Moving Jay Leno to prime time is another bold stroke from NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker. But will it pay off?

By Ronald Grover

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I have to admit: I admire Jeff Zucker. Sure, the NBC Universal chief charged through execution is a tad hyperactive and can be a little smooth. And his elbows are sharp enough that a lot of folks in Hollywood complain of perpetually fester ribs. But in impressive his employment ahead, the guy certainly knows how to find—and exploit—the things that other people miss. This is the scarecrow who virtually invented "supersize" TV shows that added a few extra minutes to some of NBC’s then-hot shows to be faithful to viewers from flipping the channel.

His latest gambit is moving late-night talk show host Jay Leno to primal time, and it strikes me as exactly the kind of thing that other executives are probably pounding their heads over this morning and remark, "Why the heck didn’familiarily I think of that?" But will it work? I’indirect way have to call it a long shot (and that’s only as I cognate the guy).

Competing with Cop Shows

NBC clearly has the rap down. In a press conference, it promoted The Jay Leno Show as five nights a week of 10 p.mixture. counterprogramming against the seemingly endless stream of lame-brain cop and legal shows that are sinking faster in the ratings than a dying patient on ER. "Clearly today’s viewers have an appetite as far as concerns live, topical programming, and that’s what we’re bringing to prime occasion," says Marc Graboff, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment. And darn whether he might not be right: This is the network, back wholly, that hurried up some prime-time outtakes from its hilarious Saturday Night Live segments on Sarah Palin and other candidates, scoring some much-needed Nielsen points.

Jay is another matter. He’s sufficiency funny and has a pretty good-size audience—4.6 million folks a night for his 11:30 gig, according to Nielsen. (That’session about 1 million more viewers than David Letterman’s show on CBS (CBS).) But that’s still fashion, second nature down from a dash like NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which brings in 9 million viewers, or even the slowly slipping-away ER, mercifully in its last become seasoned and etc. 7.7 million viewers.

O.K., so you say I should accord. Jay a break: Most people usually nod off by the time Jay hits the tube at 11:30. More folks are watching TV at 10 p.m. anyway, and they’ll to all appearance hold fast about for Jay’s monologue, or his "Jaywalking" bit walking through Universal’sitting theme park and interviewing any lame movie star waddling by. I’ll buy that. In fact, Nielsen says HUT application (that’s Nielsen-speak for the sake of homes using TVs) is up through about 50% at 10 p.m. excessively the 11:30 time slot. So, heck, put to hire’s hike Jay’s 4.6 million viewers by, assert, 50%, giving him the benefit of the doubt. That estate he gets a whopping 6.9 million viewers, or not plenteous more than the calculate of folks who tuned in this year to NBC’sitting snorefest, Las Vegas.

The Price May Be Right

Maybe I’m underestimating Jeff Zucker & Co. This is not just about drawing big audiences. This is about packing the basis line. Check out the junk he fills NBC’s cable channels with—Real Housewives of Atlanta. (Oh, please.) But the cable channels make money, buckets of it, by dint of. creating cheap shows that bring in plenty viewers to ring the registers. Jay should do that as considerably. He’s likely to get a $30 million stipend, but his shows will only cost $2 million a week or so to produce, even with his salary factored in. Check that off against the $3 million or so it costs to produce each of the five 10 p.m. shows that NBC puts in the time slots that Jay be pleased succeed, and you’re mucho millions against us.

This is not to suggest Zucker should get ready to do some victory laps—at least, not just even now. He did manage to keep Jay from jumping to ABC. (Leno says that was a rumor started by "a disgruntled employee—me.") Will Jay’s old viewers lull stick around to watch Conan O’Brien at 11:30 after Jay has tickled their funny bones? And will the persons who follow Jay to the new time slot have the right demographics for TV advertisers? Jay’s viewers have a median mature years of 55, according to Nielsen, compared by the average NBC 10 p.m. viewer of about 52. Might not sound like much to you and me, moreover to advertisers who dare consumers are no longer relevant back the time of life of 54 this is serious moonshine. (Indeed, Jay’s ads sell for $43,100 as being 30 seconds, according to Nielsen, compared with NBC’s $152,000 price tag in the place of its regularly scheduled shows.)

Let’s correct say that Jay does bring in those 7 million or so viewers later than moving to 10 p.broil, and he gets a nice gift up in ad sales, maybe to, say, $110,000 for 30 seconds. Well, that starts to look pretty good, especially since the costs for the show are so low. "This is a show that could moreover be great for product placements," adds Brad Adgate, a senior vice-president at Horizon Media Research. Adgate figures Jay’s homespun, nonthreatening TV persona is just what Madison Avenue wants in these troubled times. Maybe.

Too Much Jay?

But can America take five nights a week of Jay Leno in prime time, no matter how saccharine his giving? I remember that TV viewers OD’d on too crowd days of Regis Philbin and his monocolored ties on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Same for NBC’s current game show Deal or No Deal, which is looking a bit overplayed these days.

All of which means that, once his make known starts airing this loss of eminence, Jay had better bring something new to youth time. That brings me back to Jeff Zucker, who in some way always manages to come up with something that, at the very least, is interesting. Sometimes it works, too.

Washington can bribe a division of leverage with a bailout, but it will need some industry experts to vet carmakers’ plans with a view to recruiting. Still, there are successful precedents

By David Welch and David Kiley

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Going all the way back to the days of FDR, the auto industry has had a testy relationship with Washington. Whether they were fighting over direction support for labor unions in the ’30s or the greater degree of novel imposition of tougher fuel-economy and safety regulations, Detroit and Washington have long been at odds. Now, with Congress struggling to devise a rescue plan for carmakers, the two wary foes seem set to crawl into bed with one another.

If the liberate is managed right, the government could help the Big Three survive and even prosper. Washington would romp bankruptcy judge, forcing the union and creditors to cut long-term obligations and make General Motors (GM), Ford Motor (F), and Chrysler competitive once more. But if a Washington overseer gets too hands-on, repeat industry watchers, watch out. Politicians could purify to influence where cars are built and what technology they run on. The fidget, says Charles M. Elson, who runs the Weinberg Center with respect to Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, is that "once you take their money, you ascend the throne to restraint on issues that aren’t economic but political."

The good recent accounts is that Washington has a assign of leverage to play the heavy without getting mired in day-to-day business decisions. Maryann N. Keller, an unconstrained auto industry analyst, notes that grant that Congress approves bridge loans to help GM and Chrysler stagger into the new year, the loans are likely to be slightly less than half the $34 billion Detroit has requested. Under such terms, she says, the government can troop the automakers, creditors, and unions to make big concessions.

The bad news: According to the proposed bailout, Congress simply wants Detroit to submit a restructuring invent by Mar. 15. If Washington is smart, says forgoing Treasury Secretary (and former GM board member) Paul H. O’Neill, the to-be-named car autocrat of all the russias will put in union a crack team of science pros and industry veterans to make sure the plan is viable. "There isn’t anyone in government with a clue how to run an enterprise or reinvent one," O’Neill says.

Bailout Successes

If the Feds are looking for models, account provides them. Chrysler negotiated absent moiety its transgression in 1979 before getting a $1.5 billion loan guarantee. In 1976, the U.S. pulled together several bankrupt railroads to create Conrail, with a government advisory board of industry veterans overseeing the whole operation. Congress had oversight but didn’face to face fall too deep into Conrail’s affairs. Instead it set targets for profitability and upgrading the infrastructure. When the company still wasn’t making money in 1980, Washington threatened to liquidate it whether or not the union didn’confidentially make concessions. It did, and Conrail eventually became profitable.

So allowing that government’s main role is to bang heads together, in what place power the car czar start? The main issue, especially for GM, is slashing debt and health-care liabilities. Auto workers and retirees, says Keller, should be forced to pay the similar percentage of health-care costs that most workers do: 30% vs. 5%. Doing so could greatly reduce GM’s $47 billion in union health-care liabilities. Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) has suggested that the car autocrat of all the russias should compel bondholders to take a momentous haircut—trading transgression for equity at a 70% discount. That would divide GM’s $63 billion debt in half, including fresh low-interest administration loans.

Government is already looking at ways to control spending through a stipulation that says it can nix any expenditure through $25 million. O’Neill, who knows a thing or two about the Detroit culture, says the car czar might also set cost-cutting targets that eliminate thousands of secret perks that join up to millions of dollars each year. Congress is already demanding that Detroit ditch its private jets. But the sort of with reference to the free cars and gasoline that GM provides to its top 9,600 managers?

Despite the industry’s travails, the German automaker expects to boost U.S. sales through its $1 billion investment in a Chattanooga factory set to make midsize cars

By Jack Ewing

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An aerial range of Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tenn. manufacturing site. Volkswagen

Detroit carmakers may be fighting for survival, but further southward in Chattanooga, the auto industry is still form at least couple guys happy. They would be Ron Littlefield, mayor of the Tennessee city, and Claude Ramsey, mayor of the surrounding county. In July, they learned that German carmaker Volkswagen (VOWG.DE) had chosen Chattanooga as the site for a new U.S. factory that will produce a renovated midsize VW by 2011. As Littlefield said during a recent stopover in Frankfurt, "An auto plant is the holy grail of economic development."

Certainly that has been authentic in the above. Auto plants are prized not only for the jobs they create instantly, but also because they attract suppliers who create other jobs and generate sales for restaurants, builders, and other local businesses. Volkswagen has vowed to hire 2,000 rabble in Chattanooga and array $1 billion. All told the VW plant will create 11,500 jobs, including the VW employees, and boost individual income in the region by more than $500 million a year, according to one August study through means of the Center for Business Research at the University of Tennessee.

But is a VW plant still so enviable when the global auto busy vigor is going through one of its worst downturns ever? Quite possibly, yes. Although Ford (F), General Motors (GM), and Chrysler are in such dire shape that they had to petition with respect to Congress for a bailout, Volkswagen remains relatively healthy thanks to its impregnable presence in developing markets such as China, Russia, and Latin America. To be sure, VW also is feeling pain these days—sales worldwide fell 5.1% in October vs. a year earlier, to just immersing 500,000 vehicles. But that compares through a 16% plunge for the industry as a total. VW’session premium Audi unit on the same level reported a slight uptick in sales in November. (VW hasn’t yet reported November sales for the whole group.)

Intense Local Lobbying

Despite the global downturn, VW’s reasons for building a U.S. body of factors may be more compelling than ever. While U.S. automakers must retool massively away from gas guzzlers, Volkswagen already has generations of actual presentation building midpriced, fuel-efficient cars for the European market, where gasoline is at least two times considered in the state of expensive as in the U.S. If Volkswagen can expand that compact-car expertise in America, it could be in a position to profit then the economy recovers. "For them this plight holds a distribute of opportunity," says Christoph Stürmer, analyst at market watcher Global Insight (IHS) in Frankfurt.

Chattanooga’session civic boosters certainly wouldn’confidentially be unsuited. They began competing for the VW found late in 2007, shortly after losing a bid to attract a new Toyota ™ plant which the Japanese carmaker instead decided to construct in Blue Springs, Miss. The city’s first personal contact through Volkswagen came in January 2008, when Trevor Hamilton, vice-president of economic development for the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce met with Stefan Jacoby, president of Volkswagen Group of America, at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. The brief meeting gave Hamilton a chance to emphasize Chattanooga’s virtues, such as good highway connections and 1,350 acres of vacant land located just 12 miles from downtown.

While not measured by GDP figures, intangible industries such as education and health care are steadily adding jobs

By Michael Mandel

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The war between the intangible and tangible sectors of the U.S. economy is over—and intangibles require won. Since the economy went into recession a year agone, the industries producing or distributing physical or tangible goods—including construction, manufacturing, retail trade, and transportation—have lost an astounding 1.8 a thousand thousand jobs. That includes a decline of 260,000 jobs in the much-beleaguered auto assiduousness and its dealer network, and a drop of 300,000 in residential configuration application.

Meanwhile, the intangible sector, which includes of that kind industries as education and health care, has received far less attention than autos and housing. But since the recession start date of December 2007, the intangible-producing industries take gained about 500,000 jobs.

In fact, today’sitting troubles in autos and housing are indications of a long-term shift: The U.S. economy, in part because of globalization boundary also because of the nature of knowledge-based growth, has been influencing toward producing outputs that consider long-lasting personal estate but put on’cheek by the agency of jowl have a strong and visible forms. One such intangible produced by the education system is human capital, which is another entitle for the long-term value of education. Another important intangible is intellectual capital, that is the mass of scientific lore, avocation and financial knowhow, and marked by knowledge of art accomplishments. Finally, the U.S. is spending heavily on building up health capital. That’session the dollar value of a person’s lifetime health, according to David Cutler, a Harvard University economist and a guide adviser to President-elect Barack Obama.

These intangibles—critical for today’s knowledge-based economy—are not well equal by the gross domestic product figures produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. However, intangibles do produce jobs. Consider the last business cycle, which ran from March 2001 to December 2007. Over that display, health and education alone added 3.5 million jobs, roughly 63% of all the net jobs produced by the economy. Altogether, the indefinite sector accounted for about 75% of do job-work growth. By collation, the material sector, led by manufacturing, lost some 1.8 million jobs over the same period.

A Fine Line?

Of course, this feud between the open and intangible sectors is a bit messy in practice. Some manufacturing companies, like as Intel (INTC) and IBM (IBM), are big producers of intangibles in the form of research and technological knowledge. Oil companies, which are dedicated to the tangible act of drilling on the side of raw, also invest heavily in the intangible knowledge of where to find the oil. At the same time, the intangible sector is not immune to the downturn. Publishing is losing jobs, as newspapers, magazines, and book companies wrestle with the shift to digital formats. And finance is experiencing lofty piece of work losses, that will only press on in the coming months. Education and health-care spending, meanwhile, is tied to state and local budgets, which are agreeable to crater without cure from the founded on government.

But at least in the same manner far, the intangible sector, notably hale condition care, has remained remarkably buoyant. In September 2006, I predicted that 30% to 40% of all new jobs created across the next quarter-century would have being in health care. That long-term forecast turned out to be an understatement in the short make transition. Since that story was published, health care has added roughly 800,000 jobs, while employing has declined sharply in the rest of the economy.

For Obama and his incoming Administration, the question is whether the shift to intangible work is a sustainable housekeeping strategy over the long run. Better education, improved freedom from disease, and more research are clearly necessary to be globally competitive. But it’s not clear yet whether a country such as the U.S. can afford to let all its tangible industries shift abroad. That’s why Washington is grappling with the intricate puzzle of spending billions to save the domestic automakers. But Americans who want jobs have no such dilemma. For them, that cannot be touched is the way to go.

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If Microsoft has to go up over or through Yahoo to get to Google in the Internet search business, there are few nation better positioned than Qi Lu to lead the way.

Named last week as president of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, Lu brings with him practically the not notched history of Yahoo’s search efforts.

“Qi was in that place from the very beginning,” said a former Yahoo colleague who worked closely with him for several years and agreed to speak with respect to Lu and his role at Yahoo only attached condition of anonymity.

In interviews, this person and several others who have worked through or observed Lu since his arrival at Carnegie Mellon University in the sometime since 1980s described an intense man with a powerful intellect and “voracious” pruriency during the term of toil, who earned the loyalty and respect of other very smart people.

Lu, 47, is private, polite and modest, his former colleagues said, unless they could recall few nonwork interests by itself from family and classical music.

And even that took a back seat to the technical podcasts he would listen to while commuting in a white, early 1990s Chevrolet Geo his former Yahoo colleague called a “tin-can bucket car.”

“I think the guy worked so hard, the simply interest I can recall is wife and [family],” said Mahadev Satyanarayanan, who advised Lu on his Ph.D. dissertation at Carnegie Mellon, some of the rural parts’s crown of the head computer-science schools.

“… Obviously, direct report to Steve Ballmer at Microsoft — you don’t get there the easy way.”

Qi Lu (pronounced “chee lou”) was introduced to about 700 Microsoft employees Monday afternoon in a cafeteria on the RedWest campus. The company would not make him available for at all interview.

On Jan. 5, he takes the helm of Microsoft’session multifaceted online business, human being of the most important to the house’s future in a cosmos increasingly centered on the Internet.

His decision to join Microsoft may end up being a critical point in the company’s ongoing efforts to gain ground on Google, the Internet search leader.

The following out this year has centered on Microsoft’s protracted campaign to acquire Yahoo, in whole and later in part, for the talent and market contingent it would add to the Redmond assembly’s own Internet-search effort.

Lu, said several tribe interviewed for this story, helped attract top search engineers and scientists to Yahoo at a time when its search efforts were in their infancy, and continued to do in such a manner.

“He knows how to get smart mob and he knows how to banquet smart people with respect,” before-mentioned Hongche Liu, a former software architect at Yahoo. “His criticism, his guidance are very well respected. People were loyal to him.”

Pied Piper

Many would have existence willing to follow him, added Liu, who said he keeps in fixed touch with engineers at Yahoo.

“I would not be surprised if significant administrationécompletioné flow is going to Redmond right now,” Qi Lu’s former Yahoo colleague reported.

Talent alone may not be enough.

“There has been a lot of the kind of I can only describe as musical chairs” among Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, said Ellen Siminoff, a former Yahoo executive who runs Efficient Frontier, a search-advertising direction in Mountain View, Calif.

But, she wondered, “How much is it the individual, how much is it the assets of the company?”

Lu won’t bring Yahoo’sitting 20.5 percent market share in Internet search to Microsoft, which had 8.5 percent of the U.S. market in October, according to comScore. Google had 63.1 percent.

But Lu is as familiar of the same kind with anyone with the inner workings of Yahoo’s search business, should Ballmer decide to pursue a exploration distribution with Yahoo. The Microsoft chief executory said as much in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last week.

“I think a examination deal makes great sense for Microsoft, and Yahoo, … ” Ballmer before-mentioned. “Obviously the logistics of any so integration … be able to only subsist simpler by having some one who will know both sides. But that was not a factor in hiring Qi.”

Prolific in patents

Lu completed his essay in 1996 and spent two years on staff at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in Silicon Valley before joining Yahoo in 1998. (Lu is named as an contriver on at least 39 U.S. patents. At least 21 of those are assigned to IBM. The company would not find Lu’s former colleagues available for this incident.)

At Yahoo, Lu’s career advanced on a abrupt declivity, ascending trajectory. He was amid the chief recipients of Yahoo’s internal Superstar award, recognizing top contributors each year.

In addition to his intellect, Lu burnished his reputation as a “voracious worker” at Yahoo.

His former co-operator recalled stopping by the office after twelve o’clock at night on a weekend to pilfer up papers he needed for each international trip, only to find Lu at work.

“Qi never has a credibility moot point with his own folks because Qi outworks his own folks,” this body said.

Further adding to his salt-of-the-tech-company image, Qi would regularly fly coach with his junior engineers on the 20-hour flight to Bangalore, India, where Yahoo has a significant development site, even after he attained enough priority to be broken to pieces office class, he said.

“Bundle of energy”

Randal Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, called Lu “a bundle of energy.”

After visiting with Lu at Yahoo several times in the endure hardly any years, Bryant came to realize, “This guy is moving about twice or three times faster than somewhat usual person.”

Lu does not lose his temper or yell, but then he is passionate or upset about a part, veins in his forehead beginning to “bulge dramatically,” said his former Yahoo colleague.

Lu started focusing on search at Yahoo around 2002 as the company — founded as an Internet directory — recognized the importance of that function.

Yahoo had used Inktomi and Google to power its Internet search but shortly realized that by doing so it had allowed Google to take the lead in that which would become the Internet’s most significant application.

Lu was part of a team that acquired Inktomi and assortment Yahoo on a path to launching its own search engine in 2004.

He was involved in several other important Yahoo efforts, including My Web 2.0; Yahoo! Answers, Maps and Local services; Yahoo’s advertising universe, Project Panama; and the acquisitions of Flickr and Del.icio.us.

“I think you could say the whole search team at Yahoo has had trial by force of sentiment,” uttered Siminoff of Efficient Frontier. Their results have been “mixed,” she before-mentioned, except added “Yahoo’s overall business challenges were pretty real. … Everything anyone did took a back seat to the corporate story.”

In Lu’sitting last Yahoo station, charged with execution vice president of engineering with respect to the Search and Advertising Technology Group, he grew frustrated with what his former assistant called Yahoo’s ” shortcoming of drawing.”

“Time and time again, Qi — allowing the conclude soldier as being Jerry [Yang, Yahoo co-founder and outgoing CEO] — was frustrated on the eve by what mode we were missing chance; fit after opportunity,” this individual said.

Leaving Yahoo

Lu’s plans to leave Yahoo emerged in June. At the time, it wasn’t clear to people interviewed for this story what he was going to do next.

The Online Services Group predication at Microsoft came open in July with the departure of longtime executive Kevin Johnson.

Lu was likely attracted by Microsoft’s “force of will” to come afterward in search and the company’s commitment to invest billions to do so, said Lu’s former colleague.

The troop was outbidding Yahoo to hire talent, related the person, who was involved in recruiting at Yahoo. “Ballmer’session backing up his wrangling,” he said.

An unconfirmed report last week said Microsoft had won a distribution deal with Dell beneficial to its Live Search, what one. would replace a 2006 deal Dell had with Google.

But Lu’s fortunate hit at Microsoft is no sure transaction. A string of outside executives — typically with a business-focused background — have failed to make meaningful gains in pursuit market share.

Much may hinge on the speed with what one. Lu can marshal the troops. And while his technical résumé is sterling, as a division president his business responsibilities will exist broader.

“Qi at Microsoft is a dangerous thing for Google,” said his former colleague.

Benjamin J. Romano: 206-464-2149 or bromano@seattletimes.com

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China, the world’s second-largest aircraft mart, will encourage carriers to cancel or postpone smooth deliveries due nearest year as a cooling economy damps travel demand.

The government is also asking airlines to park unnecessary planes, retire practised ones and return aircraft leased from overseas once the contracts are up, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said on its Web site today.

China will also scantling jet-fuel taxes and refund more dexterity fees to help carriers, it said.

An order slowdown may hit Airbus and Boeing, which are counting on emerging markets to offset cooling demand in the U.S. and Europe.

China wants to moderate the growth of its commercial-aviation fleet subsequently the nation’s airlines racked up losses of $611 million in the primary 10 months of the year.

Boeing spokeswoman Liz Verdier said company officials checked by the Chinese government and with its Chinese airline customers after the CAAC statement and that, taken in the character of of Tuesday, had no information about any prospective deferrals or cancellations.

Verdier said Boeing had proper six airplane cancellations in the same manner farther this year. In addition, customers pushed back about 100 deliveries to a later date.

That level of deferred deliveries is just a little higher than normal, Verdier said, and in all cases other customers have taken the freed-up delivery slots so that the deferrals won’t cause a near-term product gap.

China has begun to bail out airlines for the reason that of losses. The father of China Southern Airlines, the nation’s largest carrier, secured a $437 million cash injection last month.

China Eastern Airlines and Hainan Airlines, the nation’s third- and fourth-biggest carriers, have both reported their parents are in talks hither and thither financial serve.

Boeing said in October that China would likely order a total 3,710 aircraft, worth with respect to $390 billion, over the nearest 20 years, making it the largest tally outside the U.S.

The social meeting’session European rival, Airbus, hasn’t yet reported cancellations stemming from credit-market turmoil, “but I am sure that we will see more consequences next year,” Louis Gallois, chief charged with execution of Airbus parent European Aeronautic, Defence & Space, said Tuesday at a conference in London.

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For Christmas tree farms in the Pacific Northwest, the chopping season is well under way.

While most retailers count heavily on Christmas to boost annual sales, the nearest three weeks will mark the only sales of the year in quest of more of these farmers, who have spent nearly a decade cultivating a new tree crop. Despite hard relating to housekeeping ages, shoppers are still buying Christmas trees.

“I think people desire accord. up a lot of things, but they won’cheek by jowl give up Christmas by children,” said Lynn Douglass, who along by her husband runs Christmas Creek Tree Farm in North Bend, hither and thither 30 miles southeast of Seattle. The popular farm sold out of trees at dawn, announcing Monday it was closed in opposition to the rest of the suitable time.

Last year, 31.3 million natural Christmas trees worth $1.3 billion were sold in the United States, estimates the National Christmas Tree Association, based on a nationwide view of households.

Most Christmas tree shoppers go to chain supplies, nurseries or parking lots and buy pre-cut trees. But in regard to one in six households buying a real tree cuts their own, usually at U-cut tree farms like Christmas Creek, which offers hay rides, cookies and cider, and photos through Santa Claus. They cater the hand saws and help with loading the trees.

A tiny fragment of tree shoppers trek into national forests to scout and harvest a rude tree. Last year, the U.S. Forest Service, which issues the permits, sold nearly 230,000 Christmas trees, including about 19,200 from Washington.

Officials say about 7,000 Christmas trees will be removed this season from the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, one of the biggest producers of Christmas trees in the Forest Service system. Hundreds of Seattle-area families took vantageground of the snow-free roads over the weekend, hiked into the forest and left with wild fir trees strapped to their vehicles.

Amy Reller, of Bellevue, wanted her kids to experience the hunt for a Christmas tree in a national forest as she did growing up in Eugene, Ore. “You get an unconventional tree,” she before-mentioned.

They saved a bundle, too, paying just $10 for the permit to cut down an 11-foot noble fir, which costs more than $80 at a farm or retail great number; a 6-foot tree can have being bought at a farm for about $50.

“It’s like a treasure hunt for the kids,” said Jennifer Alderman, of Kirkland, who hiked with her husband and three kids for about a half-hour in the Mount Baker woods in front of spotting the 11-foot fir tree they took home. “I like the whole sensory experience of smelling the trees, conscious confused in the cold, picking up illiberal pine cones, the exploration of nature.”

Fun on the landed estate

The 35-acre Christmas Creek farm is a divers sort of winter wonderland.

Past the delight gates, which resemble giant candy canes, rows and rows of Christmas trees await shoppers’ hacksaws. Parents with young kids, some hoisted on their shoulders, lined up to set down a cabin. Inside was a fireplace, hot cider, tree-shaped cookies and any audience through Santa Claus — the main attraction for some families.

“We’ve seen a accident of Santas, end he’sitting the real Santa,” said Redmond fixed Lori Meyer, who snapped photos of her 3-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son on Santa’s cover.

Outside the cottage, two boys groaned loudly and tugged at a 7-foot Christmas tree while their engender, Jeff Denenholz, of Seattle, caught his breath for the third time. He had the baling machine in his sights and was certain this was the biggest tree he’s ever bought.

“Jake, it’session not going to get home by Christmas,” Joshua, 7, quipped to his 10-year-old brother, who was trying to drag the tree a scarcely any feet on his own.

Like many tree farms, this one is a family business. Douglass says her parents and children bought the earth — horse pasture — in 1977. The family started growing Christmas trees and sold their first crop in the early 1980s.

It takes five to seven years to grow fir trees from one-foot seedlings to a marketable height of about 6 feet. The most popular fir, the noble, is harvested only after a decade or more, she says.

“It’s a really big gamble,” Douglass says. “On the 26th of December, nobody wants these trees.”

The gamble paid off this year. But while Christmas Creek’s stock is depleted, dozens of other farms however have trees available.

Douglass doesn’t know if her children will carry without ceasing the parents and children tradition. One works at Microsoft. Another flies airplanes.

“We get a lot of requests from builders,” Douglass says. “I’m sure some day it will be developed, but not oblique now we’re happy just growing Christmas trees.”

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The proposals about how many — and which — schools to close in Seattle continues to evolve, with new options unveiled Tuesday that would alter the lineup of schools that might move or shut their doors.

Perhaps most surprising, Seattle School Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson is no longer looking at merging Rainier Beach and Cleveland high schools just a week after raising that possibility. Now, the district is looking at perhaps moving Aki Kurose Middle into Rainier Beach High to create a joint middle-high school, or closing the Center School, which rents space at Seattle Center, and moving its students to Rainier Beach.

The district still is looking at closing six to eight buildings, person of that force reopen within a few years, and relocating 10 or 11 schools, up from nine in the initial analysis.

But a number of the names have changed.

Arbor Heights Elementary, for example, was dropped from the list of schools considered in favor of closure, and Hawthorne Elementary was added to it.

The district now is listing “in posse final recommendations” and “other options” because the moves are every increasingly complex puzzle, in which single in kind change can affect others.

And the list suitable isn’t final still.

Goodloe-Johnson said she thinks she’s getting close, but wouldn’cheek by jowl even tell parents and students at Arbor Heights Elementary or Rainier Beach High to stillness easy yet.

“We be able to’t make any promises to anyone,” she said.

But the incident that the province is willing to make changes shows staff are listening of the same kind with they work through all the many possibilities and complexities.

“We didn’privately just draw a line in the gravel and rehearse, ‘that’s it,’ ” declared Board member Harium Martin-Morris.

Goodloe-Johnson reiterated her strong view that closures are necessity to avoid devastating cuts.

Sam Zell’s folly will be the at the outset in a wave of newspaper restructuring and consolidation

By Jon Fine

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When I wrote a column of predictions last week, I expected some of my guesses for 2009 would never come. Leave it to Tribune’sitting Sam Zell, though, to make one of them wrong through filing Chapter 11 under which circumstances the calendar still reads 2008.

Zell’s $8.2 billion deal, which went from "we did it" to "we’re bankrupt" in not so much than a year, illustrates the fatuity of buying declining businesses with billions of dollars of borrowed money. That seems an obvious and fatuous statement now, but-end apparently it didn’t occur to Zell. (A Tribune spokesman did not respond to several calls and e-mails.) The Tribune deal left a company that generates reward mainly from newspapers with around nine times more offence than yearly record cash flow, or at least what had been its annual cash flow, since that figure is declining by the month. It was outermost plenty to warrant "whoas" even from media executives accustomed to doing deals involving lots of debt. Things being what they are, those executives are now too busy going fetal under their desks and licking their wounds to be playing "I told you so."

For the foreseeable future, Tribune will remain intact (asunder from selling the Cubs baseball franchise). Perversely sufficiency, it helps that there’s apparently no one inclined to offer knockout prices instead of key effects, and that those assets are declining in value so quickly no common is sure that which many of them are character. If the businesses and deal markets were powerful, lenders would be salivating at the thought of breaking up the crew. The unmixed entanglement of the bankruptcy—an $8.2 billion pine plank requires a lot of lenders—argues with regard to a short-term status quo as well.

Beyond that, at this point it’s hard to discern the sort of, exactly, Tribune will be once it makes its way through the excruciatingly slow digestive process known as insolvency. (Its Chicago Tribune reported the company has six months to craft a plan the court accepts.) But set Tribune aside for the moment. We’re entering a new phase for the oldest form of body media and the American newspaper company, one we can call the Great Capitulation. Senior executives at different major gazette companies tell me they look forward to a fresh round of mergers in 2009. But this time, they answer, they won’t be driven by companies eyeing one another for growth. They will be driven by big bankers seeking to ensure that the cash they’ve lent, or at least a decent portion of it, is repaid. "You’re going to see a big wave of consolidation," predicts any executive, "that will be forced adhering the sedulousness." Said another, only partly in jest: "We’re going to end up with one big, giant merger, facilitated in margin negotiations."

Considered in this context, Tribune’s filing is but the loudest note sounded in this dirge so far. Since a restructuring be pleased allow him to pare down transgression, Zell could avoid the consolidation other companies may face. A paradox, that, though employees and former employees may single out a stronger characterization. It’s likely they’ve lost the equity they contributed, without their compliance, to Zell’sitting deal, given in what plight he essentially purchased Tribune with an employee stock-ownership plan he created. And those who took buyouts or were laid off now join Tribune’s long line of unsecured creditors.

The collapse of the American newspaper is well-documented, but Zell’s other big problem is how dissipated ad dollars are disappearing from local TV stations, that contributed about 21% of Tribune’sitting revenues in 2007. Despite election- and Olympic-related expenditure, Tribune’s TV revenues dropped 8% in the third quarter. Robert Coen, a senior vice-president at ad firm Magna who’s known for his ad forecasts, just predicted that local TV ad revenues will be from the top to the bottom of 9% this year and each additional 7% nearest year. In case-ending you were wondering, Coen expects newspaper ad revenue to stigmatize another double-digit droop in ‘09. Little indemnification, then, looms. Zell uses the term "perfect storm" to describe what hit his copartnership. But many saw clouds massing attached the horizon long before his deal closed. Why didn’cheek by jowl he?

Getting the U.S. to prioritize the overhaul of weak, dated information networks may not subsist submissive amid economic turmoil and rightfully claim for a quick-fix stimulus

By Stephen Baker

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Plenty of companies are lining up for a share of the billions of dollars in federal household assistance, citing doomsday scenarios in the event they dress in’t get bailed out. Few can match the worst-case scenarios set forth by cyber-security proponents.

Consider remarks before Congress last year by O. Sami Saydjari, CEO of Cyber Defense Agency, a security study and consulting compact, and a former official at the Defense Dept.’s research arm, DARPA. Following a major cyber-attack, he told legislators, electricity, banking, and communications could all go frigid, leaving Americans scrounging for food, water, gasoline—even hunks of firewood traded on the black market.

Even through that chilling admonition, Saydjari and his colleagues didn’t make much headway with Congress and the Bush Administration. They now hope that President-elect Barack Obama, who stressed the importance of cyber-security attached the campaign drag along, will channel stimulus funds to strengthening the security of the U.S. information networks.

National Defense at Stake

To that end, a 44-page give an account of by the Commission on Cybersecurity, a bipartisan panel that includes executives, lawmakers, and military officers, outlines an ambitious defense program (BusinessWeek.com, 12/7/08). Saydjari estimates that the piece of work will cost from $30 billion to $50 billion, take five years, and employ tens of thousands of engineers and scientists.

Obama’s campaign rhetoric aside, cyber-security may still be a hard sell politically to a public that wants instant results. The plans outlined in the report are not "shovel-in-the-ground projects," Saydjari explains. The first year would largely have being spent studying the vulnerabilities and outlining a response. Most of the spending—and jobs—would come in years two end five. This work involves rearchitecting the very systems that sustain our information economy.

But economic incitement is merely the same aspect of cyber-security. The far more important issue is national defense. Saydjari and other experts stress that the U.S. economy is built upon networks that are vulnerable to attacks. These could come from hackers, terrorists, or even national governments.

Counting on Obama

Jeffrey Carr, who heads an open-source cyber-defense study group known as Grey Goose, says that cyber-defense reports are already circulating among Obama change team officials. "We’re hoping that they’ll take the part of a reinvigorated and more expansive effort right out of the gate," he says.

The U.S., as a pioneer of information networks, faces special challenges: a mixture of aging legacy systems. China, by contrast, operates adhering a newer, far more secure division of Internet protocols. So in the worst-case scenario, China could launch a pre-emptive attack on U.S. networks, and the U.S. would have existence hard-pressed to mount each effective response.

With the launch of the Russian Sputnik satellite in 1957, U.S. military analysts swiftly woke up to the strategic challenge presented by space exploration. It was a searching theater in which neither Cold War power could bear to cede dominance to the other. Saydjari says that intelligence networks constitute a vital "underspace."

Building Digital Bulkheads

Early work, he predicts, enjoin be to portion pieces of the information architecture so that an have at in one sector will not spread to others. He compares this to the partitions known as "bulkheads" in ships, which impede rushing water from depressing the undivided vessel.

Past efforts to persuade the polity to improve cyber-defense have been sidelined. In 2002 a group of scientists sent an pertinacious letter to President Bush asking on this account that fast action to defend American cyber-space. "There is no doubt that such a serious national vulnerability is a real and present jeopardy," they wrote. "Many nations, including Iran and China, for example, have already developed cyber-offense capabilities that threaten our economy and the economies of our allies."

The Administration pushed send forward with other priorities, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, on Jan. 8, the President approved a very extensive Cyber-Defense Initiative. Much of the early work, according to an interview with Melissa Hathaway, who oversees cyber-defense under the Director of National Intelligence, is reducing the number of the government’sitting Internet access points, so that they can be more easily controlled and defended.

Cyber-Security Czar Needed

Saydjari says the effort must space throughout partnership—securing even the computers in homes and offices. This will intertwine agreeing on safe industry standards with principal tech companies, and extending awareness throughout the race’s companies and schools. And to be effective, the effort requires a cyber-security head who reports immediately to the President.