Labor Day look ahead

Labor Day is a week away, and with jobs – or the lack thereof – as the topic of the year, you’ve barely time to plan and execute a compelling labor package for next weekend.

The fates – and the feds – are cooperating, with the monthly spate of employment reports due out later this week. They include:

• Tuesday: The ADP Employment Report. Produced by the nationwide payroll processor Automatic Data Processing Inc., which claims to pay one out of every six workers in the country, the report is based on ADP’s inside view of the payroll situation among its 500,000 clients. Sign up here for free e-mail releases.

The ADP report is of interest because of its scope and because it distinguishes between the manufacturing and service sectors, and provides a breakdown based on size of business by number of employees.

• Wednesday: U.S. Department of Labor’s productivity report - includes wage and hours-worked data.

• Thursday: U.S. Department of Labor’s weekly initial jobless claims report.

• Friday: The big one: The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly employment situation report. For a review of the data compiled in this monthly roundup, check out my previous tipsheets on the job reports.

Another helpful report just issued: the American Staffing Association’s second-quarter survey, which shows that temporary employment continued to stabilize throughout spring and early summer. Since some analysts believe temporary and contract hiring picks up before the permanent job market does, it’s a handy benchmark to understand.

But those are layering tools; you don’t want to petrify your audience with bare statistics. Some ideas for compelling packages (which also lend themselves to video and animated graphics, as well as print-and-save infoboxes for readers) include:

• Employment forecast Q&A with eight or 12 of your area’s major employers. Don’t forget colleges and universities, health systems, state and local government and nonprofits as well as corporate and small business employers. This makes for a great infographic or other alternative storytelling technique.

• A recap of union membership in your region; highlight gains, losses and trends but also talk with officials and labor relations experts about new paradigms in union-employer cooperation.

• Select a neighborhood, an apartment building, a street and canvass it, mapping out the employment situation in each household compared to a year ago.

• Take the contrarian tack and find success stories. Some people are thriving despite the recession, snaring good jobs at great salaries. Locate them and share their tips.

• Retraining. What public programs are in the works, what are private employers and economic development agencies planning, what courses of study (like nursing) are overbooked, what are mid-career, displaced workers doing to find a new niche? Readers love career makeover features and they’re an inspiring flip side to a dismal jobs scene.

• Track your local workforce. Collect data on the average salaries of local residents in different professions. Feature a person from each occupation and list key statistics about their area of employment.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

Resale Earns Respect

Thrift shopping’s image has gone from shabby to chic over the past year or so, with all sorts of newly minted ‘frugalistas’ touting the joys of secondhand bargains on approximately 9 million new personal blogs and message boards devoted to saving money during a recession.

Those of us who’ve long been able to spot a piece of vintage Fiesta ware at 50 feet, or snap up a never-worn black cashmere swing coat for a song, have viewed the energetic new competition with alarm.

But there is no question about it: Secondhand stores are mainstream these days and as such, belong in your business pages, as small business stories, sources for money-saving tips, reflections of the local economy, new tenants for vacant commercial space and other facets of the financial prism.

This year, the National Retail Federation even queried consumers about resale shopping for its venerable back-to-school sales survey. Discount stores still reign supreme but 18 percent of shoppers polled said they’ll be hitting thrift shops for school-days deals.

They’ll have plenty from which to choose. The National Association of Retail and Thrift Shops estimates that there are 25,000 to 30,000 non-profit and for-profit thrift, consignment and retail shops nationwide. In a recent survey, 64 percent of NARTS members reported that second-quarter sales were up an average 31 percent in 2009 compared to the same three months in 2008.

Two-thirds of sellers also said the volume of incoming inventory (traditionally from individuals looking to sell off discarded goods) also was up, and the quality of items had increased. In other words, dollar-wise consumers are cleaning out closets and donating goods for a tax write-off or consigning them to sale in hopes of a profit.

Audiences love to read about bargains and the multimedia/graphic possibilities abound – list of area thrift shops, tips from proprietors about how to make the most of consignment sales, tips from savvy consumers about how to unearth the best find. For the latter, just Google something like “garage sale queen” or “yard sale fanatic,” to find plenty of blogs by homegrown experts. Show readers what they can get for a $20 bill and two hours. Video a seasoned secondhander on the hunt.

A few resellers, like Plato’s Closet, Play It Again Sports and Children’s Orchard, are corporate franchises. Many more are mom-and-pop. Check out Too Good To Be Threw, the commercial site of veteran thrift store owner and how-to author Kate Holmes. She’s so immersed in the lifestyle she’s also written a resale-themed murder mystery! Resale.net has lots of interesting grass-roots links, and The National Flea Market Association is a portal to casual and weekend resellers; again, conversations with these folks can lead to pithy insights into your local economy. The NFAA even offers a “Flea Finder” interactive map linking to market sites state-by-state.

The main difficulty in covering the secondhand economy is finding objective third parties to help with perspective. Most academic and bank analysts don’t bother tracking used-goods stores. One source of expert commentary is the professional group for what used to be called ‘home ec.’ The media relations staff at the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences will help you find experts who can talk about consumer habits and trends in your area.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

Golf to the Fore

Biz news has been pretty heavy lately, so let’s take a breather and focus on a picturesque weekend feature.

According to numerous event calendars, August is National Golf Month. I realize these industry "holidays" are phony and manufactured, but they come in pretty handy sometimes as a news peg for a worthwhile but rather orphaned story idea.

The ubiquitous sport of golf is a likely pick that generates a lot of spending in most areas and is flush with novel spin-off possibilities. According to the National Golf Foundation, it’s a $75 billion-a-year industry in the United States – and that sounds low to me given the NGF claims that more than 28 million players a year hit nearly the nation’s nearly 16,000 golf courses.

Your state’s travel and tourism department likely can come up with an estimate of golf’s impact on the local economy. Besides the NGF, the industry-sponsored Golf 20/20 site focuses on the sport’s financial impact and offers myriad studies and reports as well as a directory of state-level affiliates. Golf Digest magazine online provides up-to-date industry news and trends.

Talk with local vendors about how they’re coping with this year’s grim economy, or to ferret out small business and career features. Pro shops, instructors, equipment dealers and manufacturers, golf course design and landscaping specialists, municipal golf course managers and vendors of supplies from food to fertilizer are just a handful of the ideas that come to mind.

If you like trend stories, find out whether courses in your area are keeping pace with competitors providing catering and banquet services for weddings and other non-golf events. Are they doing double duty, switching to cross-country ski routes in winter to maximize their seasons?

Another competitive angle: Many country clubs and courses are cutting dues, offering incentives to lure junior members and otherwise responding to their clientele’s financial straits. What are the hot discounts and promotions in your area, and are they working?
Play Golf America, a sort of information coalition sponsored by various leagues, also highlights corporate golf – surely that’s big business. It also features resources for golfers with disabilities – an area I haven’t seen explored yet. Even blind individuals play golf and there are trainers who specialize in helping handicapped people learn the game. The site includes a zip-code search function for many of its channels, so you can find local experts and providers easily.

If you’re covering the work-life beat, how about reviewing the notion of golf as a career? The Professional Golf Management program developed in conjunction with the PGA of America and offered at 20 universities nationwide touts 100 percent job placement. Doing what, they don’t quite say.

Or, take a look at golf as a career-builder in your business community. I’ve often felt at a disadvantage because not playing the game costs me a number of professional networking opportunities each year; you might talk with career coaches, management experts and the like about whether strolling the links with the boss really does help boost one up the corporate ladder. This 2008 survey www.CIO.com, the site for IT executives, says golf is over-rated as a way to chum up with business colleagues, but I’m not sure I buy it – especially for sales people and others who trade heavily on relationships.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

All Eyes on Automakers

Monthly U.S. auto sales tallies are always closely watched, but Monday’s numbers will be especially interesting because they’ll reflect a full week of sales under the federal "cash for clunkers" program.

Automotive sales, of course, have spent the past year in a free fall, sending General Motors and Chrysler to bankruptcy court and Capitol Hill for concessions. Thousands of workers have been furloughed, bought out, retired early or laid off.

Here’s how drastic the drop has been: In 2007, U.S. consumers wheeled away in some 16 million new cars trucks. This year, the most upbeat forecasters predict total sales of – maybe – 10 million vehicles. That’s nearly a 40 percent drop in two years – meaning 40 percent less revenue for pretty much the entire supply chain and everyone connected with auto retailers.

So even if you don’t have a car company headquarters or factory in your territory, chances are a good number of your readers have a vested industry in the health of the auto industry.(After all, as taxpayers they now own a majority stake in GM!)

The automakers – including the U.S. units of transplant and overseas companies, report monthly sales a day or two after the last business session of the previous month. Autodata Corp., an information service for the industry, posts the release calendar and year-to-date figures free of charge on its Web site.

The June tally is up now; take a look to make sure you understand the terminology. First you’ll see the year-over-year results – last June compared to this June, in raw numbers and in percentage-point change. (Those are the negative numbers in the third column, for most brands.) The next three columns are cumulative sales year-to-date, compared to the same period in 2008.

You also should understand SAAR – that is, the seasonally adjusted annual rate of sales, a measure of how many cars could be expected to sell in a year if the pace of the current month continues.

Autodata also provides an aggregated spreadsheet at the end of the day to some media outlets; the reports are a valuable shortcut in creating charts and info boxes. The firm has been inundated of late with media requests and might switch to a paid subscription, so don’t put away your calculator just yet. Meanwhile, a polite request to media@motorintelligence.com may just get you a coveted spot on their distribution list.

Another way to prep: Check out the company-by-company forecasts by industry watchers such as Edmunds.com; while not infallible, these predictions can help you get a feel for the story-du-jour in auto sales. Sometimes it’s external forces like the current rebate program; other months it’s the horse race for the No. 1 position or the dive in truck and SUV demand.

Individual company releases (sign up for them at individual automaker media Web sites or via PR Newswire – and do it today, not Monday) come in no particular order and trickle out after noon on the appointed date – leaving you the morning free to troll dealerships for retailer and consumer comments.

Check around today to see if you can sit in on (and video) the closing of a new-car deal Monday morning; hearing the voice of a consumer who decided to take the plunge – and the reasoning behind his or her purchase – will add quite a bit of human interest to what can seem like a dry numbers story. With billions of taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs at stake, car sales reports these days are anything but routine.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

Digging for Agriculture News

Neighbors are starting to hand fresh produce over the back fence, even here in the Midwest where summer temperatures don’t seem to have kicked in quite yet. They’re casting a critical eye over their gardens and weighing in on this year’s horticultural successes and failures.

With agriculture a key part of most state and local economies, you might want to do the same. Stories about crops and the people who grow them are always interesting, informative and offer great photo ops.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture site offers information overload and story ideas galore, from economics and research to crop marketing and food safety. Its Agriculture Fact Book, while someone dated, will give you an overview of topics and resources.

Naturally you’ll want to explore your state’s agriculture department as well. And for more information about trends and concern, check out the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture - who knew?! – a sort of trade and lobbying group for these related government agencies. Here’s the membership list and links to state offices.

If your state or region is known for one main crop, you could focus on the health of that business and any positive or adverse conditions this year that could affect jobs and revenue. Commodity prices are set at the Chicago Board of Trade, a sort of stock market for crops. If you aren’t up to speed on commodities don’t overlook the CBOT Web site’s helpful glossary and educational channels.

Keep in mind that crops grown for animal feed, research or for use in non-edible products all have a tale to tell. Biotech firms in your area may be researching genetically altered foods; your state university’s agriculture school or extension service might be a good place to get some leads.

If you need small business stories, look around for interesting companies related to agriculture and find out how the weather and the economy are treating them. Check roadside fruit and vegetable stands, farmers markets, small nurseries and specialty growers. What are they doing to compete?

Any interesting seed companies or mail-order suppliers in your area? Processing plants? Landscape supply companies selling giant palms to Las Vegas golf courses? How are the plants doing at the local cranberry bog or winery?

Agriculture stories practically scream for multimedia coverage. Try a sunrise scene at the local produce market or an explanatory video of blueberries going from field to muffin. Don’t laugh – in 1999 The Oregonian won a Pulitzer Prize for its biz package that followed a batch of potatoes from their field in the Pacific Northwest to their fate as french fries in Indonesia. Read all about it, along with some great advice for making business news relevant to readers, in this American Journalism Review piece.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

Pet Biz Stories Fetch Readers

We’re about halfway through the dog days of 2009 – theoretically the sultriest, laziest days of the year.

If you’ve hit summer melancholy in your writing, challenge yourself with something like this: Can I get a puppy or a kitten into a business centerpiece display next week?

The $45 billion-a-year business of pets has boundless reader appeal. Animal lovers will lap up the information and the anti-pet contingent will devour your article too, rolling its collective eyes at the cash people spend on those darned cats and dogs, parrots and pigs.
The Petco and PetSmart, whose sites also offer fun facts and financials. Ask pet store proprietors – especially independent ones – about local suppliers; these small businesses could make interesting biz features or career spotlight stories. Seek out new or unexpected products.

Other good features include doggie day care, animal spas and motels, pet trainers, sitting services (we’re in peak of vacation season), kennels - the list goes on. Relatively new to the scene are the pet-waste pick-up services; there’s an interesting work-life story for you.

Or, focus on the business of pet health care. If you have a pharmaceutical firm nearby, check to see if they’re working on animal formulations of common human medications. Many veterinary clinics feature up-to-date technology and treatment. Look for the labs that process their blood work and companies that manufacture kitty-sized surgical equipment.

Be adventuresome. I once spent an entire night – 6 p.m. to 7 a.m. – in a for-profit emergency veterinary clinic. Patients ranged from the city’s $35,000 K-9 dog (upset stomach but X-rayed just in case) to a scrawny yellow scrap of a kitten whose destitute family couldn’t afford treatment. (The brusque, barely-out-of-vet-school doctor pulling the late shift nearly let them go but at the last minute picked up the tiny cat and carried it away, treating it at his own expense with an exasperated sigh.) Try something similar; the stories practically write themselves and you get a first-hand view of veterinary economics. Not to mention a vast array of multimedia opportunities for your Web site.

For more ideas try the pet funeral and cemetery industry. Condolence cards are going mainstream; ask stationery and gift shops how sales are doing. Urns, caskets, grave markers, memory jewelry and other products are a huge business.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.