The Indianapolis Star has launched an armada of initiatives to bolster revenue as it reacts to seismic industry changes, many
driven by advertiser and reader flight to digital media. Daily newspapers–once one of the nation’s most stable, profitable
businesses–now face a rapidly changing marketplace that would make the most innovative business operator quiver.
New patient satisfaction scores compiled by the federal government and posted online give consumers more feedback than ever regarding the care hospitals provide. The usefulness of that information is up for debate. On its Hospital Compare Web site, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services tracks technical measures that show how often hospitals provide certain types of care that is recommended for patients treated for various conditions-heart attacks or pneumonia, for instance. Starting late last month, the agency began including…
When Erin Newell was growing up in Greenwood, she and a friend would swipe her dad’s video camera and make movies in the basement. As a student at Ball State University, she studied filmmaking. And when she graduated, she was out like a shot to Los Angeles. Now, nearly nine years later-after scoring production and assisting credits on movies that even everyday folks have heard of-she’s back in Indiana, helping to beef up the state’s film-production industry so others might…
While one college basketball team just completed its journey to a national championship, CREW Network’s women hope they’re on a similar winning path-a path to scoring parity in the male-dominated field of commercial real estate. The Commercial Real Estate Women Network is a national member organization dedicated to the advancement of women in commercial real estate. It has 66 chapters, including one in Indianapolis. In 2005, CREW Network completed the industry’s first comprehensive study of the status of women in…
My wife, Janie, and I made some new friends on our recent trip to Israel, including Moira Carlstedt, president of the Indianapolis Neighborhood Housing Partnership. I happily cede my space this week for her observations of the trip. It is like any hospital room in Indianapolis-except you can see the Lebanese border from the window, and you stand amid damage from a Hezbollah rocket that tore through that window. And then you understand the need for the underground hospital that…
Change. While it is a buzz word that some political candidates throw around like candy, the construction industry is bracing for an important and imminent change of their own. The American Institute of Architects has produced standard contract forms for the construction industry for more than 100 years. Regardless of your perspective on such forms, the AIA forms still are the most commonly used standard forms in the industry. The AIA released their updated and revised set of contract forms…
I’ve been looking over some business polls from 2007 and 2008, and I have to tell you I’m disappointed. As a technology columnist, I’d hoped that companies would be perpetually lathered over all sorts of thorny technical issues that only new purchases could solve and that I could critique. Silly me. But still, I went into the exercise with high hopes. After all, isn’t every aspect of a business permeated by breakable, worrisome technology of all kinds? And doesn’t every…
British investor Joe Lewis (who is still a billionaire, although after you find out what happened to him, you will wonder how he has any money left) started buying stock in Bear Stearns back in August when it fell to $120 a share. When the stock fell to $110 in October, he bought more, to the tune of $300 million. In November, Bear fell to about $90, and Joe was at it again. All told, he bought $1 billion of…
Property tax reform took center stage during the just-completed session of the Indiana General Assembly. But lawmakers also grappled with a host of other measures with business implications. A roundup appears below. ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT One of the session’s most divisive issues-whether to penalize companies that hire illegal immigrants-died during the waning hours. Under the legislation, introduced by Sen. Mike Delph, R-Carmel, companies could have had their business licenses suspended, or revoked after three instances. The Senate and House passed…
The local office of Cleveland-based KeyBank has hired a banking veteran to lead a revamped mortgage department that will boast a larger sales force. And locally based mortgage firm Signature Group recently completed construction of its new headquarters and added three brokers. In this climate of ballooning foreclosures and rising interest rates, one might wonder whether executives of the aforementioned institutions are reading the wrong spreadsheets. To the contrary, despite the gloomy picture monthly housing statistics paint, they are among…
I try to avoid leading this column with commentary on productions that have come and gone. While I steadfastly believe it’s valuable to keep such productions in the mix, I appreciate that many of you aren’t as interested in what happened as you are in what’s still happening. Still, I think there’s use in talking about some weekend-onlys and onenighters. If I share, for instance, that Indianapolis Opera’s production of “Tosca” (March 14, 16) offered a compelling, entertaining, and often…
“At $2.94 per share, the price of Finish Line stock has almost fully discounted the downside risk.” Whew! The above quote in my column of Dec. 3, 2007, had me choking on my own ink. I was addressing Finish Line’s ill-fated quest to purchase the outstanding stock of much larger Genesco Inc. for $54.50 a share. The thought of trying to digest the $1.5 billion purchase price is reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s lunching on his own boots. I predicted that…
The local president of Milwaukee-based M&I Bank, Reagan Rick, got the shocking news while waiting for a plane at Boston Logan International Airport. It came in a text message from Robert Warrington, the former CEO of First Indiana Bank, the Indianapolis bank M&I acquired last year for $529 million. Warrington told him 85-year-old New York-based investment bank Bear Stearns Cos. had been sold to JP Morgan Chase Co.-with backing from the Federal Reserve-for a mere $2 per share. “The degree…
And in less than five months-if, as we used to say in Center Grove, the Good Lord’s willing and the cricks don’t rise-it no longer will be just that mammoth structure rising between West and Missouri streets. It will be ours, and in that personal pronoun, I mean, sincerely, that Lucas Oil Stadium will belong to all of us, not just residents of Indianapolis and the contiguous counties who have pitched in on the funding, but to all Hoosiers who…
As an intellectual property lawyer, it is often my duty to deliver unexpected answers to questions with seemingly innocent intentions: It’s OK to include a short clip from “Animal House” in our company’s annual meeting presentation, right? As long as we cite our sources, we can send our customers copies of helpful newspaper articles, right? It’s not a problem to embed a nifty video we found on the Internet on our own Web site, right? Unfortunately, incorrect assumptions like these…
With the possible exception of the people who run this newspaper and either allow me to write for it or haven’t noticed that I do, David Little is the greatest newspaperman in America today. Little is the editor of the Chico (Calif.) Enterprise-Record, who declared his paper a Britney-free publication-No Spears, None Of The Time. He wrote in his column: “This is a woman who seems to have mental health issues, shall we say. We’d never make light of a…
This isn’t a column about business technology per se, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to write about a half-dozen states thumbing their noses at the federal government and potentially backing up travel this spring at airports all over the country, including some of the world’s busiest, all over a piece of plastic. After the tragedy of 9/11, one of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations was to create a hard-to-fake identity card for Americans. In 2005, Congress passed a huge defense…
March Madness is upon us-that glorious season born in a Springfield, Mass., peach basket and now headquartered, literally and spiritually, in the Hoosier state. That means, of course, high-pressure conference tournaments; Big Dance brackets and pairings; controversial selections and exclusions; friendly wagers; blowouts; upsets; scoring runs; dry spells; lead changes; come-frombehind victories; heartbreaking defeats; and last-second, game-winning three-pointers. But in only the first week of the third month of the Gregorian calendar, it’s clear-from personal life, to the recession (er…
In 2003, Carmel-based Telamon Corp. hit rock bottom. So, founder Albert Chen returned to his roots. Taiwanese native Chen, 63, had spent two decades building his firm to serve telecommunications giants. But when the dot-com bubble burst, the telecom industry tanked along with it. Telamon-then Indiana’s largest minority-owned business-saw its annual revenue plummet $300 million, down from $456 million in 2001. Most managers would have chosen to shrink Telamon to reflect its new reality. But Chen doesn’t do mass layoffs….
Yes, I’m writing about the Indiana Pacers. Their struggles-and, yes, the scrapes with the law and bad judgment exercised by a few-have exposed an ugly underbelly that says as much about us as it does about them. It’s a cautionary tale for those riding-high Indianapolis Colts because (1) Peyton Manning won’t play forever, (2) Tony Dungy won’t coach forever, (3) Bill Polian won’t be the decision-maker forever, and (4) the law of legal averages eventually will catch up to any…
