Category Archives: Winston-Salem

Customer Appreciation Winston-Salem Journal Style

5 Replies

Here's the scenario: You're running a business, the local monopolistic newspaper, that by all accounts is struggling mightily against the tide of alternative media. Lucky for you the first black American has just been elected President of the United States which leads to an incredible demand for your issue that documents the historic occasion.  So here's the question: What do you do to celebrate? Do you:

  1. Create a commemorative re-print of the historic front page and bundle it in with every copy?
  2. Create a commemorative re-print of the historic front page and give it to your dwindling supply of loyal subscribers?
  3. Create a commemorative re-print of the historic front page and insert it only in the copies that are sold in news racks or at retail outlets, thus snubbing your bread and butter subscribers in exchange for a few extra dollars in extra single copy sales?

Thanks to Esbee we know that our friends at the Journal opted for the third choice.  With management decisions like that is it any wonder they're struggling?

I'm waiting to hear the justification, probably something to do with logistics making it near impossible to get the insert into all subscribers' hands.  Of course that would be BS, and I think we can all discern the real logic behind the decision: keep the print costs down, and juice the single copy sales.  But why?  Why risk alienating subscribers? 

Here's another question for the Journal's management: why not sell a special sponsorship for the piece?  Surely you'd make more money by producing the piece for 100,000 readers and selling a sponsorship based on that volume than by producing a few thousand pieces for a couple of percentage points bump in single copy sales. 

So how many subscribers will the Journal lose over this?  Probably not many in the near term, but these are exactly the kind of things that customers remember and as the newspaper continues to diminish in size, and as subscribers continue to struggle to find reasons to continue their subscriptions, I can guarantee you that many will be saying to themselves, "They've completely eliminated half the things I care about, they barely cover any local news, and there was that time they screwed us subscribers on the Obama cover.  Why would I write a check for that?"

If the paper had an ombudsman it would be interesting to hear what he has to say about this, but alas they don't have one.  Maybe Ken Otterbourg will address it on his blog.

Update 11:10: I could swear that when I first visited the Journal page with the announcement that there was at least one negative comment there.  I went back to check the language of the announcement and it said that the page had been updated five minutes earlier and there wasn't a comment anywhere to be found.  Actually there isn't any way to leave a comment now. Hmmm.  Can someone else visit the page and let me know if it's just my browser or has the comments function (been) disappeared for everyone?  

After double checking it looks like I'm not crazy.  The screen shots below show:

  1. The Journal home page that clearly shows the article about the reprint and says "1 comment".
  2. The announcement page without the comment or any way to comment.
  3. The page of another article with a comment as it's supposed to appear.

In other words from my browser it looks like that's the only page you can't comment on.  I'm guessing it's coincidental, but I feel like being a conspiracy theorist today.  So here goes: The Journal's scared of us!  They don't want us to spread poisonous verbiage about their lame customer service!

Okay, I feel better.

JournalPhantomComment

JournalAnnouncementPageWOComment

JournalPageWithComment

I Miss Esbee

4 Replies

Winston-Salem's first lady, uber-blogger Esbee, has been on hiatus for about 10 days and I have to say it's like having a friend you talk to every day leave town.  It's funny because she's interested in things that, quite frankly, I wouldn't do in five lifetimes, but at the same time it's fun to read her dispatches from around town.  Since I rarely venture far from the confines of my home office she's been my lifeline to all things Winston-Salem.  I have a feeling that she's filled the same role for the thousands of people who visit her blog every day so I'm guessing that she's received hundreds of emails from readers suffering Esbeedrawals asking her what's up and when she'll be back.  The sign on her blog says she'll be back November 5-ish and I'm hoping that the -ish is closer to five than to nine or ten.

Until she's back you should check out the profile that Winston-Salem Monthly did on Esbee, aka Lucy Cash.

Live from the Courthouse

Leave a reply

I have jury duty today and it's just a bucket of laughs.  Interesting thing, though, is that the Winston-Salem Journal's local columnist Scott Sexton is in the same jury pool with me.  There are two cases today and a bunch of us got called into the courtroom for a drug trafficking case.  Luckily my name wasn't one of the 18-ish that were called to fill the 12 spots on the jury.  Sexton's was, though, and it offered a little comic relief when the assistant DA asked everyone questions like, "Do you know anyone in law enforcement?" or "Do you know anyone in the District Attorney's office."  FYI, the DA accepted Sexton but the defense attorney dismissed him.  What a surprise, huh?

Now I'm back in the jury waiting room.  We won't be excused until either the second case has it's jury selected or 5:00, whichever comes first.  At least they have free wi-fi here.

While walking back from lunch I ran into an older gentleman who was looking for the early voting location.  It's a couple of blocks from the courthouse, but I couldn't really help him because I still don't know downtown Winston-Salem like a native.  We ended up asking a street vendor and he pointed the gentleman in the right direction, but during our stroll the gentleman and I figured out that we both spent the majority of our lives in the metropolitan DC area. He'd mentioned that even though he'd grown up in Winston everything had changed during the 50+ years he'd lived in DC. We compared notes about our neighborhoods (he lived in NW DC, and I lived in Northern Virginia) and agreed that it had changed for the worse. 

I thought it was kind of cool that two people with a common background (if you negate the 30 years difference in age) met each other in the course of fulfilling their various civic duties.  It really made my day.

John Daly Passed Out Drunk at the Hooters in Winston-Salem

1 Reply

JohnDalyMugshot
Pro Golfer John Daly, Mr. Grip It and Rip It, got sloshed at the Hooters on Hanes Square Circle and passed out in the restaurant.  The EMTs and police were called and after Daly refused to go to the hospital and the police realized he didn't have a ride they took him to the drunk tank for a 24-hour sober up session.  I have to ask: what was Daly doing in Winston-Salem? It's a great town, but it's not exactly a tourist mecca.  Also, how did he end up at Hooters without transportation?  I'm guessing whoever drove him there ditched him, but who knows.

Really sad.  I remember watching him fight a case of horrible DTs during one tournament and then watching the profile of him on 60 Minutes when he said that he was under control because he'd cut out hard liquor and was a beer-only guy now.  I guess that isn't working so well. 

Real Estate Juxtaposition

Leave a reply

When we moved to North Carolina from Northern Virginia four years ago the real estate market here in the Winston-Salem area was one of the few in the U.S. that wasn't experiencing the bubble that the rest of the country was enjoying.  At the same time the real estate market in Northern Virginia was one of the most over-heated markets in the country.  Of course this worked in our favor at the time, but it's been interesting to examine the differences between the two markets during the current mortgage meltdown. 

In general both areas are down, but since Winston-Salem already had depressed real estate prices relative to the rest of the country it didn't have as far to fall as the DC area.  Still, I think in the near future DC has much brighter prospects than we have here in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina and two news items I read this week helped mold my thinking.

First, I was reading an article about Obama's surprising success in Virginia and in the article was this paragraph:

In Prince William County, about 25 miles south of Washington, residents
are watching neighbors head into foreclosure at a record pace. Nearly
one in 20 mortgages is in foreclosure there, the highest rate in
Virginia, according to the Virginia Housing Development Authority.

Prince William County is where we lived for the last eight years before we moved to North Carolina, and I can tell you that it's absolutely not surprising that it is experiencing such a bump in mortgage delinquencies.  In the early '00s houses were exploding in value but much of that was due to the fact that money was so cheap; any fool could get a loan with incredibly low ARMs. That made it possible for someone who could only qualify to buy a $200,000 home in the late '90s to qualify for a home in the $350,000 range just a few years later.  Well, guess what happened when those adjustable rates re-set?

On top of the cheap money Prince William also had the distinction of being an ex-urb that was more affordable than the suburbs closer to DC.  Add to that a set of political leaders whose governing philosophy can best be described as "build, baby, build" and you had the recipe for a massive real estate bubble.  Thank God we got out when we did.

Unfortunately for Winston-Salem it's still been a painful year despite not having as far to fall.  Just this morning the Journal reported that foreclosure filings in September were up 55% over September 07.  This area has seen hard times for years so relatively speaking the change in Prince William seems starker than the changes here. Believe me, when we left Northern Virginia that area felt like Northern California must have during the Gold Rush of 1849.  Housing developments sprang up seemingly overnight.  Traffic clogged every highway, and often many neighborhood roads.  People bought houses and flipped them months later for a tidy profit.  Heck it got so crazy that they tore down a prison and built townhouses, houses and a high school in its place. So when prices started to fall, it must have felt like Armageddon.

All that being said, the prospects for Prince William are probably much better than they are here, at least in the near to medium term.  DC's economy is historically insulated from experiencing the worst of economic downturns because of the recession-proof industry known as the federal government and government contracting.  Once the home prices have settled to a normal level there will be buyers because unemployment will likely be lower there than in the rest of the country.  And of course jobs will attract more people and eventually the housing glut will be filled, there will be a shortage of available homes and new homes will need to be built.  It might take a few years but mark my words that unless something truly catastrophic happens the DC area will see home prices rise before much of the rest of the country.

Here in Winston-Salem things will take longer.  Yes our housing prices didn't have as far to fall, but we still saw lots of building that happened thanks primarily to cheap money over the last few years.  Consequently we have a rather large housing inventory.  Unfortunately we're also bleeding jobs, a continuation of the decline of the textile, furniture and tobacco industries that started well over a decade ago and an impending decline in jobs related to the current economic meltdown.  The region is actively pursuing new industries, but it's going to take a while for them to get rooted and growing. In other words even as the housing prices settle we're not going to have a lot of buyers in the near term so the lower housing prices are likely to be with us for a longer period of time than in other parts of the country.

You might think that I regret the move.  Well, that couldn't be further from the truth.  Life is a marathon, not a sprint, and I'd take the environment here over the DC region any day.  Our standard of living is quite high with little traffic, affordable housing (obviously), easy access to the mountains, the beaches only a couple of hours away, a decent education system, easy access to the I-40 and I-85 highways, a leading private university (Wake Forest), two state universities (University of NC School of the Arts and Winston-Salem State University), one of the oldest colleges in the country (Salem College) and a well run local government.  Eventually there will be a lot of companies that will discover the benefits of this area and I'm confident that within the next twenty years this will be a very strong economy.  Honestly you can't lose the majority of your industrial base and expect to replace it overnight, but when you have as many positives as we have it's only a matter of time before you see the positive effects.

The timing should be just about right for us.  We'll be able to make a killing on our house and then I can buy that Winnebago and Celeste and I can see the country in our old age.  I'm sure she can hardly wait.

Winston-Salem Journal Gets Its Warhol On

Leave a reply

When I opened my Winston-Salem Journal this morning I was confronted with a picture that had me thinking maybe they’ve put an Andy Warhol worshiper on their design staff.  Below on the left is this morning’s Journal front page and to the right is Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe piece.  Oh, and yes I realize that the Journal pic is likely the result of a press error, but I still think it’s cool.
Artywsj2Andy_warhol_marilyn

DIY Traffic Alerts via Text Message

Leave a reply

Do you really need someone on TV to tell you about traffic?  Why, no you don’t now that the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) has made their traffic alerts available by RSS feed. I’ve just now put myself into direct competition with local traffic reporter Jennie Stencil by adding the Forsyth County traffic alerts to my blog; just look in the right hand column at the bottom and you’ll find it right there.

Of course you can set up your very own traffic alert system so that you don’t have to wait on anyone.  Here’s one way to get traffic alerts sent via text to your phone:

  • Go to the NCDOT’s Traveler Information Management System page(http://apps.dot.state.nc.us/tims/)
  • Select the region or county that you’re interested in getting traffic updates on.
  • Once you’ve gotten to that page go to the bottom and look for the "RSS" button.
  • Click on that and you’ll go to the page that acts as a kind of permanent news ticker for that particular travel area.
  • Highlight the address in your address bar.  An example would be this address for the Piedmont Triad region: http://apps.dot.state.nc.us/TIMS/RSS/IncidentList.aspx?RegionId=2
  • Go to www.web-alerts.com
  • Paste the address you just copied into the field provided and click "Go".
  • Add your phone number in the appropriate field, add keywords (if you want to) in the keyword field and click "Create Alert".
  • When you get the text asking for confirmation just confirm and you’ll have your very own traffic alert system.

One problem that I’ve found with this is that the alert contains a link to a web page, which is okay for me because I have a Blackberry and an unlimited data plan with Verizon.  For someone who is on the road and getting the text via regular phone this is going to be a problem.  Stay tuned because I’m looking for a way to send a straight text alert.

What’s cool is that NCDOT allows you to select traffic alerts by region, county or route so you don’t have to get alerts for Raleigh if you live in Winston-Salem.

Wake Forest to Host Panel Discussion About Financial Crisis

Leave a reply

If you’re interested in hearing what folks like BB&T’s chairman and CEO John Allison think of the current financial crisis then you should check out the free public panel discussion titled “Exploring Today’s Financial Crisis: Business, Politics, Ethics and You”  that Wake Forest is hosting this Friday (October 3, 2008) at 4 p.m. at the Scales Fine Arts Center.  Other panelists will include PNC Bank managing director Reggie Imamura and several Wake Forest professors.  From the news release:

Banking industry panelists will be John Allison, chairman and chief
executive officer at BB&T Corp. and Reggie Imamura, managing
director at PNC Bank.  Panelists from Wake Forest University will be
Sheri Bridges, associate professor of marketing at the Calloway School
of Business and Accountancy; David Coates, professor of political
science; and Alison Snow Jones, associate professor at the School of
Medicine’s Program in Bioethics, Health and Society.

Moderators will be Bill Marcum, associate professor of finance at
the Calloway School and Rob Nash, associate professor of finance at
Wake Forest’s Babcock Graduate School of Management.  To promote
informal dialogue among the panelists, a moderator-led
question-and-answer format will be employed.  The two-hour session will
include time for questions from the audience.  Dean of Business and
Professor of Leadership and Strategy Steve Reinemund will offer opening
and closing remarks.

You may recall that John Allison is the banking executive who wrote a letter to Congress about the bailout that garnered just a little attention.

Share Your Creativity

Leave a reply

I received an email today that tickled me pink because it included me in a group the author described as the "Creative Cluster".  Very cool!  Anyway, the email was a forward of a call for submissions for an event titled Creativity: Worlds in the Making that is being put on by the Wake Forest University Office of Entrepreneurship and Liberal Arts and the Program for Creativity and Innovation.  Here’s the overview from the submission page:

This interactive symposium is designed to position creative engagement
as a core literacy in today’s global environment and to model fresh,
critical perspectives for creative research, collaboration and
outcomes, between and among diverse disciplines and communities. The
objective of the symposium is to stimulate new thinking about what
creativity is, how it is practiced across cultural domains and what its
potential applications can be, especially in relation to humane and
sustainable outcomes and impact. Diverse perspectives from the arts,
humanities, sciences and entrepreneurship will pose questions and
challenges about the role that creativity plays in higher education and
in society through its capacity to shape dynamic and interdependent
future ‘worlds’. The interactive format of “Creativity: Worlds in the
Making” combines keynote speakers, traditional panel presentations,
innovative performance and exhibitions with participatory working
sessions.

If you can get your head around that then I encourage you to submit.  Deadline for submissions is October 15, 2008 and the actual event is scheduled for March 18-20, 2009.