Metro I-4 News

You are browsing the archives of 2008 May.

It’s very possible. This time, it’s Anheuser-Busch, maker of “The King of Beers” and other brands. And many are saying that this could be the cruelest cut of all, especially in it’s hometown of St. Louis.

There have been reports of a possible takeover of Anheuser-Busch by the Belgian brewer InBev, which makes the brands Stella Artois and Beck’s. Such a move would mean the loss of the last major American owned-and-operated brewery.

The Associated Press reports:

The largest U.S. brewery has long been a point of pride as a hometown attraction. The company’s massive red-brick brewery draws tourists from around the country to see the Clydesdale horse stables, brewing vats and Busch family memorabilia dating back generations.

Reports that the company might be purchased by brewer InBev of Belgium have residents worried they might lose a company as closely identified with St. Louis as the iconic Gateway Arch.

“St. Louis has gotten to the point where we have the brewery and the Cardinals (baseball team) — that’s it,” said John Schute, owner of the Sage restaurant and bar just across the street from the Anheuser-Busch brewery…

Schute said his customers who work at the brewery have been nervous that an acquisition could mean job cuts. He worries InBev may not only lay off some of the company’s 6,000 St. Louis employees, but also cut back on expense accounts, which Anheuser-Busch employees use for meetings and meals at his restaurant.

There’s good reason to worry that InBev, which makes Stella Artois and Beck’s, will make dramatic changes if the deal goes through, said Juli Niemann, an analyst with Smith Moore in St. Louis. While Anheuser-Busch has made strides to cut costs in the face of rising ingredient prices, InBev has a reputation for making new operations as lean as possible.

“The way InBev does it, they send in the surgeons and their scalpels are sharp. And they cut and cut,” Niemann said.

Virtually every administrative job at Anheuser-Busch headquarters could be on the chopping block, she said. InBev would likely keep the company’s distribution network in place and probably would not close the St. Louis Brewery to tourism that helps build the brand name, she said.

A purchase would also have an effect here in Central Florida as well, as Anheuser-Busch still owns and operates the Busch Gardens and SeaWorld theme parks through it’s Busch Entertainment subsidiary.

Today the Lakeland Ledger premiered the new look of it’s Web site, and to be honest it’s not bad at all. It seems as though one or two of the top stories will get a picture and story tease, but everything else will be headlines.

This actually makes it better for viewers who are in a hurry and want to glance for the stories they are more interested in. The new look also is part of the plan of owner New York Times Regional Newspaper Group to make the online appearance of all it’s properties basically the same.

A very good job!

Tomorrow Matters! is working hard to get thousands of people to participate in the public phase of One Bay’s regional visioning project (“VoiceIt”), which will be kicked off at 5 locations simultaneously on June 2, then continued at smaller meetings and in an online survey throughout the next 6 weeks.
Because I’ve been working with [...]

You might remember reading about One Bay’s Reality Check exercises, in which 300 hand-picked invitees, rushing against a 90-minute time limit, hurriedly heaped Legos on maps to depict their ideas for the 7-county region’s development over the next 50 years.  When selecting the participants, One Bay had set an artificial ratio of 1/3 citizens to [...]

Didn’t we see this in every sitcom over the past 3 decades?  A couple of kids room together, but can’t get along, so they paint a line across, splitting the bedroom in two.  Neither kid can cross the line to their brother’s side.
The Tampa Sports Authority has come up with a plan to paint a [...]

TheLedger.com is getting a new design today according to Managing Editor/Digital Barry Friedman.

Yes, it was just a mere 8 months and 25 days ago that TheLedger.com 3.0 debuted. Friedman received 77 reader comments on that redesign. I’m betting he gets fewer this time. Readers are getting used to design changes affecting their daily news perusal.

What will the new design look like? I’m glad you asked. If you’ve read the News Chief online lately you’ve already seen the Ledger’s new design. You can also see it at the Gainesville, Ocala, Wilmington (NC), Santa Rosa (CA), Houma (LA), and Thibadoux (LA) online sites.

Yes, the Ledger’s parent company, the New York Times, wants to have similar online sites for all the papers it owns. Well, except for the New York Times. With their teaser paragraph heavy front page, the New York Times readers must expect something more than a lot of lonely headlines.

However, headlines are what you’re going to get with the new Ledger site. The page is bursting with headlines. Headlines for local news, features, sports, and AP news. Headlines for forum posts, columns, reporter blog posts, and national news.

One or two important stories rate teaser paragraphs. The rest of the page is chock-full of headlines the Ledger hopes will lure readers inside.

Why?

According to a Standford-Poynter project, it’s because you multi-task:

In contrast, online readers are catching up with their news between answering e-mail, conversing with colleagues, or answering phone calls. The need for quicker access to information is much more prevalent online.

In addition to headlines, video will literally be the centerpiece of the new site. For good reason: younger readers want it.

“We’re talking about a generation that doesn’t just like seeing the video in addition to the story — they expect it,” said Danny Shea, 23, the associate media editor for The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com). “And they’ll find it elsewhere if you don’t give it to them, and then that’s the link that’s going to be passed around over e-mail and instant message.” — New York Times

Why cater to younger readers? Advertising. We old folks aren’t buying enough dead tree editions of the paper, nor is anyone placing enough classified advertisements. So, The Ledger, and other newspapers, are tweaking online until they can re-capture their audience. Well, at least a piece of it.

I admit I’m one of those old folks, and I’m also leaving behind the paper version of the Ledger. Every morning before breakfast I buy a copy of the Ledger at a paper box. Soon I’ll join the young crowd and go all digital. Coincidently, I just purchased a huge monitor that lets me see the entire Ledger front page in one glance. I’m sure that’s how I’ll probably read it — with a glance over the headlines and a click or five to read some stories within.

I think the Ledger’s headline writers are going to become the paper’s new stars.

Of course, that didn’t happen, but I’ll soon be facing another challenge at my place of work.

The client whose group I work in made several major changes in product offerings after the Christmas / New Year holidays this year, choosing to concentrate on the base items for which it has dominated the market for decades. Many of what it had sold online are now either available through it’s branded stores or not at all, and what it is now offering online are a few speciality editions of it’s base product which can be ordered “one of a kind”.

This business decision has resulted in our call volume to drop greatly, causing the reassignment of much of our team to other clients. As the greater number of calls are now received in the later afternoon / early evening period, management has been sending daytime representatives such as myself home early on a regular basis, which doesn’t help the paycheck at all.

Over the past few days, the management team has been seeking volunteers to either accept a later work shift or transfer to another department. The only other option would be possible layoffs. I can’t work later than I already do due to transportation issues (I don’t drive), and a layoff is an obvious negative. So today — following a training update session with client representatives — when the programme manager again made the options known, I asked her to put me on the transfer request list.

While the job can be quite stressful at times, I have gotten to somewhat enjoy the programme and the people that I work with. Certainly, I’ll still see them on a daily basis, but will miss the camaraderie that I enjoy. However, although the programme I’ll be going to has been hiring a bit lately, their call volume still virtually guarantees a full week’s work.

Our training for the programme will begin a week from Monday. Wish me luck…

(Standard disclaimer: My wife works at USF. She likes the USF Polytechnic idea. I’d rather it was a Liberal Arts college. However, I believe strongly that this area can support a locally managed university in the USF network. See today’s editorial in the Ledger. The following is a press release from Thomas Hagerty at USF.)

(Lakeland, Fla., May 28, 2008) — University of South Florida President Judy Genshaft announced the university’s acceptance of a major gift from Lakeland Regional Medical Center to support the development of the new USF Polytechnic campus on I-4.

Lakeland Regional Medical Center CEO Jack Stephens confirmed his institution’s gift to USF of $500,000 — a gift that the university anticipates will be eligible for state matching dollars and, in the words of USF Lakeland CEO Marshall Goodman, “help to literally transform the landscape of our community.”

In making the presentation, Stephens emphasized LRMC’s interest in developing “a world class community.” According to Stephens, “Our Board is very excited about what this new campus will mean to Lakeland in the coming decades. This is a huge opportunity for our community.”

Stephens, Genshaft and Goodman spoke of shared interests in developing degree programs in healthcare-related professions and observed that, as Goodman put it, “Our institutions share a passion for serving this community.”

The new USF Polytechnic campus is expected to open in 2010 or 2011 with over 4,000 students and an ultimate build-out target of 16,000 students. The state legislature has already approved the first $15 million in funding for Phase 1 of the campus, and Governor Charlie Crist has personally assured Genshaft and Goodman that he will add his approval to that funding.

The Tribune editorial board makes some pretty good points with Wednesday’s editorial about St. Pete Beach’s voter-clogged growth approval process.
St. Pete Beach has become a living laboratory to study the statewide consequences of a proposed constitutional amendment called Hometown Democracy.

But regardless of how the town decides it wants to grow, the issues are bewildering. In [...]

The Tampa Bay Derby Darlins are at it again.
Having captured the inaugural Florida State Championship in February, the Switchblade Sisters, Vicegrip Vixens and Cigar City Mafia have begun their regular season schedule for the 2008-09 season.
I’ve talked about my love for the roller derby and the Darlins before, but it bears repeating that [...]

A small group of neighborhood girls go to the city park to enjoy the fresh air and play a game or two of kickball.  The following week, another neighborhood puts a team of girls together to compete with the first.  After a few weeks, there are seven neighborhood kickball teams.  They all play against each [...]

Janet Zink reports in the St. Petersburg Times political blog The Buzz that two Lakeland area legislators who helped derail the state’s commuter rail / welfare deal with CSX, State Senator Paula Dockery and Representative Dennis Ross, have been actively looking at another idea.

The two Polk County Republicans are reportedly seeking to begin talks with Amtrak regarding a possible rail line which would connect Tampa, Orlando, and Miami.

According to the post, “Dockery and Ross wrote to Alexander Kummant, president and CEO of the company, on May 14 asking to meet this week to discuss ‘what we and our Legislative colleagues must do’ to make a coast-to-coast rail line happen.”

While suggesting a meeting next month in Tallahassee, they have received no response from the national passenger rail service.

As many know, Dockery’s husband, businessman C.C. Dockery, has long championed the cause of high speed rail, an issue which shattered the once close relationship he had with Jeb Bush during his term as governor

The Texas Rangers extracted a measure of revenge for Monday night’s loss, knocking around pitcher Andy Sonnanstine in a 12-6 victory over our Tampa Bay Rays. Josh Hamilton, who was plagued by personal demons when he played for Tampa Bay but so far has recovered quite well, hit a grand slam in last night’s game for the Rangers. The Boston Red Sox also lost last night, so the local boys are still one-half game on top of the American League East.

One interesting note is that while Tampa Bay leads their division, down south the Florida Marlins are also on top in the National League East, holding down a 1 1/2 game lead over Philadelphia.

It’ll be a lunchtime start at the Trop today (12:40) for the wrap-up to the three game series before the White Sox come into town.

In an effort to make MI4 easier to read we’re making some layout and other changes. Give us a couple of days to work out the kinks.

The Weekly Rays Update
Overall: 31-20
Last Week: Oakland (2-1), Baltimore (3-0)
This Week: Texas Rangers, Chicago White Sox
What has gotten into the (Devil) Rays? Last season the Rays had the worst record in baseball. Now they have the best record in baseball. How rare is this kind of turnaround? 1903 was the last time a team [...]