The “sage of Omaha” gets it right

Add comment March 9th, 2009

If you need a roadmap for managing the current economy, here’s a sane, sensible one with the smarts of Warren Buffett. Good reading, most excellent advice and worthy of a deep, relaxing breath.

“Everything will be all right. We do have the greatest economic machine that man has ever created.”

The real differences between1981-82 and today

Add comment March 9th, 2009

I just hate it when folks blame “The Media” for bad news. Like it’s our fault that the economy is in free fall. Geesh, we didn’t get those big bonuses or package up those toxic mortgages. We paid our bills and funded our 401ks like the rest of you.

We’re just reporting the news, the facts, context and impact, of a global economy in search of a bottom. Just like we’ll report the bottom and the eventual rise from the ashes. That’s what we do.

But, maybe it is our fault, at least sort of, that we’re all scared out of our proverbial shorts. There are two whoppers of a difference between today’s and all the other recessions/depressions: 24/7 cable television news and the Internet.

A newspaper is a once-a-day fix, so one gets the bad news once a day and then has the remaining 23 hours to go do normal stuff. With the 24/7 news cycles on television and the Web, it’s easy to get sucked into following every tick of the stock market, every repeated-ad-naseum headline, and every worried-and-over-the-top-for-TV-guesstimate-turned-analysis interview.

Yep, it’s bad out there. Yep, it’s likely to get worse. Yep, I worry, sometimes a lot, about what’s going to happen at home, with my son, with my job, here in the News Tower. But, I find that when I create an “information overload-free zone” I remember what the important things are. And, I can get back to work and back to living.

So, maybe the real folks are right this time. We’re opening ourselves to too much information. We need a daily dose (the newspaper), or maybe a couple (say, a morning, noon and night check of the Web and TV). We don’t need 24/7.

As the pop culture cliche would put it: TMI…..

County budget’s in need of a slicer

Add comment March 6th, 2009

Unfortunately, Winnebago County put its final budget together weeks before the financial markets imploded in late September and the global economy careened over the water fall. Since the county’s fiscal year is October through September, there’s no way they could have seen the shocking meltdown coming.

Or maybe they should have. Back in the fall of 2008, board chair Scott Christiansen and administrator Steve Chapman met with the Register Star’s editorial board to explain the spreadsheets behind the rather austere upcoming budget.

The budget called for some minor expense cuts that included voluntary buyouts, some freezing of positions and a handful of other painless options. Revenue projections were — for government — somewhat restrained, projecting 2-4 percent increases, which in normal bad times might be considered reasonable.

We told Chapman and Christiansen then that we thought it was surprisingly lean considering what we have come to expect from government, but that was before we dug into the spreadsheets — and before we started questioning them about budget numbers versus actual numbers.

The problem was two-fold: (1) Those expense cuts underestimated the tenacity with which county employees would hold on to their jobs and the refusals of some departments to do more than pay lip service to expense controls and reductions. And, (2) the revenue projections were based on the idea that 2009 revenue would exceed 2008 actual revenue even though the trend lines clearly showed that was not going to happen.

We asked — actually, I pushed obnoxiously hard — why the county thought revenues would increase from sales and property taxes when nothing was on the horizon to warrant such optimism. The answers were hopefully vague. It was clear the county folks had their fingers crossed, were hoping for the best — and trying mightily to wish that big black revenue cloud wouldn’t burst anytime soon.

The city of Rockford has been a tad luckier, if one can call it that, because the city gets to craft its budget right smack in the middle of the recession. Difficult though that is, the city can make its cuts now with some prayer it can maintain the balance between revenue and expenses.

The county is going to have to retro-fit and retro-fit fast or risk going even deeper in the hole. What was to have been a million dollar or so hole, is now $5.6 million deep. That’s going to mean far deeper cuts now than they would have had to make had they not been so optimistic-against-all-indicators when they passed that budget last fall.

We’ll eventually get back on an even keel, but for now taxpayers expect their governments to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Not plan for the best and hope to heck the worst doesn’t happen. The county’s ax is going to fall hard.

What if rrstar.com content were not “free”?

25 comments March 2nd, 2009

Actually, content has never been free, Web or daily newspaper. We’ve just never  charged readers for the expense. Instead, advertisers foot the bill. Sure you pay 75 cents if you buy it on the rack; you pay much less if we deliver the newspaper to the doorstep. But, that subscription price is a pitiful percentage of the actual cost. Depending on the market, you’d have to fork over upwards of $5 if there were no advertisers in the newspaper.

Back 15 years ago when the Web toddled into the market as a tool for distribution of information, we convinced ourselves that content on the Web had to be free, that no one would pay for it. I never agreed with that, but what the heck, as long as the newspaper’s advertisers footed the bill for print and online content, go ahead and give it away. The advertisers got — and still get — results as long as we drive readers and online visitors, which we do.

Back to the “content is not free” point. These days, news Web sites are reconsidering. Maybe we should put all our content behind the so-called “paywall.” I can hear you now: Go ahead, charge me — and I’ll just go somewhere else for my news and information.

Yeah, sure you will. But, if every news content generating entity from the Register Star to the New York Times, along with the Associated Press, Fox News and CNN, all erected a wall, there’d be no place to get the “free” news on which all those opinion-divas and spin-doctors depend for their blogs.

I’m kinda in the middle on this discussion. I do think we have undervalued our content. I do think we need to understand that gathering news content requires cash, a lot of cash, to pay professional journalists — even those who are owned by non-profit foundations. Either the advertiser pays or the reader pays. If someone doesn’t pay, we can kiss farewell any pretense to democracy.

Here’s a good exploration of what’s being talked about out there in News Land. Click here.

Parse and evade: Is that a lie?

2 comments March 2nd, 2009

What in the world possessed Rockford Mayor Larry Morrissey and the Rockford School Board members to “evade” discussing publicly the involvement of Paul Vallas in the search for a new school superintendent?  These folks, all of whom I consider smart, caring, and community-committed, tried to pull off contortions that would have made an Olympic gymnast cheer. And, the parsing of sentences? Lands, Perry Mason would have been proud. Read it here.

The whole evasion thing makes absolutely no sense. Getting Vallas involved was a brilliant move. Making sure the mayor – one of the school district’s most vehement critics – had a seat at the table, whether he forced himself in or not, was strategically superb. Getting some local business power brokers (like Sunil Puri and Cyrus Oates) inside the circle? Equally excellent.

The misstep was not standing shoulder to shoulder at a press conference back in the fall and shouting from the podium: We are all committed to finding the absolute best superintendent. We include the board, the city, the search firm, business leaders and nationally known educators, traditional and alternative. We are going to do the right thing for our children, our community and our future, and we’re doing it together in the sunshine because you – the public, parents and taxpayers – need to understand and we need your input.

Instead, they did it the Rockford Way: play it close to the vest, shut out the public, and when questioned, parse and evade. And, oh, yes, be sure to repeat the mantra: It’s the newspaper creating the problem by asking all these questions that we leaders would prefer not to answer.

And, so they didn’t. They went straight to parse and evade, pretending not to understand the questions. Pretending they were shocked the reporters would even think to ask such a thing. They opened their eyes wide and said to us with straight faces, “nah, didn’t happen.” And, behind their backs they crossed their fingers. But, it did happen – and, guys, it was a good thing. Unfortunately, you’ll get no credit for the smarts it took. Instead, your parse and evade approach raises doubts and hints at collusion and exclusionary behavior that once again isolates the leadership of the community from its followers.

The Register Star’s news coverage has been neutral even to the point of being compassionately gentle; its reporters used the word “evade.” Were I writing it, I’d have said you lied to us. Sins of omission (parse and evade); sin of commission (lie).