SeanReadsTheNews

BW: Men, Not Women, Suffer Most from Current Job Market

Peter Coy of BusinessWeek recently reported on the continuing disparate impact of the recession on male U.S. employment v. female.  This observation is turning into Nascar reporting - an endless loop of repetitive stories that add little to the conversation.

Economists are concerned that the recovery will extend an ominous trend of disengagement for male workers that stretches back six decades. The share of American men aged 16 to 64 who are employed has fallen in a sawtooth pattern, from nearly 85 percent in the early 1950s to less than 65 percent now. As the chart above shows, the rate falls steeply in recessions and does not get back to its previous high in recoveries. (Women's employment-to-population ratio has trended higher over the years.)

What's interesting is that the two unemployed men that Coy chooses to highlight in the story are not exactly sympathetic profiles.  One is a 19-year-old who says "he's talented" but was expelled from high school and was fired from a construction job for fighting.  The other is a 55-year-old who was working in "corporate travel" when he was laid off.  News flash: it isn't that hard for executives to plan their own travel now.

Reading these stories convinces me not that there is a fundamental unfairness toward men in the job market - it's that employers naturally favor employees who finish school, don't fight and focus on providing lasting value.  Not all of these people are women but if they are - why would employers owe anyone a job just for being a man?

SRTN: Yesterday's News Today!

There were several interesting business news stories yesterday but I didn't have time to blog them so here we go with bullets.  Today we are adopting the "royal we" for the blog even though we usually don't.  We aren't sure why.

• This blog doesn't usually cover The Economist because of its non-use of bylines.  We are making an exception today because this article on the incredibly prolific Nigerian film industry and the social problems it is causing in Africa is really interesting.  But we aren't making a habit of it.
• We were annoyed by this Gary Weiss article from Portfolio.com on a health industry PR man writing a tell-all about fighting Obamacare.  The annoyance doesn't have anything to do with the journalism, it's an excellent article on the practice of issue public relations and worth reading unless you're already an expert in such things.  We were annoyed because we oppose Obamacare and the article takes a snide attitude that company leaders using PR to fight for what they believe in is bad - and implies that the other side wasn't also using spin to make their point.  That is b.s. - the pro-side also spun like a centrifuge (remember when it wasn't supposed to increase the deficit?) It was a fair fight and making it seem like the anti-socialized medicine side isn't entitled to advance their side of the argument is pernicious.
• Fortune ran its annual "Worst of the Year in Business" piece yesterday.  What's interesting is that many of the missteps weren't just bad business decisions but compounded by the result of bad PR.  Tony Hayward and BP feature prominently.
• Steven Rosenbush of Portfolio.com had a great story about how the taxi commission and tax regimens in New York City have reduced the noble independent cab driver from a mini-small business to a virtual indentured servant.  It is somehow entertaining to read even though the subject is basically how guys who used to control their own somewhat limited destinies have had their freedom stolen from them.
• Julie Schmitt of USA Today mystifyingly dedicated a long article to how homeowners are fighting foreclosure by demanding paperwork from their lenders, something that has been covered almost daily for months.
• David Streitfeld contributes an article on how a California law intended to protect homeowners from unscrupulous lawyers claiming to be able to help them fight foreclosure has actually stopped troubled borrowers from securing legitimate representation.  The two stories both deal with paperwork problems in home lending - but USA Today's contained no information we didn't already know while The New York Times' uncovered a dramatic and troubling new side to the story.

Fortune on AOL Reinvention

I'm not sure why so many people are still writing about AOL's attempts to revive itself but the articles just keep on coming.  Juliane Pepitone of Fortune does the honors today.

AOL (AOL) has two key advantages left: A widely recognized brand and a huge audience of legacy users who still hit the AOL.com homepage every day. Chief executive Tim Armstrong, a former Googler who took the reins in March 2009, is building some parts of his content network internally -- most notably, Patch, AOL's hyperlocal blog network -- but he's actively shopping to fill in the gaps.

It's kind of interesting I guess but the coverage does seem way out of proportion with the company's influence at this point.

 

SeanReadsTheNews - Special Catch-Up Edition

Hi, it's been a crazy week and while I've seen a lot to blog about, I haven't had a chance to actually write the posts.

Today, I'm catching and here's the news since Tuesday.

• A small but great placement by law firm Latham & Watkins, getting its iPad app on finance jargon in the very visible Wall Street Journal "Heard on the Street" column.
• The New York Times' Elizabeth Olson profiles the NHL's Pittsburgh Penguins and their attempts to use mobile and social media for marketing.
• There is a small but fun trend in business journalism to poke scammers and watch them squirm.  Too much of it and it gets tired but Fortune's Philip Elmer Dewitt's probing of a company advertising an iPad for $31 is hilarious.
• Has it really been a year since I was in China during their new year moon festival enjoying way too many Mooncakes?  Sadly, it has been.  But Rob Schmitz of NPR's Marketplace Radio has a fun story on how the Chinese tradition has led to a secondary market in mooncake vouchers for those who get them as gifts but don't want to eat the 1,000 calorie pastries.
• Larry O'Dell of the Associated Press spots an interesting case surrounding the whistleblower provisions in the False Claims Act - the ACLU is suing to prevent clauses that prohibit the whistleblower from discussing the case before the government is ready.  It's an interesting case that also has implications for the new provisions in the Dodd-Frank bill.
• This Financial Times story by David Gelles on Facebook's success at using its like button to get love from the rest of the Internet is a little dated given the two major features on the company that ran today in Fortune and Forbes (and I'm not linking because I didn't think they were novel enough) - but it made an impression on Tuesday when I first read it.
• I love any expose of shady fake TV news outfits that plague my business and fool most professionals at least once, so I have to link to Mike Masnick's Techdirt post on 800notes.com.  For my fellow professionals, PBS does not want to do a feature segment on your ridiculously anonymous client.  It is a scam and only generates the world's most expensive marketing video.

CNNMoney on For Profit Schools, Again

Aaron Smith of CNNMoney today reports the latest on for-profit education woes, the next step in this once-obscure news category that has become an incessant pool of repetition.

While the story starts well, explaining how out-of-work folks are trying to get trade degress to get jobs that can't be outsourced, it quickly shifts to analyzing whether the trades actually lead to jobs and the default rates on government-provided loans.

The investigation found that "four colleges encouraged fraudulent practices and that all 15 made deceptive or otherwise questionable statements to GAO's undercover applicants." The nature of the fraud included exaggerated claims of earning potential after graduation - including a school representative who told a prospective student that barbers can earn up to $250,000 a year.

The GAO called that "an exceptional figure for the industry," noting that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that 90% of barbers make less than $43,000 per year.

There really wasn't enough new to justify another story on this topic - other than the political issues I'm not sure why it's dominating the business pages the way it is now.

Well, I Guess It's Been A Week Since the Last Gold Bubble Piece...

Kai Ryssdal at NPR's Marketplace Radio yesterday reported on the run-up in gold prices and called "bubble" on it, while at the same time calling out the often-cheesy gold investment come-ons that are popular among the apocolyptically inclined.

Ryssdal: Last year, about this time, when gold was touchin' on $1,200 an ounce, it was all "Oooh! Gold bubble! It's gonna crash soon, it's gonna crash!" And then I read the other day, there are analysts saying it's going to go to $1,500 an ounce. Whatever happened to the bubble talk?

Moon: Well, I was one of the people that was involved in the bubble talk, and I have been wrong about gold for so long, I know longer have any respect for my own opinion, Kai.

Points to source Bob Moon for being self-effacing - but didn't he just kind of invalidate himself as a guest to speak on this topic?  He goes on to say that he has no idea how long the bubble will last and has no price target for Gold.

Not to go all Timeswatch on you but given how often NPR and others have harped on the "gold is a bubble" theme, listening to the piece makes you think the only reason they did it was to make fun of Gordon Liddy and Glenn Beck, whose programs hype gold as a hedge against a devalued dollar.

Marketplace is a great show.  It should do better.

TIME: More on BP's PR Problem

Vivienne Walt of TIME magazine contributes the latest on BP's public relations problems today, offering little that hasn't been covered by her colleagues earlier.

A lot of the blame, say public-relations experts, falls on BP's executives. "It's astonishing in today's media-savvy world that such a colossal and ongoing p.r. mess can be made," says James Herring, co-founder of the London public-relations firm Taylor Herring. "It's left people in the p.r. industry scratching their heads."

Walt rehashes major criticisms of BP in a story that makes for thin reading even if I didn't largely disagree with her analysis.

She criticizes BP for underplaying the incident in the quarterly report that published just after the disaster, for CEO Hayward's quotes about wanting his life back, for hiding behind its green image, and for Hayward blaming others when being blasted in Congressional inquiries by Henry Waxman.

Once again, BP's management is guilty and the company deserves to be sued out of existence based on their safety record and bad conduct in how they and their partners drilled the well.

However, since the explosion they put a camera right on top of the leak and let CNN air it 24/7.  They waived a statutory limit on their liability for damages, provide up-to-the-second updates on Twitter to journalists while they are on the air talking about the disaster.  They are spreading money around the affected regions.

You can't criticize the company for not being aggressive in answering calls for accountability and the 24/7 spill-cam sets a new standard for transparency.

The reputational damage to BP came from bad management, not from bad handling of a freak accident.

TIME Weighs in on For-Profit Colleges

After reading this TIME story by Elizabeth Dias, I've decided that for-profit colleges are turning into the new health insurance companies.  As a former health insurance industry PR representative, I noticed that decisions to restrict treatment or try to cut payments to doctors by health plans got completely different treatment from the news media than when Medicare or Medicaid attempted to do the same thing.

Similarly, while public colleges and universities continue to consume massive amounts of direct and indirect subsidy, allowing them to gussy up their campuses like they were resort hotels and soak parents of means within a penny of their lives, similar actions by the for-profit education sector attract rigorous media scrutiny.

That doesn't make observations by Dias or her sources incorrect and the article rightly shines a light on how tuition subsidies might not serve a public good - but it would be fun to see, say, CUNY Law School, get the same scrutiny.

Government money, lightly supervised institutions, unchecked supervising bodies and debt-trapped students — it all sounds similar to the subprime-mortgage collapse that is still fresh in America's mind. "The analogies are unbelievable," said Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, linking the for-profit education boom to the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, the dotcom boom of the '90s and the recent mortgage bubble, which was helped along by lax credit-rating agencies and loose regulation.

All of that is also true of tuition support going to schools like Harvard and Princeton with huge endowments and monied graduates who only serve the very intellectual elite of society.  University of Phoenix Online may only exist because it can transfer its costs in large portion to the taxpayer - but at least they are an egalitarian institution serving all comers.

I blogged separately today an article on a solar panel installer in Los Angeles that reveals toward the end that the company only survives by taking subsidies.  This level of scrutiny of that issue would have been valuable there as well.

This is also the third story on this subject I've noticed recently - I blogged a couple from NPR but there were others.  Unless it's the public universities driving their media contacts to stamp out the competition, I don't see why this story is so hot all of a sudden.

FT's Gapper on BP's Failed PR Effort

John Gapper of The Financial Times adds to the series of articles about how BP's management took the worst environmental disaster in living memory and made it worse with bad public relations.

But Mr Hayward's wayward PR performance worsened BP's troubles; his yachting trip came after he had suggested early on that the environmental impact of the spill would be "very, very modest" and then, as part of an apology, said: "I would like my life back."

The irony of this is that, early on at least, BP appeared to be adopting a textbook approach to corporate crises - dispatching its chief executive to lead from the front, taking responsibility for cleaning the spill and compensating victims.

I'm on record arguing that BP's errors were before the spill, not after and that it is impossible for them to get any traction on rebuilding their reputation until the spill is capped.

That was before Hayward decided to start acting like a victim and then go yachting but I stand by my original observation (echoed by Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post, here).  BP is spending money, keeping everyone updated in real time and presumably did not need Tony Hayward interrupting the engineers to ask for progress reports every 30 seconds.

Gapper does a reasonable job of pointing out the PR tactics that might have worked better but the column does come off as an exercise in repetition.

NPR Smacks For-Profit Schools Again

Brandon Burke of NPR's Marketplace Radio show today returns to the suddenly hot topic of for-profit higher education and packs a surprising amount of depth into a short segment, particularly considering the hit-and-run job the show did the last time they covered the subject.

This segment analyzes the controversy in more depth - the conflict between what these schools charge vs. potential incomes as well as the fact that most of the tuition money tends to come from government subsidies.

Career colleges are booming, as more people go back to school for job training. But critics say many students graduate with more debt than at traditional colleges, and are more likely to default on their loans. Many for-profit schools get most of their revenue from federal student aid programs.

Pauline Abernathy: We've seen some really troubling signs that taxpayers are subsidizing programs that over-promise and under-deliver.

The segment is pegged to new Federal rules that make it harder for the schools to pay their enrollment officers based on how many students they enroll, rather than just repealing the subsidies, which would have a much stronger impact on aligning cost with value.  

Burke deserves credit for exploring the problem and the most important proposed solutions.