FOCUS/midwest

Few posts and no new editions in 2011, but readers are still finding FOCUS/midwest.

Here’s a look at the magazine by the numbers, as of Dec. 31, 2011.

32,212:  Hits on the magazine’s website, focusmidwest.com, since its creation in Oct. 8, 2008. That’s an increase of nearly 8,700, or 37 percent, in the past year.

2: New public posts on the website since Dec. 31, 2010.

2,158: Web hits for “Fears and lobbying,” an investigation of a former Illinois businessman. That’s 1,315 more in the past year.  The special report, partially funded by the St. Louis Press Club and reformatted as a PDF, also separately garnered nearly 1,500 additional reads on Scribd this year, for a total of 2,826 so far.

4: Number of prototypes, or sample, editions of FOCUS/midwest magazine posted in 2010 on Scribd and Issuu.  If you haven’t seen them, you can get to the fall edition here http://bit.ly/b7nMRs and winter here http://bit.ly/fSIjJ6

9,052: Total reads for the four prototypes. That’s 5,452 more readers in 2011.

0: How much money FOCUS/midwest has sought, or generated, in advertising or subscription income.

0: Number of prototypes posted in 2011.

Interested in the future of FOCUS/midwest? Check back in two months for an update.

Or email focusmidwest@yahoo.com

Remarks by Bob Zieger (University of Florida, emeritus) at the annual Labor Day Breakfast, Sept. 3, 2011, sponsored by the North Central Florida Central Labor Council, Gainesville.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka has recently said that “nostalgia for organized labor’s past is no strategy for our future.”

As a historian, however, I do think that the past can continue to instruct us.

Let me bring you back to the year 1935 and the founding of the CIO, or Congress of Industrial Organizations. The CIO existed as a separate organization between that year and 1955 when it merged with the AFL to form the AFL-CIO. Many historians see the formation and struggles of the CIO to build industrial unions as the single most important episode in the history of American labor.

Much has changed since the 1930s. Then the “typical” worker dug coal, poured steel, or assembled automobiles. Today she is a health care worker, a retail clerk, a school teacher.

But there’s an old saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Billy Bragg bids us to remember “the lessons of the past.” What are the lessons that the rise of the CIO holds for us?  Read the rest of this entry »

The St. Louis Journalism Review, younger sibling of FOCUS/midwest, celebrated its 40th anniversary last year and a move to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. The publication marks the occasion at an event on Sept. 15, from 6-9 p.m., at the Edward Jones Building in Des Peres.  Russ Mitchell of CBS is emcee; Bob Woodward of The Washington Post joins via satellite. For information http://gatewayjr.org/2011/08/26/celebration/

The first volume of Jacqueline Dougan Jackson’s The Round Barn will be released this October by Beloit College Press. It’s an engaging, inspiring and amazingly detailed look at the rise and fall of a family-owned dairy farm in Wisconsin. Some of Jackson’s work has been featured by FOCUS/midwest. Look for ordering information and other details at  http://roundbarnstories.com/

For four years, beginning in 1971, Barbara Olson kept a detailed journal of her family’s time in Ethiopia, telling stories of people whose lives would soon be upended by war, revolution, drought and famine. Excerpts were published by FOCUS/midwest; the book, Gondar, Ethiopia, is now available. To order a copy, go here: http://gondarstories.com/book_236.html.

Although FOCUS/midwest has been hibernating since winter, it continues to draw readers. For example, Will Gardner, writing for Education Week, recently looked at private management of public schools, referencing Peter Downs’ study, published by FOCUS/midwest. Find Gardner’s “Are public schools supermarkets? at blogs.edweek.org. Read the rest of this entry »

When Lawrence Criscione asked a Nuclear Regulatory Commission review board last week to reopen an investigation of an incident at AmerenUE’s Callaway nuclear power plant in Missouri, the nuclear engineer expressed no hope that the federal agency would honor his request.

“I believe the decision has already been made that this petition will be bureaucratically [limited] to the investigations already performed … in spite of the fact that significant questions concerning the honesty and integrity of the uppermost management of a commercial nuclear power plant are still unanswered.” Criscione said. Read the rest of this entry »

J.J. Maloney was facing life behind the walls of the Missouri Penitentiary, sentenced for the murder of a 74-year-old businessman during a botched robbery. Remarkably, Maloney wrote his way to freedom — some of his work found its way to the pages of this magazine — and he kept writing, becoming one of the Midwest’s most intrepid journalists.

C.D. Stelzer tells Maloney’s remarkable story in the current edition, now available for free at Scribd.com (http://scr.bi/hs7o5w) and Issuu.com (http://bit.ly/ggY9G9).

In addition to Stelzer, contributors include Franchot Ballinger, Andrew Dillon, Dave Etter, Joe Hennessy, Jacqueline Jackson, Conrad Knickerbocker, Lola Lucas, Felicia Olin, Robert Joe Stout, Alan Toltzis, Karen Walsh and Daniel Waugh.

For more information, e-mail focusmidwest@yahoo.com.

From the fall edition of FOCUS/midwest.
The entire issue is available for free at at Issuu (http://bit.ly/9Ig7cX) and Scribd (http://scr.bi/anPe6T).

By PETER DOWNS

The Midwest has become a cold place for African-Americans.

A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank, St. Louis District, finds that the earnings gap between white and black men in the Midwest has been getting progressively bigger for over a generation.

And the earnings gap keeps growing despite the huge strides that black men made in closing the education and academic performance gaps with white men. Read the rest of this entry »

In the Nachusa Grasslands, the Nature Conservancy explores the possibilities

By JEANNE HANDY
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOM HANDY

From the fall edition of FOCUS/midwest, available for free at at Issuu (http://bit.ly/9Ig7cX) and Scribd (http://scr.bi/anPe6T).

The Prairies. I behold them for the first,
And my heart swells, while the dilated sight
Takes in the encircling vastness.
– William Cullen Bryant

Stalwart plants grasp at our shoelaces, whip at our thighs, and send forth seeds to journey to new destinations upon our clothes as our little tour group continues plodding at an undaunted pace through The Nature Conservancy’s Nachusa Grasslands of north-central Illinois. Here at this nearly 3,000-acre site near Franklin Grove, Illinois, the sky meets the ground unimpeded and the forever vista suggests possibility.

Something from the human past seems to be whispering, “This is good.”

It has been suggested by Harvard biologist and conservationist Edward O. Wilson that humans have an innate tendency “to affiliate with life, to be attracted to it, to like its varieties, to enjoy and prefer certain qualities of it.” He calls this instinctive response “biophilia.” And surely the majority of us have felt the fascination, the sense of well-being and wonder associated with a particular landscape whether hiking through a national park or standing in the midst of a backyard garden in bloom.

Yet, Nachusa belongs as much to our present as it does to our past. Read the rest of this entry »

The fall edition of FOCUS/midwest is now online.

The 100-page publication is available at Issuu (http://bit.ly/9Ig7cX) and Scribd (http://scr.bi/anPe6T).

The publication is e-reader accessible.

Subject matter includes the economy, wages, auto manufacturing, adult entertainment and the environment. Several features also look at aspects of life during the Great Depression. And, in keeping with tradition, FOCUS/midwest features several original short stories and poems. Contributing writers are Karen Walsh, Anita Stienstra, Shawna Mayer, Lola Lucas, J. Mitch Hopper, C.D. Stelzer, Frank Absher, R.L. Nave, Jacqueline Jackson, Jeanne Handy, Ted Evanoff, Peter Downs and Abe Aamidor.

FOCUS/midwest was founded by Charles and Rose Klotzer in 1962, suspended publication in 1983, and resumed publication in 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

A warning about the U.S. economy, issued more than four decades ago

(The full version of this article was published in the fall edition of FOCUS/midwest, available for free at Issuu and Scribd.)

Job statistics offer a measure of the recent recession’s depth, but tell only part of the story.

A recent report, by MIT economist David Autor, makes the case that the middle is dropping out of the job market; specifically, the economy is rapidly shedding certain kinds of occupations that used to be solid tickets to the middle class.

The kinds of jobs that are disappearing: “Middle-skill, white collar clerical, administrative, and sales occupations and in middle-skill, blue-collar production, craft, and operative occupations.”

What’s driving the change? Primarily automation and offshoring, Autor finds.

If a routine task (one that involves repetition) can be performed successfully by a machine or by a lower-paid worker in a developing country, it will be. And as computer and communications technologies continue to improve, more machines, or non-U.S. workers, will be performing those kinds of tasks.

The thing is, though, the pace of automation is escalating – Read the rest of this entry »

A full version of this article by St. Louis writer C.D. Stelzer appears in the fall edition of FOCUS/midwest, available for free at Issuu (http://bit.ly/9Ig7cX) and Scribd (http://scr.bi/anPe6T).

. . . He says the troubles began when Honeywell International Inc. disbanded his union’s safety committee. In its place, his employer implemented a program named “behavioral safety,” a euphemism for a system that blames individual workers for on-the-job accidents. As a result, plant workers refrained from reporting accidents out of fear that they would lose their jobs. The big man furrows his brow, as he describes how the program essentially helped mask the continuing safety risks inside the plant. Workers’ morale declined and labor disputes inside the plant accelerated. Read the rest of this entry »