Newspapers / The Charlotte post. / April 6, 2006, edition 1 / Page 24
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8C BUSINESS/CIie Clmrlotte 3^ast Thursday, April 6, 2006 Podcasting opens doors Continued from page 7C Pounds, young people have always used music as a folrn of expression and a method of generating finance. “Music is so accessible. that they would rather use that as a way of making money,” said the 23-year-old college student. Podcasting as a business alternative allows anyone with an entrepreneur spirit tolaxmch shows without traditional broadcasting avenues. With podcasts anyone can broad cast their own version of the nightly news. Weiner said there are six points to keep in mind when launching a podcast. Be acquainted with the software, invest in a decent microphone, have a good idea, have an idea that is repeatable, focus and stay on track with the idea, know how to get into the podcast directories, and know how to market yourself. “All you are required to have is a micro phone and a computer,” Weiner said. ‘3ut advertisers are only going to go to podcasts that they like.” Wal-Mart goes for organic Continued from page 7C Americans are increasingly interested in,” Peterson said. Wal-Mart’s Lee Scott is not the first chief executive to advocate sustainability, a term for the corporate ethos of doing business in a way that benefits the environ ment. Industrial giant General Electric Co., for example, last year launched a program called "Ecomagination” to bring green technologies like wind power to market. What makes Wal-Mart’s efforts unique, sustainability experts say, is the retailer’s sheer size and the power that gives it in relations with sup pliers. Wal-Mart works close ly with suppliers to shape their goods, if they want them on the shelves of Wal- Mart’s nearly 4,000 ’U.S. stores and over 2,200 interna tionally. “They have huge potential because it’s not just Wal-Mart we’re talking about, it’s their entire supply chain,” said Jeff Erikson, U.S. director of London-based consultancy and research group SustainAbility. The group says it does not do any con sulting work for Wal-Mart. Erikson said Wal-Mart could bring the same pres sure it has exerted over the years on prices and apply that to pushing manufactur ers and competitors to adopt more sustainable business practices and larger organic offerings. “We love to see companies like Wal-Mart taking a big step and making pronounce ments as they have, because their tentacles are so large,” Erikson said. Wal-Mart plans to double its organic grocery offerings in the next month and contin ue looking for more products to offer in areas such as gro cery, apparel,'paper and elec tronics. Stephen Quinn, vice presi dent of marketing, told an analysts’ conference this month that Wal-Mart would have 400 organic food items in stores this summer “at the Post-hurricane New Orleans economy still a queston mark Continued from page 7C back and sponsoring the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage festival, one of the city’s major tourist draws. And ChevronTexaco returned 700 white-collar workers, helping to alleviate fears that Katrina had done away with New Orleans’ remaining oil busi ness. With billions of dollars in reconstruction work facing the city and not enough skilled craftsmen to go around, the construction business will be “like gold mining in the gold rush days,” said Loren Scott, a retired economics professor at Louisiana State University who tracks the state’s employ ment picture. On the down side, the state’s only Fortune 500 company, utility holding firm Entergy Corp., says its New Orleans headquarters will be scaled down. And Hibernia National Bank, acquired last year by Capital One Financial Corp., is moving 350 to 400 jobs from its 3,100 pre-storm payroll to Dallas, citing the lack of housing. Scores of small retail businesses and restaurants aren’t sure how long they can remain viable with so few workers and a housing shortage that grows worse. Baldwin said the monthly rent on his fami ly’s home will jump from $900 to $1,550 in October. The housing crunch has created a prob lem - and, for some, a big expense _ for busi nesses too. Shell spent $33 million to acquire about 120 residential units in the New Orleans and Baton Rouge areas to lease back to their workers at cost. The suburban commute for many now reaches as far away as Baton Rouge, 65 miles northwest of New Orleans. Jason Williams, who’s self-employed, dri ves at least an hour and 10 minutes in each direction on a work day that starts early in the morning. “On a bad day, it can take any where from two hours and up,” he said. Williams and his family plan to return to their rental house in New Orleans next month. They’re lucky - their longtime land lord isn’t hiking the rent. Others will never return. RAND Corp,, a private think tank, pro jects the city’s population will reach only 272,000 by September 2008, three years after Katrina. Greg Rigamer, head of GCR & Associates Inc., a New Orleans consult ing firm, said RAND is too conservative. He projects a population of 250,000 to 275,000 by the end of 2006, followed by an extreme slowdown as housing fills up. Renee Baldwin, who’s home-schooling her 12-year-old daughter in addition to keeping a job in the petroleum support industry, said she believes the housing scenario could put the city’s middle class in jeopardy. “The area is going to be people with a lot of money or people without any money,” she said. “They’re pushing the middle class out. Not everyone can afford to pay $1,500 a month for rent.” Mike Pendley, who works in the oilfield service business in New Orleans, chose to live in Baton Rouge and commute when he transferred from Houston three years ago. He believes many New Orleans workers will decide to become permanent Baton Rouge residents. “It will be the safety factor for the their families, the levee factor,” Pendley said. “They won’t have to worry about flooding. The schools are better, and the area is per haps safer.” Scott, the retired economist, said more commuting workers bodes ill for New Orleans, which has faced a dwindling tax base since the school desegregation flight of the 1960s and 1970s, the oil price crash of the 1980s and corporate consolidation and crime fears in the 1990s. “The tax base will shift more to where they have their residences, instead of where they work,” Scott said. "That’s where they will pay their property taxes, buy their gro ceries, buy their cars.” Scott said the recovery likely will speed up if New Orleans escapes a major storm this year - or could be stopped stone-cold by another. “If it happens again, you’re going to have people giving up on coming back, business es giving up on coming back and taxpayers in the other 49 states questioning sending billions (of dollars) into the area,” he said. The uncertainty makes no difference to Manheim, who says more tourist-oriented advertising is needed to convince the rest of the country that New Orleans is ready to host them. Indeed, the RAND study said businesses and industries that rely on their New Orleans roots - petroleum, shipbuilding and, of course, tourism - will recover the quickest. “Without the help of tourism, it’s going to take us a lot longer to get back,” she said. “We need everyone in the United States to come visit us.” Racial income gap persists Continued from page 7C Owning a home is the way most Americans accumulate wealth, writes Lance Freeman, a Columbia University urban planning professor in one essay. In 2004, 49.1 percent of blacks owned homes, the highest rate ever. Still, that was 25 percent age points lower than for whites, and blacks’ homes were worth less. Freeman writes. Census data in 2000 showed blacks had barely one-tenth the net worth of whites. Another essay analyzes causes and effects of the nation’s ballooning prison rolls. George Curry, an editor' at the National Newspapers Publisher’s As^ciation, writes that harsher laws for drug offenders helped to almost double prison and jail populations in the 1990s. Curry cites a Justice Policy study which foimd that, by 2000, there were more African-American men in prison and jail (791,600) than college (603,000). “When we send (students) to college instead of prison,” Curry writes, “we strength en them, their families and our country in the process.” Mortal, a former mayor of New Orleans, writes that the nation’s attention was turned to the plight of poor Americans during Hurricane Katrina. He called the storm and flood that hit the Gulf Coast last August “this generation’s Bloody Sunday,” referring to the March 1965 civil rights march in Alabama that focused the nation’s atten tion on racial segregation in the South. 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April 6, 2006, edition 1
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