Month: September 2016

Latest Headlines

KFC kicks off a new Colonel Sanders, and a pro football team to boot

A news summary focused on 10 big employers; updated 8:02 a.m.

KFC: The newest in the TV commercials starring a resurrected Colonel Harland Sanders  imagines him launching a professional football team, the chicken-fueled Kentucky Buckets, in a 30-second spot that starts airing today to promote $20 buckets. The chain posted the commercial to its YouTube page yesterday, where it’s already been viewed more than 153,000 times. Check it out:

The commercial stars “Saturday Night Live” cast member Rob Riggle, the latest actor to portray the KFC founder. Earlier ones were played by Darrell Hammond, Norm MacDonald, Jim Gaffigan and, most recently, perpetually tanned actor George Hamilton, as the “Extra Crispy” colonel. The campaign featuring resurrected KFC founders started in May 2015.

When the Yum unit unveiled the campaign last year, many customers were skeptical or disgusted that the chain would revive its founder — a real person — from the dead, according to Business Insider. But the controversial move has paid off for the chain; in July, Yum announced the fried chicken chain had its eighth consecutive quarter of same-store sales growth, after a period of slumping sales (Business Insider).

KINDRED‘s Gentiva Health Services unit successfully advocated for a Medicaid rule change that could extend care to 18,000 people in Mississippi. Eligible patients in the state will now be able to receive home and community-based services — “waiver services” — at the same time as hospice services. “The old program was unintentionally keeping patents away from hospice care,” Mullins told Home Health Care News. “Patients would be forced to choose between their waiver services, like Meals on Wheels, or hospice care” (Home Health Care News).

Diversions

Opening Saturday at the Speed: ‘The Rise of Sneaker Culture’

Featuring nearly 150 sneakers from the 1830s to today, “Out of the Box: The Rise of Sneaker Culture” is the first museum exhibition in the United States to feature the sneaker’s complex and fascinating design history, according to the Speed. Many on display have rarely, if ever, been exhibited publicly.

“From its origins in the recreational pastimes of the elite, to the increasing importance of physical fitness, to its role in athletic performance and urban style,” the museum’s curators say, “the sneaker has been a pivotal component of dress for more than 150 years.”

Dates: Sept. 10 to Nov. 27, in the North Building. Tickets: $6 members,  $8 non-members, in addition to general admission.

Photo, top: Pierre Hardy, “Poworama,” 2011. Collection of the Bata Shoe Museum, gift of Pierre Hardy. Photo: Ron Wood. Courtesy American Federation of Arts/Bata Shoe Museum.

Media and Marketing

CJ owner Gannett’s new head of investigative reporting: ‘They want someone who is exclusively focused on investigative work’

As The Courier-Journal’s owner advances on a takeover of the Los Angeles Times and more than 160 other titles, it has promised it won’t take a top-down approach to managing news at the company’s existing chain of more than 100 papers.

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Davis

A big test of that pledge comes with one of Gannett Co.’s newest editors, Chris Davis, hired for a new position leading the company’s chain-wide investigative reporting. He joined the company in July from the Tampa Bay Times, where he edited two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects.

In a new interview, Davis talked to industry trade site Columbia Journalism Review about what he sees in the future for the CJ and Gannett’s other dailies. Here’s an excerpt:

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Today’s paper.

What do you think this new position says about Gannett’s journalistic ambitions now and in the future, especially as the company continues to refine its strategy?

To me, it’s a clear signal that the editors here are putting journalism first, particularly investigative journalism. They could have hired all sorts of people, but they wanted someone who could come in and really drive the most important kind of journalism, which is watchdog and investigative work. I think it shows a clear commitment, and it was one of the reasons I was intrigued at the outset. They want someone who is exclusively focused on investigative work to be in a top-level position. I think that says a lot.

Read the full Q&A here.

Philanthropy

David Jones Sr., his alma mater UofL, and the politics of money and power in Louisville

By Jim Hopkins
Boulevard Publisher

David Jones Sr
Jones

If there’s anything surprising about David A. Jones Sr. formally entering the high-stakes fray over the University of Louisville yesterday, it’s the fact it took this long to become public.

Nearly three months ago, when Gov. Matt Bevin shocked the community by seizing control of the school and dismissing the 20-member governing board he declared “dysfunctional,” the first person I thought of was Jones, the Louisville native, co-founder of Humana, and one of the state’s leading philanthropists.

That June 17, Bevin said his decision was the “culmination of all the conversations I’ve had with everybody on all fronts.” He didn’t reveal the names of those he’d spoken with, but it certainly would have included alumni whose opinion mattered. And few among that select group matters more than Jones.

“One of the university’s most influential and wealthiest graduates,” I wrote the day Bevin moved against the 22,000-student school, “is Humana co-founder David A. Jones Sr., who received a bachelor’s degree in business there in 1954.”

Jones and his wife, Betty Ashbury Jones, have long and extensive ties to UofL. She received a bachelor’s degree from the school in 1955, and the two went on to graduate school: David to Yale Law; and Betty, much later, to the French School at Vermont’s Middlebury College. (More on those two schools in a moment). Back in Louisville, Jones and a law partner, Wendell Cherry, launched the health-care company in 1961 that would become the Humana empire, starting with a single nursing home; they became millionaires after it went public in 1968.

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Betty and David Jones.
A Depression-poor childhood

David served on the board of trustees for a time, and Betty taught French Conversation in the Continuing Education Department from 1993 to 2003. For their service to the school, the couple were among the first to be made members of the Arts and Sciences Hall of Honors, in 2007.

David didn’t come from money, and UofL — which he attended on a ROTC scholarship Continue reading “David Jones Sr., his alma mater UofL, and the politics of money and power in Louisville” →

Latest Headlines

Schnatter trades another $360K in Papa John’s shares; Yum sells 250-outlet Pizza Hut master franchise in Australia to Sydney private-equity firm

A news summary focused on 10 big employers; updated 8:18 p.m.

PAPA JOHN’S CEO John Schnatter sold another 4,736 shares of company stock for $360,000, at around the same per-share price he’s been fetching since he began selling aggressively in early August: $76, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing this afternoon. The latest sale, which was on Friday, brought to $10.9 million his total proceeds over the past month (SEC document). Papa John’s PZZA stock closed at $75.96 a share today, up 21 cents.

Pizza Hut boxPIZZA HUT: Private equity investor Allegro and three local fast-food management veterans are taking over Pizza Hut’s 250-unit master franchise in Australia; terms, including a price, haven’t been announced. Pizza Hut has about 10% of the $4 billion takeaway food market in Australia, according to industry analyst IBISWorld. The deal will “accelerate growth and deliver Pizza Hut to more consumers across Australia,” says outgoing Pizza Hut Australia General Manager Graeme Houston. Corporate parent Yum will retain its KFC outlets in the country (Business Insider). The deal is the latest foreign market shift for corporate parent Yum, which last week said it agreed to an advance sale of a $464 million slice of its China operations to a prominent Chinese deal maker and the financial affiliate of Chinese Internet giant Alibaba ahead of next month’s planned spinoff of the China Division.

KFC: In a U.K. court, a former 30-year-old KFC worker was spared jail time after admitting he stole $14,700 from a KFC franchise by processing thousands of fake customer coupons for popcorn chicken. For more than a year starting in January 2015 James Anderson of Basildon, 32 miles southwest of London, pretended to hand money back to customers for the $2.65 snacks, but pocketed the cash instead. He said he wanted the money to contribute to his upcoming wedding. Anderson’s supervisors became suspicious after noticing a high number of refunds being processed under his cash-register ID number (Halstead Gazette).

BROWN-FORMAN will inaugurate new, higher-profile free-standing exhibition space at this year’s TFWA World Exhibition & Conference next month in Cannes. The new Brown-Forman area is more than double the size of the Louisville spirits and wine giant’s former stand and has informal gathering space as well as a large number of meeting tables and four meeting rooms, said Marshall Farrer, vice president and managing director for global travel-retail. The company will join more than 3,000 other brands at the annual duty-free travel-retail meeting Oct. 2-7 at Canne’s Palais convention center (DFNI).

The Jennifer Lawrence Diary™

Here’s the first ‘Passengers’ poster for Lawrence’s December sci-fi movie

The outer-space adventure romance starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt doesn’t hit screens for another 106 days, 15 hours and 12 minutes, according to Boulevard’s exclusive Jennifer Lawrence “Passengers” Countdown Clock™. And here comes Sony Pictures, revving up the promotional machine by releasing the first poster for the movie.

passengers-poster

Passengers is about a 5,000-passenger luxury spaceship on a 120-year journey to an interstellar colony. Lawrence, 26, and Pratt are unexpectedly awakened 90 years too early. Romance and Lawrence’s first on-screen sex scene follow — all of which she’s getting $20 million to act out. Pratt, 37, is perhaps best known for 2015’s “Jurassic World” and “Parks and Recreation.”