The Weekly Screed (#854)

How it should be done
by David Benjamin

“Real life is slow; it takes professionals time to figure out what happened, and how it fits into context. Technology is fast. Smartphones and social networks are giving us facts about the news much faster than we can make sense of them, letting speculation and misinformation fill the gap.”
                                                                — Farhad Manjoo

PARIS — After ten years in town, the glass factory was closing down — suddenly.

In a month, it would be gone, every machine, module, fixture and forklift, every gray-flannel executive shifted to a new location in a right-to-work state way down south. Three hundred fifty local employees were offered the option of either moving to the new facility 1,400 miles away — with no relocation subsidy — or signing up for unemployment.

The local newspaper editor — let’s call it the Gazette — remembered the ballyhoo when the Glass Company arrived in town, broke ground with a gold-plated shovel, promised to be a pillar of the regional economy ‘til Hell froze over and started taking applications for living-wage jobs. The local editor had taken photos of the ribbon-cutting at the new factory. She had interviewed the factory chiefs and recorded the Glass Factory’s efforts at community outreach, including its annual Toys for Tots drive and a $500 Glass Company scholarship given annually to a graduating member of the National Honor Society. None of these benevolences would continue after the Glass Company blew town.

The local editor knew also, from receiving and dutifully re-writing its quarterly-earnings press releases that the company, and the local factory, had been operating at or well above break-even for all but a few of those ten years in town.

She had a copy of the Glass Company kiss-off, sent to her electronically from Corporate HQ in a large city 500 miles due west. In several terse paragraphs, it revealed a plan to shut down all operations in the editor’s little town, but offered little insight into the reasons for this abrupt and disruptive exodus.

The local editor went to work. Her first call was to Corporate HQ, where she got funneled to the P.R. office, whose junior assistant could not comment but promised that Mr. Arbuthnot, Vice President of Corporate Communications, would get back to her “right away.”

The local editor made plans to call Arbuthnot every hour all day and all week ’til she got through. Meanwhile, she put in calls to the chairman of the Board of Selectman and the Town Manager for comment. Both had heard rumors about a possible shutdown. Both were flustered by its suddenness. Both were tempted toward anger. But they also conveyed a knee-jerk tendency to empathize with the greed-is-good philosophy of the Glass Company, which had brought it to town — lured by tax waivers, zoning concessions and cheap land — in the first place.

But the town officials gave the editor printable quotes that put them on the spot, and they helped her fill a few gaps in the Glass Company’s brief local history.

Next, the local editor plunged into the “morgue,” a hodgepodge of yellowed newspapers, clipping folders, microfilm records and computer files that dated back to the first inklings — more than 14 years before — that the Glass Company might be building a local factory. While the editor pored— and sneezed — through her dusty archives, she repeated her calls to V.P. Arbuthnot.

The morgue search provided the local editor with corroboration of the claims and promises given the town by the Glass Company when it moved in.

The editor then made additional calls to the mayor of the town, in Alabama, where the Glass Factory was already breaking ground and taking job applications. She searched online for articles in the local Alabama press about the Glass Company’s negotiations there, and the promises made. She took notes on similarities between the present-day accommodations and assurances in Alabama and those bandied in her town more than a decade before. She found officials in both state governments who were cautiously willing to discuss pros and cons of the Glass Company’s portable production-site practices.

That night, still unsuccessful in her efforts to reach any executive at the Glass Company, the local editor attended the Selectmen’s meeting, where the chairman and the Town Manager spoke both disconsolately and carefully — lest they offend — about the bugout by the Glass Company. To the editor’s relief, two other Selectmen and several erstwhile glassworkers spoke more bluntly about the Glass Company’s broken vows and mercenary expediency. The editor hurriedly snagged two of the workers and enriched her quote file.

That evening marked the Gazette’s deadline. So the local editor filed her main story on the factory shutdown, plus sidebars on the Selectmen’s meeting and comments from the workers, without any comment from the Glass Company. She inserted high in the lead story the standard notation, “Glass Company officials were contacted but had not responded by press time.”

The editor finished with a last-minute six-‘graph editorial about the Glass Company’s departure, lamenting the loss of 350 jobs and a resulting disturbance in the life of the community. But she stifled her urge to blast the corporation, opting instead to end her commentary with several pointed “how” and “why” and “what happened” questions.

Next day, with the online Gazette posted and the print version hitting the newsstand, the editor got her callback from the Glass Company. Arbuthnot had delegated a “top” assistant, named Wetherbee, to control the damage. Unfortunately for Wetherbee, the local editor had more background on the glass factory than he did. Interviewing Wetherbee genially and with sympathy for the vicissitudes of U.S. manufacturing in a global economy, the local editor managed to coax from him — on the record — several revelations about the Glass Company’s motives. Whether read in or out of context, these inadvertently candid admissions cast the Glass Company’s management as coldblooded profiteers blithely willing to sacrifice the livelihoods of two or three hundred families for the sake of a few pennies in the corporate stock price.

Accidentally, Wetherbee also revealed that the Glass Company had come to town with no intention to linger long. Wetherbee said with a note of pride that the Glass Company treated frequent and advantageous “relocation opportunities” as basic corporate policy, “good for our shareholders and good for our bottom line.”

Thanks to Wetherbee, the local editor was able to put together much of the story behind the story. But she was still a few phone calls away from being satisfied. Every story, she knew, has a life of its own.

The local editor went back online to identify experts and analysts who could explain the finances of the glass industry. She also looked for sources with expertise on the risks and rewards involved in siting, building and relocating manufacturing facilities. She learned more than she really wanted to know about the economics of “spec buildings.” All these calls took a few days, during which she shared some of her findings with the Town Manager, several Selectmen and one of her favorite Town Hall sources, an astute and articulate member of the Zoning Board who had a knack for putting municipal mishegoss into perspective.

Following on her contacts with Arbuthnot and Wetherbee, the local editor put in the obligatory request — three times — for a chat with the Chief Executive Officer of the Glass Company. She was, of course, thrice rebuffed. Meanwhile, she spoke with more glassworkers. She interviewed the head of a labor union that was prevented, after the company obtained an injunction, from organizing at the glass factory. She recorded more remarks — this time somewhat less indulgent toward the Glass Company’s duplicity — at the next Selectman’s meeting.

Perhaps most important, she found and spoke with officials in other communities where the Glass Factory had pulled up stakes after using up its tax holidays and labor concessions. These quotes corroborated the tale unintentionally told by the voluble and amiable Wetherbee.

For the second week in a row, the glass factory shutdown led the Gazette above the fold. The local editor was able to add “art.” She found a photo of local dignitaries in Alabama ushering the Glass Factory to town, photographed a Selectman speaking heatedly and added shots of soon-to-be-fired glassworkers picketing outside the soon-to-be-empty factory. Her follow-up editorial cast caution aside. She scorched Glass Company executives for their venality and dishonesty in hustling the original sweetheart deal, and for chucking their responsibility to a community of salt-of-the-earth folks who had come to depend on them.

She typed the word “criminal,” but then — having no legal foundation and knowing that the Glass Company had conformed to conventional business principles — deleted it.

To the her surprise, the editorial got re-posted by several news aggregators and eventually quoted in The Financial Times. This flicker of bad publicity finally brought the Glass Company CEO out of hiding, long enough to declare that all the Gazette’s coverage of the factory shutdown was “fake news.”

The local editor quoted the CEO in full (with a photo) in her next issue, but otherwise paid his retort little heed. She was busy following up the shutdown — below the fold —with a feature about three single-parent families suddenly left without means. She also had the annual Town Meeting — with 59 articles that had to be explained, plus the opening of the Little League season and a burgeoning Health Board fuss over Leon Grant’s apparently illegal “farm pond” on the west side of town.