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Square Feet: Akron Shakes Off Some Rust With Goodyear Tire’s Help

June 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

AKRON, Ohio — For much of the last three decades, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company served as this city’s signature global brand. The world’s third-largest tire manufacturer, with $21 billion in revenue last year, was founded here in 1898 and stayed put even as B. F. Goodrich, Firestone and General Tire, its biggest competitors, closed their Akron plants and left in the 1980s.

In a word, Goodyear is devoted to this 188-year-old northeastern Ohio city. On May 13, in a step intended to sink deeper roots, the company’s top executives gathered in the city’s east end to formally open a 639,000-square-foot, seven-story, $160 million world headquarters for Goodyear, by far the largest office building ever constructed in Akron.

During the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Richard J. Kramer, Goodyear’s chairman and chief executive, noted the building’s advanced communications capacity, energy efficiency and other high-tech features. He described how the seven-story building, which is connected to the company’s 860,000-square-foot Innovation Center that was renovated at a cost of $30 million, enabled the company’s professional and research staff to collaborate more easily.

But the most important facet of the new building, he said, is its location. “We’re proud,” he said, raising a closed hand. “We’re very proud to be the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company of Akron, Ohio.”

“It’s an important time in this city’s history,” said Jennifer A. Thomas, Akron program director for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, one of the city’s leading philanthropic organizations. “Goodyear is a global technology company as much as they are a tire company, and they are committed to Akron. They represent a foundation, among others, of a new kind of economy that is developing here.”

Akron, founded in 1825 as a center of waterborne commerce along the 40-foot wide Ohio and Erie Canal, knows something about era-defining transitions. Agriculture became such a mainstay in the mid-19th century that the small grain companies that merged to form Quaker Oats were started here. Quaker Oats operated a mill downtown until 1970.

Most of the city’s development, though, centered on making tires for America’s trucks and cars. From the time Benjamin Franklin Goodrich opened the city’s first rubber factory in 1871 until the 1980s, the rank smell of heated rubber was this city’s unmistakable industrial scent. The black dust of tire manufacturing hung over four separate mammoth tire manufacturing works, and a constellation of smaller plants.

Akron was a gritty and polluted city that employed 58,000 rubber industry workers in 1930. In 1960, the city’s population peaked at 290,351, according to the census. Even as late as 1980, according to a study by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, Akron’s tire and rubber industry employed 26,000 people. But by the end of the decade, Goodyear was the only big rubber company left in Akron.

Today there is scant tire manufacturing in the city. B. F. Goodrich merged its operations with Uniroyal in 1986 and shut its three-million-square-foot Akron plant. Bridgestone, the Japanese company that bought Firestone in 1988, manufactures tires for Indy-class racing cars in a corner of its largely empty 1.3 million-square-foot plant on Akron’s south end. Goodyear makes tires for Nascar races in a portion of its campus here.

Just like the other industrial cities of the Midwest that formed the Rust Belt, the end of tire manufacturing, and the loss of over 20,000 jobs, was the start of a long period of civic trauma that sent the city’s population sliding. Last year, according to the census, the number of city residents dropped below 199,000, the lowest in a century.

Akron, though, is far from dead. Even as three tire companies departed, and Goodyear shrank its manufacturing operations, they left behind expansive campuses close to the city center that contained a collection of stalwart manufacturing buildings made of red brick and reinforced concrete that could be modernized to serve 21st century markets.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/realestate/commercial/akron-shakes-off-some-rust-with-goodyear-tires-help.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

Professor Sues Columbia, Claiming Misuse of Funds

March 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The professor, Sylvia Nasar, who is the John S. and James L. Knight professor of business journalism at Columbia and the author of the book “A Beautiful Mind,” which inspired the movie of the same name, charges in the suit that the university mishandled funds from a $1.5 million endowment provided by the Knight Foundation to improve the school’s teaching of business journalism.

Elizabeth Fishman, a spokeswoman for the journalism school, said in an e-mail that “we don’t comment on matters in litigation.”

The lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court, comes at a time of transition for Columbia’s journalism school, which on Monday named Steve Coll its new dean. He succeeds Nicholas Lemann, who announced last fall that he would step down by the end of the academic year after a decade as dean.

According to the 27-page complaint, the journalism school created a professorship in 1998 using a $1.5 million grant from the Knight Foundation, a nonprofit organization that seeks to support high quality journalism. Columbia was expected to match the grant.

Terms of the agreement called for Columbia to pay the professorship’s salary on its own, and use foundation funds for additional salary and benefits, like research.

In 2000, the university hired Ms. Nasar, who is a former reporter for The New York Times. According to the lawsuit she was given a base salary, which the university paid for out of Knight Foundation funds, and was asked to pay most of her additional expenses out of her own pocket.

Ms. Nasar said in the suit that over time she spent $174,000 of her own money for research and other expenses. She is asking for punitive damages.

Ms. Nasar said in an interview that in September 2010 she had received an e-mail from the university listing more than $70,000 in what she described as “phantom I.T. charges” — expenses attributed to her that she says she never incurred.

Ms. Nasar said that when she looked into the matter, she learned that the misspending expanded to include “the fruit of the endowment,” meaning that it went beyond the technology charges and included Knight’s $1.5 million gift, Columbia’s $1.5 million match and the income earned on the endowment over the decade.

She said that she had contacted the Knight Foundation about the disparities and that it hired the accounting firm KPMG to audit the endowment. Court papers say that KPMG calculated that Columbia’s “misappropriations and defaults” added up to as much as $4.5 million.

The audit also said that the endowment had not been used for its original purpose: “to supplement the salary and benefits of the holder of the Knight chair and to subsidize her research and service.”

The university and the foundation reached an agreement to forgive Columbia the $4.5 million and release it from its obligation to match the grant. In return, the university promised to spend future income generated by the endowment in ways “consistent with the purpose of the chair.”

In her suit, Ms. Nasar said that after she complained about the misspent funds, Mr. Lemann “intimidated and harassed” her by telling her that the Knight Foundation “was dissatisfied with her performance as Knight chair because Knight objected to her work on books.” He was not immediately available for comment.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/business/media/professor-sues-columbia-alleging-misuse-of-funds.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Pew Media Study Shows Reliance on Many Outlets

September 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The report, by the Pew Research Center and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, surveyed news consumers and concluded that while television is the main source for three popular topics — weather, traffic and breaking news — newspapers and their Web sites are the main source for 11 other topics, like local government updates, zoning news and crime reports. It also found that word of mouth, most likely including text messages and Twitter posts, is the second most common meansof news distribution on the local level.

“There really is a nuanced ecosystem here with very old and very new sources blending,” said Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which collaborated with another arm of Pew, the Pew Internet American Life Project, to conduct the study.

The researchers set out to map the sources of news and information in local communities, and came away with encouraging and discouraging signs for local television and newspapers.

Television is the most common medium for local news, with 71 percent of people watching for local information at least once a week, according to a survey of 2,251 adults. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points. But younger adults “rely on local television less,” and more on the Internet, the report says, “a fact that suggests more vulnerability for the medium in the future.”

In recent years many experimental newscasts and talk shows — usually with a soft-news bent — have popped up on some local stations in an effort to attract younger viewers.

The survey found that 50 percent of people read newspapers or their Web sites for local information at least once a week. People tend to get a much wider array of information from newspapers than from television — yet 69 percent of those surveyed also said they believed that the death of their local paper would have at most a minor impact on their news diet. Younger adults, the report states, “were especially unconcerned.”

Mr. Rosenstiel said the finding could be attributed to cognitive dissonance (the tendency to hold two clashing views at the same time), or to an assumption that the news and information would be available elsewhere if the newspaper were to close.

“There’s a feeling, I think, that in the digital age, information is a commodity that’s just available — and there’s not always a sense of how it’s generated or produced,” he said.

Starkly, the report asks, “If television has focused on covering weather, traffic, and breaking news, and that is what people look to this platform for, will television begin to cover taxes and zoning and education if the local newspaper no longer exists?”

Separately, Pew’s annual survey of news media performance, released last week, reaffirmed public distrust of the news media as an institution. By several Pew measures, the public perception has never been lower. Of those surveyed, 80 percent said they thought the news media were often influenced by powerful people and groups; 77 percent said the media tend to favor one side; and 72 percent said reporters try to cover up their mistakes.

But in a twist this year, Pew, a nonprofit group, asked about the news sources people use most. The public seemed to have a more favorable view of those sources, much as the public overwhelmingly disapproves of Congress, but individuals approve of their local members of Congress.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d1170b0818a463529c16759633a0d1cc

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,