I don’t know what it is, but I wanna try it.”

Then, the fun part: After all the credits — apparently, Joss Whedon needed the help of about 3.7 million people to make this flick — you see the exhausted heroes lounging, disheveled, around a table in the shawarma joint, slowly munching away in complete silence. This continues for more than 30 seconds, as a restaurant employee sweeps up in the background.

This sort of backhanded, non-branded little product placement has apparently launched a bit of a shawarma craze:

Those of you still reading will likely recall Tony Stark’s fascination with shawarma toward the end of the film. During the climactic battle, Stark suggests the team adjourn to a nearby restaurant to try the dish, which Wikipedia describes as “a pita bread sandwich or wrap” filled with spit-roasted meat (commonly lamb, goat, chicken or a mixture of various meats). At the very, very end of the film, after the credits have rolled, we witness the superhero team sitting at a table, silently eating their shawarma for a surprisingly long amount of time.

Now, based on that short in-joke, TMZ claims that the Los Angeles shawarma industry has seen a massive spike in popularity since the release of the film. “At Ro Ro’s Chicken — a famed Lebanese joint in Hollywood — the manager says shawarma sales jumped 80% in the days after the movie opened,” the gossip site claims, while saying that a number of other Lebanese restaurants offered similar results…

That’s fine. Just as long as they don’t start rebranding it the Super-Gyro…

Some views of the Moore School that is to be

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This is a story from the “drive-by” beat that I always wanted The State to create, but it never did. The idea would have been to satisfy people’s curiosity about things they drive by every day and wonder about. Today, we answer the question of, “What’s that thing coming out of that hole in the ground next to the Carolina Coliseum?”

That was the subject of Hildy Teegen’s talk today to the Columbia Rotary Club. (Disclosure, to the extent that it means anything: I invited Hildy to speak to the club, and introduced her.)

Speaking to Rotary. That's Club President J.T. Gandolfo in the foreground.

It’s the new Moore School of Business, of which Dr. Teegen is the dean. It’s intended, among other things, as the gateway to the Innovista, and should go a long way toward helping people understand that Innovista is NOT those two buildings everybody keeps obsessing over, but will constitute a transformation for that whole underdeveloped urban expanse from this location down to the river.

Innovista is conceived around the “live, work, play” concept, and the new Moore school has been designed to complement that. The key word Hildy keeps using to describe it is “permeable.” That goes from the literal sense of the rooftop garden, to the fact that it will be open to the whole community 24/7. In fact, she pointed out, it is architecturally impossible to close off the building.

One of the goals is for the building to achieve “net-zero” status, meaning its energy and carbon impact on the surrounding community will be nonexistent.

The building, which is to be completed in December 2013, will house the nation’s No. 1 international business master’s program and all of the school’s other business education programs — such as the night school that has just entered the top 25 in the U.S — except, of course the multiple distance-learning opportunities the school offers across SC and in Charlotte.

You can see the entire PowerPoint presentation here. And here are some pictures:

Silly me, for thinking DeMint cared what I thought

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Couldn’t help responding to Jim DeMint today when he Tweeted,

My response was in two parts. First, I answered his question: Yes!

I had read with interest the top story in The Wall Street Journal this morning, which said that the long logjam on national legislation to require online businesses to pay sales taxes just like their bricks-and-mortar competitors may finally have broken:

Republican governors, eager for new revenue to ease budget strains, are dropping their longtime opposition to imposing sales taxes on online purchases, a significant political shift that could soon bring an end to tax-free sales on the Internet.

Conservative governors, joining their Democratic counterparts, have been making deals with online retail giant Amazon.com AMZN -1.09% to collect state sales taxes. The movement picked up an important ally when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie—widely mentioned as a potential vice-presidential candidate—recently reached an agreement under which Amazon would collect sales taxes on his state’s online purchases in exchange for locating distribution facilities there.

Mr. Christie called taxation of online sales “an important issue to all the nation’s governors” and endorsed federal legislation giving all states taxing authority.

This should lead to quick resolution, in a rational universe, since Amazon has said they support a national solution. And that’s very good news for states like South Carolina, which have unwisely shifted so much of their tax burdens to sales taxes just as conventional, “analog” store sales have been drying up.

I was particularly interested because the change that had come about was that Republican governors, such as Chris Christie, saw the need to do something about the fact that their states’ coffers had been depleted by the shift of our economy to online shopping.

It caused me to wonder what it would be like to have a real conservative Republican governor, rather than a darling of the Tea Party or the Club for Growth, one who — like any real conservative — believes in responsible governance, one who sees his or her role as a steward of the state’s public sector.

And then I remembered, that I did experience that, for years, when Lamar Alexander was governor in Tennessee. And so it is fitting that Lamar is the senator pushing this legislation:

Seizing on the recent political shift, Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, and co-sponsors from both parties are attempting to speed up action on a bill they wrote to give states authority to compel online companies to collect sales taxes.

One of the co-sponsors, Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.,) said, “It gets down to a basic issue…of simple fairness for small businesses that create jobs and opportunities all across America. And with the sales taxes they collect, they provide for local police and firemen, for the sewers and streets.”…

Oh, but wait… as soon as I said, Yes!, I realized that Sen. DeMint’s question was purely rhetorical, meant only to set up his announcement that he’s leaping into the fray to fight against common sense.

You can always rely on Jim DeMint. Unfortunately.

Silly me, for thinking Jim DeMint cared what I thought.

What, Me Worry about what YOU think?/File photo from an editorial board meeting in 2007.

Onion gets the scoop on The Daily Planet

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This was a mildly amusing piece in The Onion yesterday:

NEW YORK—Frustrated fans of the Superman comic book said Monday the continued financial stability and cultural relevance of the series’ Daily Planet newspaper is now the most unrealistic part of its universe and an annoying distraction that has ruined their reading experience.

While they acknowledged that enjoying the adventures of a superhero who can fly, lift a bus over his head, and shoot beams of intense heat from his eyes requires some suspension of disbelief, longtime fans told reporters they simply could not accept a daily metropolitan newspaper still thriving in the media landscape of 2012.

“I can play along with Superman using a steel girder to swat someone into outer space, but I just can’t get past the idea that The Daily Planet still occupies one of the largest skyscrapers in all of Metropolis and is totally impervious to newsroom layoffs or dwindling home subscriptions,” said comics blogger Marc Daigle, adding that it was impossible for him to even look at Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, without immediately thinking he would have been replaced long ago by a freelancer who gets paid nine cents a word and receives no health benefits. “Every time The Daily Planetshows up, I just get taken out of the story completely. I usually flip ahead to Superman freezing a volcano with his breath or something.”…

I say “mildly” because the idea of a health Daily Planet was sufficiently absurd that it was hard to make fun of effectively.

One last excerpt:

“The least they could do is have [Daily Planet editor-in-chief] Perry White be forced into retirement by an MBA 25 years his junior,” Taft continued. “It’d be a start.”

See? Too real, too true, too matter-of-fact to be funny.

Perry! Great Caesar’s Ghost!

Only 80,000 — low jobs figure depresses markets, casts pall on Obama’s re-election

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No virtual front page today, because there’s not much I’d willingly put on a front page. The biggest story of the day by far is the softer-than-expected jobs numbers — which, combined with bad news out of Spain, has sent global markets plunging.

(The only thing competing for the front with that is Hillary Clinton talking tough to China and Russia about Syria. I might do a separate post about that.)

The BBC does the basic overview:

US shares have fallen after official data showed firms had created only 80,000 new jobs in June, leaving the jobless rate unchanged at 8.2%.

Job creation remains below the 100,000 judged necessary by the Federal Reserve for a stable job market, according to the US Labor Department.

Shares slipped after the news, with the opening Dow Jones index falling 1%.

President Barack Obama said the rise in employment was “a step in the right direction”.

Campaigning in the swing state of Ohio on Friday, President Obama acknowledged that “it’s still tough out there” for ordinary Americans…

Republican White House candidate Mitt Romney said from Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, that the jobs data underlined the need for a new president, adding “this kick in the gut has got to end”…

Other angles include:

  1. String of Weak Jobs Reports Likely to Set Tone for Voters (NYT)
  2. Obama Promotes a Long View on Jobs (NYT)
  3. Jobs Report And Politics: The Monthly Spin Cycle (NPR)
  4. Jobs report makes it tougher for Obama to tout progress (WashPost)

As you can see, the political angle is getting heavy play. Although the Post did manage to show some concern for the actual economy in its lede headline: Weak jobs report adds to worry of faltering recovery.

The European problems feeding into the drop in markets is at least briefly discussed in this WSJ story. Here’s some more, courtesy of The Guardian.

Post-newspaper retail environment born in 1962

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This morning was one of those moments when several threads came together for me, providing a small insight into the shape of the world in which we live.

It’s related to a moment of revelation I experienced in about 1996. I was attending one of a series of monthly meetings that our then-new publisher, Fred Mott, had instituted to brief employees in general about the state of the business side of the newspaper. I was probably sitting there trying not to let my eyes glaze over too obviously when he said something that cut through. Something that should have been obvious, but was not until that moment.

He observed — I forget exactly how he said it, but this was what I got out of it — that Walmart had shifted the ground upon which the business model of newspapers had been built. The key element was “everyday low prices.” Everyone knew that Walmart was the place to get the lowest prices available locally on anything they sold. And they sold everything. If everyone knows that you have low prices every day — and not now and then, in the form of sales events — you have nothing to communicate, on a regular basis, through advertising.

To show how that affected but one of the newspaper industry’s key advertising constituencies… people were used to reading about all the grocery stores’ specials — which changed if not day to day, then at least week to week — in the newspaper. But what’s the point in that if you can get all those same groceries — same brands and everything — cheaper at Walmart? And every day. So beyond some general branding, which it does mainly through television, reminding people of said everyday low prices, what does Walmart have to communicate? There is no news to pass on. That gives it yet another competitive advantage over those regular advertisers, because it saves the ad costs. To try to compete, those advertisers cut back on their ad budgets, and so forth.

And since Walmart sells practically everything a mass market wants, there is no retailing area unaffected. Department stores, appliance stores, clothing stores — everybody is competing against an adversary that doesn’t have to advertise to the extent that they traditionally had done.

That was just a piece of what was strangling newspapers, but a significant piece. Hence the expense cutbacks and hiring freezes that were already a monotonous part of newspaper life. The next year, Fred made me his editorial page editor, and shortly thereafter, as a measure of his confidence in me and his perception of the importance of the editorial mission, I was able to grow my department by one FTE. That was it. From then on, every budget year was an exercise in doing it with less. And less. And less. Until, two publishers later, it was decided to do without me.

But where did Walmart come from?

I got to thinking about that this morning. I was reading, in the WSJ, an oped piece about Eugene Ferkauf, who recently died at the age of 91.

In the postwar years, he pioneered discounting through his chain of stores called E.J. Korvette. This required challenging the “fair trade” price-fixing laws then in place in many states:

Retail price-fixing in the United States—often packaged for popular consumption as “fair-trade” laws—was a Depression-era concoction. Launched in California in 1931, it was quickly copied by state legislatures across the country. These statutes were premised on the idea that manufacturers retain a legal interest in the price of their products even after actual ownership has moved downstream to retailers. The laws were written so that once a single retailer in a fair-trade state agreed to observe the manufacturer’s proposed retail price list, it would in effect impose those prices on all other retailers in the state.

Conceived as a means of protecting small, independent merchants against predatory chains, fair-trade laws were pushed through state houses by legislators beholden to the influential retail chambers of commerce. The big manufacturers, especially appliance makers like GE, Westinghouse, RCA and Motorola, usually lent tacit support. It was easier for them to deal with a multitude of small customers through their wholesalers than to directly confront retailers big enough to muscle them for price concessions and promotional allowances…

I had never heard of E.J. Korvette stores, but I got to thinking, when was the first time I experienced discount store shopping? I realized that it was when we moved to New Orleans in 1965, after having lived in South America since late 1962. One of the elements of modern American culture that made an impression on me that year was the local Woolco store, a short drive from my home.

Anybody remember Woolco? They went out of business for good in the 80s, but this one was thriving in 1965.

I looked it up on Wiki, and found that Woolco was founded in 1962. This made me curious, and I looked to see when Kmart was founded. 1962. When did the first Walmart open? As it happens, 1962.

Then there was this passage in the oped piece this morning about Ferkauf:

In the end, the demise of fair-trade laws didn’t help E.J. Korvette. Ventures into high-end audio, home furnishings, soft goods and even supermarkets made E.J. Korvette considerably bigger but also shakier financially. In July 1962, Ferkauf was on the cover of Time magazine, hailed as the PiedPiper of the new consumer-centered retailing. Four years later he was ejected from his company, which by 1980 went into final bankruptcy. Ferkauf’s legacy, though, was secure. He had finally killed off legally protected price fixing.

Something about that year. A cusp of sorts. A changing of the guard, as retailing pivoted.

In his awesome book The Catalog of Cool (and if you can lay hands on a copy, you should buy it — although you may want to go the used route, since Amazon prices new copies at $127 and more), Gene Sculatti published an essay titled “The Last Good Year.” An excerpt:

Sixty-two seems, in retrospect, a year when the singular naivete of the spanking new decade was at its guileless height, with only the vaguest, most indistinct hints of the agonies and ecstasies to come marring the fresh-scrubbed, if slightly sallow complexion of the times. On the first day of that year, the Federal Reserve raised the maximum interest on savings accounts to 4 percent while “The Twist” was sweeping the nation. A month later “Duke of Earl” was topping the charts, and John Glenn was orbiting the good, green globe. That spring Wilt Chamberlain set the NBA record by scoring 100 points in a single game and West Side Story won the Oscar for Best Picture. The Seattle World’s Fair opened, followed five weeks later by the deployment of five thousand U.S. troops in Thailand. Dick Van Dyke and The Defenders won Emmys, and Adolph Eichman got his neck stretched. By that summer, the Supreme Court had banned prayer in public school, Algeria went indy, and Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose…

No mention of a major shift in retailing, though, as I recall.

One last tidbit, which you may consider to be unrelated…

Recently, I picked up several old paperbacks for 50 cents each at Heroes and Dragons on Bush River Road. One of them was The Ipcress File, which is what originally turned me on to spy fiction. You may recall the 1965 film, with Michael Caine — who expressed the cooler, hipper side of the 60s, as opposed to the mass-production James Bond.

In it is a passage in which the protagonist has a conversation with an American Army general who points out that the essential difference between the United States and Europe was this: A European develops a ballpoint pen, and sells it for a couple of quid and makes a modest living from it. An American, he said, invents the same thing and sells it for 5 cents a pop and becomes a millionaire.

Where am I going with this? Well, The Ipcress File was first published in 1962.

They got a union just for SERGEANTS? Really?

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When I saw this headline at the Chicago Sun-Times site — “Ex-head of Chicago police sergeants union sentenced to 12 years in prison” — I thought what any ol’ Southern boy would think:

They got so many unions up there, they got a special one just for sergeants?

Apparently so.

Which means that those other parts of the country are… really different… from down here. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

As I’ve said before, I don’t hold with public employee unions. Public employees work for the people, not some separate private entity. That means they serve themselves as well as their friends and neighbors. Given that special relationship, there’s something really twisted about employer and employed being on opposite sides of a bargaining table. We should be able to rely on their being on the same side.

Fortunately, that’s one thing (one of the few) that I don’t have to worry about in South Carolina. We ain’t got none o’ that.

Unfortunately, we do get some of the negative effects of public employee unions here, with none of the dubious benefits. For instance… you know all that money that flows into our state from people trying to elect legislators who will undermine public education? They are to a great extent motivated by their animus toward “teacher unions.” Well, we don’t have any of those here, which is why it’s bitterly ironic that we should be a battleground for that issue (thanks in large part to Mark Sanford — his being governor persuaded those interests that South Carolina was fertile ground for their movement). The SCEA is a professional association, not a collective bargaining unit.

Today in the WSJ, there was yet another screed against teacher unions — which of course has no application to South Carolina. Sadly, too few in our state understand that, based on how many times I hear public education critics in our state moan about how the “teacher unions” stand in the way of improving education here. (I actually heard it from the lips of a Rotary speaker recently.)

Anyway, these are the things I’m thinking about as voters in Wisconsin decide whether to recall their governor over a battle about public employee unions. A fight in which we do not have a dog.

Apple, leave my Google Maps alone

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I’m really getting sick of this Total War between the big technology communities, based upon the absurd assumptions that each provider of products and services become the provider of all products and services.

It’s like all of these companies — Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and to some extent AT&T, Time Warner, Verizon, etc. — think that to survive, they must succeed in becoming Ma Bell on steroids. The old Bell monopoly only dominated telephony. Now, the quest is to dominate it all, providing all of the services once provided by separate telephone, cable, and internet providers as well as manufacturers of all of the devices used as the platforms for such services.

This, of course, is happening at the same time that the potential services to be provided are expanding at explosive rates — which you would think would make for enough business for everybody, wouldn’t you?

Now, it seems Facebook wants to put out its own phone — which to me is the height of absurdity. Why would I want one of those? It would be like, I don’t know, having an AOL phone. (I have this pet theory that Facebook is the AOL of this decade — trying to be everyone’s gateway to everything, when no one needs it to be that.)

The latest is that Apple wants to boot Google Maps from its iPhones. Which, frankly, would make me like my iPhone less:

Later this year, Apple is planning to oust Google Maps as the preloaded, default maps app from the iPhone and iPad and release a new mapping app that runs Apple’s own technology, according to current and former Apple employees. Apple could preview the new software, which will be part of its next mobile-operating system, as soon as next week at its annual developer conference in San Francisco, one person familiar with the plans says. Apple plans to encourage app developers to embed its maps inside their applications like social-networking and search services. Technology blog 9to5Mac earlier reported that Apple will launch its own maps app in its next mobile-operating system.

Apple has been hatching the plan to evict Google Maps from the iPhone for years, according to current and former Apple employees. The plan accelerated as smartphones powered by Google’s Android software overtook the iPhone in shipments…

I want to know how far Apple plans to go with it. Will it duplicate Google Maps entirely, with a fleet of street-level cameras photographing every foot of every street in the developed world? Or will it merely use mapping technology to serve its other apps, and never mind providing the full range of service provided by Google? (Actually, my preloaded Google Maps app doesn’t do street level — which strikes me as odd, because it worked on my old Blackberry.)

The WSJ indicates that Apple will add functionality that Google lacks. And since Apple is Apple, there is bound to be some gee-whiz factor built in. And beauty. If the spirit of Steve Jobs still lives in the company at all, there will be beauty.

But I have to wonder, whatever happened to stressing one’s core competency, and just letting others do what they do well? I guess it’s out of style.

Then, suddenly, the economy got worse faster than you can say ‘Polish death camp’

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This hasn’t been a good week for Mr. Obama. First there was the “Polish death camp” thing that wouldn’t go away. (Hey, I understood what he meant, didn’t you? But just try explaining it to the Poles…)

Today, there’s this:

Worst U.S. Job Data in a Year Signals Stalling Recovery

A dismal job market report Friday gave a resounding confirmation to fears that the United States recovery has markedly slowed, reflecting mounting evidence of a global slowdown.

The report, which showed the smallest net job growth in a year and an unemployment rate moving in the wrong direction, was a political game-changer that bodes ill for President Obama as he faces re-election.

It provided traction for his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, at a time when politicians have been deeply divided over the most effective way to strengthen the economy. And it put increased pressure on the Federal Reserve to take further action to stimulate growth.

The United States economy gained a net 69,000 jobs in May, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate rose to 8.2 percent from 8.1 in April, largely because more people began looking for work. And there was more unexpected bad news: job gains that had been reported in March and April were revised downward…

Yow. Now the president knows how John McCain felt when the economy got shot out from under him. OK, not that bad. But still not good.

What do y’all think? Is it a blip, or a negative trend? Because I remain convinced that the health of the economy depends in large part on what y’all — all 300 million or so of y’all — think about it. Yeah, there are some things we can’t help, like the Euro mess, but largely we have the ability to stimulate the economy by ourselves. Hey, that sounds kind of dirty, doesn’t it? Well, that’s not how I meant it. Or maybe I did. Talking about money stuff makes my mind wander…

Bad news, good news about newspapers

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I learned yesterday that one of America’s great cities will no longer have a daily newspaper in the unkindest way, courtesy of my favorite celebrity Twitter follower, Adam Baldwin:

Adam Baldwin Adam Baldwin‏
@adamsbaldwin

Buggy-Whipped?! | RT @carr2n “Times-Picayune facing deep layoffs, may cut back from daily publication.” – http://nyti.ms/Jsib87

He jests at scars that never felt a wound. How would ol’ Jayne Cobb feel if the financial underpinnings of movies and TV suddenly collapsed? (Hey, don’t say it could never happen. Have you heard about Autohop? Remember, newspapers didn’t start dying because people didn’t want news; it was the ads drying up.)

That newspapers are having to cut back isn’t new (especially not to me), although nothing quite like this has happened before in a major city, so it’s a milestone (and the same company is doing the same with its papers in several other cities, including Birmingham). But my sadness is for the city as well. I lived in New Orleans almost as long as anywhere else growing up — I went to school there for two years (7th and 8th grades) instead of the usual one — and news like this makes it feel like the city itself is dying, with a vital spark fading:

The latest to go to three days a week: The storied New Orleans Times-Picayune, one of America’s oldest papers, which announced Thursday that it plans to limit its print schedule — beginning this fall — to Wednesday, Friday and Sunday editions. It will maintain 24/7 online reporting via its site, Nola.com.

This is a tactical trend for New York-based Advance Publications, which owns the Times-Picayune, as it pushes toward a limited print-digital model. Advance said Thursday that in addition to the Times-Picayune, it will also cut back the print frequency of its three papers in Birmingham, Mobile and Huntsville, Ala., to three days….

First Katrina, now this.

But enough bad news. We have some startlingly good news from closer to home: Warren Buffett is investing in newspapers. Including in South Carolina.

You may have seen that news last week. I was sufficiently surprised that I didn’t know what to make of it, and haven’t commented yet. But I have a new news peg: Buffett has written a letter to his editors and publishers, communicating his thinking in making this move. It’s a bracingly confident message:

Until recently, Berkshire has owned only one daily newspaper, The Buffalo News, purchased in 1977. In a month or so, we will own 26 dailies.

I’ve loved newspapers all of my life — and always will. My dad, when attending the University of Nebraska, was editor of The Daily Nebraskan. (I have copies of the papers he edited in 1924.) He met my mother when she applied for a job as a reporter at the paper. Her father owned a small paper in West Point, Nebraska and my mother worked at various jobs at the paper in her teens, even mastering the operation of a linotype machine. From as early as I can remember, my two sisters and I devoured the contents of the World-Herald that my father brought home every night.

In Washington, DC, I delivered about 500,000 papers over a four-year period for the Post, Times-Herald and Evening Star. While in college at Lincoln, I worked fifteen hours a week in country circulation for the Lincoln Journal (earning all of 75? an hour). Today, I read five newspapers daily. Call me an addict.

Berkshire buys for keeps. Our only exception to permanent ownership is when a business faces unending losses, a remote prospect for virtually all of our dailies. So let me express a few thoughts about what lies ahead as we join forces.

Though the economics of the business have drastically changed since our purchase of The Buffalo News, I believe newspapers that intensively cover their communities will have a good future. It’s your job to make your paper indispensable to anyone who cares about what is going on in your city or town.

That will mean both maintaining your news hole — a newspaper that reduces its coverage of the news important to its community is certain to reduce its readership as well and thoroughly covering all aspects of area life, particularly local sports. No one has ever stopped reading when half-way through a story that was about them or their neighbors…

So… if we are to take Mr. Buffett at his word, this isn’t some bid to rack up losses for tax reasons, or any other convoluted strategy. He actually believes this is a good investment. And he’s not known for being wrong about such things.

Back when I was first laid off, the executive editor position at the Florence paper was open. But I didn’t apply for the job — a combination of wanting to stay where my grandchildren are, and a reluctance to jump back into a dying industry, having done more than my share of laying-off and cutting back in the last few years.

But had the opening occurred under these circumstances — with new ownership, and that owner being Warren Buffett, and he bullish on newspapers — I might have looked at it differently.

GM says ads on Facebook don’t work (Oh, and why is it going public anyway?)

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At the worst possible time — on the eve of the social site’s IPO — The Wall Street Journal reports that General Motors plans to quit advertising on Facebook because ads there don’t get the job done:

General Motors Co. plans to stop advertising with Facebook Inc. after deciding that paid ads on the site have little impact on consumers’ car purchases, according to a GM official.

The move by GM, one of the largest advertisers in the U.S., puts a spotlight on an issue that many marketers have been raising: whether ads on Facebook help them sell more products. On Friday, Facebook is expected to sell shares in an initial public offering that could put a market value on the company of as much as $104 billion…

That aside… personally, I have trouble understanding why Facebook wants to go public anyway. Of course, I’m pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to — hence his childish, obnoxious gesture of showing up for business meetings on Wall Street in a sweatshirt.

But while I blame him for not dressing like a grownup, I find any reluctance he feels to go public totally understandable. I say this as someone who suffered for decades working for publicly-traded newspaper companies — and who would still be a newspaperman if his paper had not been owned by an overleveraged public company. To me, anyone who is making plenty of money from his private company would be totally insane to go public.

No one, but no one, would accuse me of being any sort of financial whiz. But I fail to see the presence of any of the usual reasons for going public. What does Facebook really need an infusion of cash for? It’s not capital-intensive like, say, a steel mill. It’s always been able to rake in the money for relative little investment.

Yes, I’ve gone out there and read explanations of why. But I’m unconvinced. So what if, for instance, going public would be a huge windfall for Facebook employees? Why would I, as an investor (if I were an investor), want to spend my money to give them that windfall? Where’s the competitive advantage in encouraging a company’s founding talent — the people responsible for making the property valuable — to cash out?

The one rational excuse seems to be that in this converging online world, the only way to compete with the other titans out there, such as Google, is to have mountains of cash on hand, so you can beat the others to the punch when it comes time to buy a YouTube or an Instagram.

In other words, it’s a necessary step in the bid to become all things to all people online. Which seems, in and of itself, a debatable goal. But hey, nobody’s asking me.

Idea for my band: “These go to three”

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Just had an inspiration for how to make my band a success, at least on the local level. By “my band,” of course, I refer to the one that I’m going to start just as soon as I come up with a name, and finalize the playlist. I’ve been working on this for more than 40 years, and I’m making good progress. Don’t rush me.

Back when I was young and impatient, I briefly tried rushing it, and it didn’t work out. Some of the lads and I tried forming a band in Hawaii, and it only had one rehearsal, at Steve Clark’s house on Hickam Air Force Base. Burl Burlingame was there with his harmonicas, which proved it was a serious effort (he probably doesn’t remember, it was such a tiny blip on his music career). I was the front man, and thought I was the next Mick Jagger. But you see, we hadn’t settled on the name, or on our playlist — although we had written one song, called “Grilled Beaver Blues,” which we tentatively rehearsed that day — so the whole thing was just half-baked and premature.

Now, I’m going about it in a more organized and sedate manner.

And today, I had an inspiration for how to make some moderate money on the local level.

Last night I was at a business open-house kind of reception, and there was a band playing. And you couldn’t carry on a normal conversation when the band was playing, because the amps were turned to a point that would be useful for reaching the higher seats in Williams-Brice Stadium. As the organizer said to me in a LinkedIN message this morning, “Glad you were able to stop in last night — it was LOUD!!!”

Yes, it was. But not unusually so.

Have you noticed how very often this is the case? In fact, it seems to always be the case. Take the afterparty at the 100th episode of Pub Politics at Jake’s. Rep. James Smith’s latest band was playing, and no one could hear each other. I remember having what might have been a pretty interesting conversation with Trey Walker about working for the governor, and now for USC, except that it was conducted entirely by taking turns shouting into each other’s ears at a distance of about an inch.

Yeah, boys, I know you shelled out money for the amps and all, but do they really have to be turned to 11? Wouldn’t it be nice to put them at a volume where each note can be heard quite distinctly by people who are not talking, but which would allow those who DO need to talk to do so in normal tones?

I think a band that did that would really be in demand for almost any kind of event involving grownups — pretty much anything short of the latter hours of a wedding reception where everyone’s had too much to drink. I know what you’re going to say: “If it’s too loud, you’re too old.” Well, wake up and look around you — everybody is old. The Baby Boom hasn’t been 16 for some time.

I think that if a band could promise not to hurt the ears of attendees, it could name its price. And no one would care what its name was, or what it played, as long as it wasn’t too discordant. You could probably get away with playing Sex Pistols stuff at a Chamber event, as long as people could talk over it.

My sales pitch to event organizers would involve showing a specially modified amplifier. See? I would say. “These go to three.”

Rawl defends Georgia dredging decision

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South Carolina Chamber of Commerce President Otis Rawl — who two years ago led his organization to make the unprecedented move of endorsing Vincent Sheheen for governor — today stuck up for Nikki Haley for something virtually no one at the State House will defend her on.

Speaking to the Columbia Rotary Club, he said the DHEC decision allowing Georgia to deepen the way to the port of Savannah was not a game-changer, and not a problem, for South Carolina in the long term.

In saying this, he was partly reflecting the wishes of multistate members who like the idea of competition between ports to keep costs down. But he also said it was a competition that Charleston, and South Carolina, would win.

To start with, he said, the proposed work would only deepen the Georgia port to 48 feet, compared to Charleston’s 52 — and that those four feet made a big difference. Further, he said that if South Carolina makes the right moves (always a huge caveat, but he seemed optimistic) we are well-positioned to become the entry point for the world to the Southeast, and an ever-greater distribution hub. One of the things SC has to get right — opening up the “parking lot” that I-26 has become at key times between Charleston and Columbia.

Otis agreed with me that this stance makes him a lonely guy over at the State House, where both houses almost unanimously rebuked the governor for, as many members would have it, selling out South Carolina to Georgia. Aside from Otis, only Cindi Scoppe has raised questions that challenge that conventional wisdom.

Now, lest you think ol’ Otie has gone soft on the Sanford/Haley wing of the GOP, he went on to say that one of the things business and political leaders must do to help build the SC economy is to refute, challenge and combat the Big Lie that our public schools are among the worst in the country. Because who in the world would want to invest in a state like that?

Not that we’re where we want to be, but as Otie pointed out, on realistic measures of quality, SC is more likely to rank in the low 30s. Which may not be fantastic, but is a far cry from “Thank God for Mississippi.”

On the whole, a fine set of assumption-challenging points from today’s Rotary speaker…

The videos we did for the Coble campaign

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Here are the three videos ADCO created for the Daniel Coble runoff campaign. I like the way they came out.

I think you’ll find they’re a little different from what you usually see from a political campaign.

There are no “gotchas” here. We haven’t edited the truth to try to embarrass the opponent or make him look bad. Our purpose was more journalistic, to provide the voter with information they weren’t getting from news media, to help them make up their minds. Yes, we thought Daniel looked a little better than Moe in these clips. But the clips weren’t just chosen on that basis — in fact, we thought Daniel came across better throughout the debate, although Moe handled himself well, too. They were chosen because they struck a nice balance between complete answers, more than you’d get on TV news, without being so lengthy that the viewer wouldn’t lose interest and go away. (For instance, there were some really pertinent passages when the candidates discussed an important issue at some length — such as when Coble explained his position on water and sewer funds being used in the general fund, and did a good job with it — but we felt they were too long for this purpose.)

At the end of this forum, before the Melrose Neighborhood Association on Monday night, Moe Baddourah thanked the group and praised the format. He liked it because he wasn’t limited to 30-second answers as in some such gatherings. I think he was right, and you should be able to see some of what he liked about the format in these clips, even though we didn’t use some of the longer answers.

Each of the answers you see is mostly complete and unedited. I say “mostly” because in several cases, we trimmed the beginning of an answer and started the clip at the point when the candidate settled down to really answering the question — to the extent that he actually did answer it, which didn’t always happen.

You might watch these and decide you prefer Moe to Daniel, although I think most people will not. In any case, you can get a pretty good sense from watching them which of them approaches issues, and public service, in the way that you would prefer an elected representative to do.

I could elaborate here on the three clips and why we chose them, but I’d rather that those of you who are interested (particularly those who live in Columbia’s third district) would look at them with a fresh eye first, and after I see your reaction, I’ll elaborate.

Enjoy.

Something you should know: I’m helping Coble

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The Melrose event Monday night.

Last night I went to a debate between Daniel Coble and Moe Baddourah sponsored by the Melrose Neighborhood Association. But I’m not going to tell you what I think about what was said there because I wasn’t there as a blogger. This is complicated by the fact that various people who saw me there, including Moe, probably think I was there as a blogger. So this is to set the record straight.

I’ll start at the beginning.

Lately, a large part of my job with ADCO has been business development. In connection with that, I went to breakfast one morning several weeks ago (Feb. 23) with my old friend Bud Ferillo, and I urged him that if he ever finds himself in a situation where he’s representing a client who needs some of the services that ADCO provides, he should give me a call.

Sometime later (I’m not exactly sure when, but my first email on the subject was on the Ides of March), he gave me a buzz and said he needed some help with the production of some last-minute mailings for the Daniel Coble campaign. Fine. I put him in contact with colleagues here at ADCO with expertise in that area, and they helped him out.

At that point, I wasn’t directly involved, beyond getting people together. (I didn’t even see the mailings until after they were done and gone.) Nevertheless, when I interviewed Moe for this post, and when I interviewed Mike Miller for this one, I mentioned what my company was doing to help out Bud on Daniel’s behalf. Neither of them expressed any concern. (I meant to tell Jenny Isgett when I interviewed her, but later realized I had forgotten. And given the reactions of the other candidates, it didn’t seem worth a separate call. I’ll let you be the judge whether I was right about that.)

Then, over the next couple of weeks, I got slightly more involved, but only in the sense of being a conduit for communications between the campaign and folks at ADCO.

Last Thursday, my status changed. On that day, Bud asked whether ADCO could shoot video at a debate Monday night, and provide YouTube clips contrasting the candidates. I checked, and our usual in-house people couldn’t do it that night. There wasn’t time for handling things the usual way. I went ahead and personally lined up a free-lancer, Brett Flashnick, who readily agreed to help out.

So I was there last night in case he had questions, and also so I could witness the whole debate, and be able to help him in editing the video. This afternoon, Brett and Bud and I spent between two and three hours going through video and choosing some clips of good YouTube length. Brett has left now and will send Bud and Daniel the finished product to see if they approve.

So basically, I’ve been heavily involved now in making editorial judgments about campaign materials. I wasn’t involved in that way at all before, but I am now.

Even before things got to this point, I was worried about what, if anything, I should write about the campaign. When I wrote about all those endorsements that Daniel got on March 29, the news was so helpful (in my opinion) to the Coble campaign that I worried that I wasn’t reporting anything of similar impact from the other campaigns, and that it could look like I was favoring him. But I couldn’t figure out how to balance things out. Neither Moe nor Jenny were generating news like that; I wasn’t seeing anything new to react to.

Now that I write that, I realize that as indirect as my involvement was before, I should have told y’all about it. The fact that it was entering my head, that I was worrying about whether I was being 100 percent fair or not, even a little bit, means I should have told y’all so you could judge for yourselves. But I didn’t. I thought about it, but I decided that I was overthinking things, and that all I would accomplish would be to make the connection sound like a bigger deal than it was. Which is a case of over-overthinking, now that I think further (over-over-overthink) about it.

Also, I thought this: The fact that Daniel was the only candidate advertising on my blog (and I assure you, the other candidates had the same opportunities to do so that he did) was a greater apparent conflict than my indirect involvement with those mailings. And y’all knew about that — you could see the ad — and were therefore forewarned and armed to make any judgments you chose to make as to whether I was being fair.

Regardless of decisions I made in the past, there’s no question now: Y’all should know that I am involved at this point. So, anything else I say about this runoff (which probably won’t be much) must be considered in light of the fact that I’ve definitely, directly, done work to help the Coble campaign. I fact, I invite you to go back and read everything else I’ve written up to now (just use the search feature to look for the candidates’ names), and decide for yourself.

Of course, this is an opinion blog. I never make any pretense to news-style “objectivity.” But what I invite you to do is see whether you think any subjective judgments I’ve made were ones I would have made anyway, without any involvement in the campaign. Actually, what I see when I look back is that I held back from expressing any strong opinions or preferences. Which means that what I wrote was affected. Because that’s not normal for me.

All of this is making my head hurt. This, of course, is why people who make their livings as reporters and editors just don’t get involved, period. Or at least, that’s the way it used to be when there were good, full-time jobs to be had in that field.

Now, increasingly, news (or at least commentary) is brought to you by people who make their livings some other way. Which is something you have long known about me.

Life is confusing here in the New Normal, and all I can figure out to do about it is to tell y’all what I’m doing. Which I just did.

Anybody want to talk Mad Men?

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I called AT&T (and be sure to check out the ad at right) on Saturday to upgrade my TV options so that I could see the season premiere of “Mad Men” Sunday night. In HD.

I even went to see Dreher High School’s production of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” — twice — over the weekend to help get me in the mood. (Quick, what is the most direct connection between that play — and I’m thinking the original Broadway production — and “Mad Men”? There’s a hint in the photo above.)

And it was all that I had expected it to be.

So I come in to work at my own ad agency Monday morning, and we usually spend a few minutes batting the breeze at the start of the traffic meeting, but… no one but me watches “Mad Men”! So there was no one to discuss it with.

Anybody want to talk about it? Here, I’ll start…

My favorite story line wasn’t Don’s relationship with his hot new wife, or Lane’s dilemma over the picture he found in a wallet. It was the one that went (SPOILER ALERT):

  • Young white twerps at competing agency, tired of hearing civil rights marchers outside their window, start dropping water bombs on them — which makes news.
  • Our protagonists at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce decide (in their own white-twerpy fashion) to add to the competitors’ discomfiture by running a help-wanted display ad declaring that they are “an equal opportunity employer.”
  • Joan (my very favorite Mad Man, even though “Man” fits her less well than it does anyone else on television), who is on maternity leave, thinks the agency is hiring someone to replace her, and charges into the office with her baby to demand explanations.
  • A reception-room full of earnest young black applicants, quite naturally taking the ad at face value, show up to apply for the job. NOW what are our wiseguys going to do — say there IS no job, and risk getting as big a black eye as the rival agency did?

Suddenly, our “heroes” are entangled in the mid-60s, and they have to figure out how to cope with it. And it’s deftly and realistically handled, if a bit larger than life.

Getting in the mood for ‘Mad Men’

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NEW YORK CITY—An office party, 1966. © Leonard Freed / Magnum Photos

Slate has put up a really interesting photo slide show invoking the “Mad Men” era, to help us all get psyched up for the season premiere coming Sunday.

This is but one. I urge you to go view the whole package. And check out other excellent archival images from Magnum Photos.

Oh, and in case you wondered, fans — working at an ad agency is just like that. Only without the smoke.

Bold new step for IT-ology, Innovista

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This just came in a few minutes ago:

It’s a sign of progress. Friday, the Tower at 1301 Gervais — a landmark in the Columbia skyline — becomes IT-oLogy @ Innovista.

The installation of the IT-oLogy @ Innovista signage exemplifies the already successful partnership between IT-oLogy and Innovista to foster the development, growth and relocation of information technology (IT) companies, small and large.

“This marks the fruition of one of our original visions: a district with the strategic clustering of IT companies in one locality,” said Don Herriott, Director of Innovista Partnerships. “More companies are seeing the advantages of co-location, and IT-oLogy @ Innovista now houses 9 IT companies, and counting.”

SignIT-oLogy’s mission is to promote, teach and grow the IT talent pipeline and profession. With Innovista’s mission of creating, attracting and growing knowledge-based companies in the Midlands of South Carolina, the two constitute a perfect partnership for recruiting to the new IT-oLogy @ Innovista building.  Clustering IT companies in a single location, such as the Tower at 1301 Gervais St., can open the door for new opportunities for partnership and business development, stimulate new ideas and industry innovation and help in the recruitment of new companies to the region.

“Our goal is to bring the IT community together in a collaborative environment to develop the IT pipeline through programs at all levels,” said Lonnie Emard, executive director of IT-oLogy. “The partnership with Innovista is a perfect example of this collaborative effort because we are bringing together people and companies that are dedicated to both of our missions.”

The establishment of an IT district is not about a sign at the top of the Tower at 1301 Gervais St. While that is a visible representation of the partnership, the real story is what happens both inside and outside of the building. The uniqueness of IT-oLogy is that it is not a single company or entity; instead, it is a non-profit collaboration of companies, academic institutions and organizations uniting to address the nationwide shortage of skilled IT professionals. To address this challenge, IT-oLogy offers K-12 programs where students explore numerous IT career options, internships for undergraduate students and continuing education opportunities that keep professionals constantly learning and up-to-date. When all this happens, the result is a vibrant economic picture, which is the goal of Innovista.

The confluence of opportunities in IT-oLogy @ Innovista will provide a home in the community for local talent as well. “At the University of South Carolina, our responsibility to students and alumni extends beyond education. It includes a commitment to helping them find jobs, good jobs, when they graduate,” said Dr. Harris Pastides, president of the University of South Carolina. “The pairing of IT-oLogy and Innovista is perfect because of their complementary missions, each focused on growing our innovation economy in this region and across South Carolina.”

“From the outset, the vision of IT-oLogy has been to have business and academic partners collaborate to advance IT talent,” Emard said. “The lack of IT talent is a national epidemic that is solved in a local manner. The establishment of IT-oLogy @ Innovista is a visible representation of bringing companies together to collaborate and partner, fostering new ideas and technologies.”

Recently, IT-oLogy announced the establishment of the branch IT-oLogy @ University Center of Greenville, located in Greenville, S.C. This is yet another way IT-oLogy is working locally to address a national issue. In the future, IT-oLogy will continue to open branches across the nation as a way to advance IT talent in a grassroots manner.

Innovista is a strategic economic development effort that is connecting USC and university-spawned innovations with entrepreneurs, businesses and stakeholders. Its purpose is to help attract and create technology-intensive, knowledge-based companies, which result in higher-paying jobs and raise the standard of living in South Carolina.

For more information about Innovista, visit www.innovista.sc.edu

This is interesting on a number of levels.

Several months ago, I heard a rumor that Innovista’s headquarters were going to move from the USC campus to this building, in part to emphasize the point (emphasized by Don Herriott) that Innovista is about the whole community, not just those blocks in the area described by Assembly and the river, Gervais and the baseball stadium (and certainly far, far more than those couple of buildings people keep going on about).

Then I heard that wasn’t right. Maybe this idea is what started the rumor I’d heard.

Anyway, this is interesting, and I’m not sure what all the ramifications are yet…