Tag: Courier-Journal

Media and Marketing

Heartbroken in Louisville! The last direct link to the greatest advice columnist ever has been severed

Kathy Mitchell and Marcy Sugar, who for 14 years wrote the syndicated “Annie’s Mailbox” column for The Courier-Journal and hundreds of other outlets, called it quits today. They started as the long-time editors of the original “Ann Landers” column, written for nearly 50 years by the late, great and ever-stylish Esther Pauline “Eppie” Lederer. (That’s her, top, with her trademark hair.)

“We’ve urged you to live your lives to the fullest,” Mitchell and Sugar told readers this morning. “Now it’s our turn.”

Annie's Mailbox smallerStarting tomorrow, Mitchell and Sugar are being replaced by the conveniently named “Annie Lane,” who will be writing a column called “Dear Annie.” Lane, who grew up in California, is a certified yoga instructor who also worked in sales at an Internet advertising startup; a law firm, and, before that, a federal magistrate. She’s written extensively for Creators Syndicate’s special sections.

The original Landers column was started in 1943 by Chicago Sun-Times writer Ruth Crowley. Lederer took it over in 1955, but declined to have a different writer continue the column after her death in 2002. (At the time, she lived in a $4.4 million, 16-room Lake Shore Drive co-op in Chicago with three — three! — maid’s rooms.)

Like de Havilland and Fontaine

Continue reading “Heartbroken in Louisville! The last direct link to the greatest advice columnist ever has been severed” →

Media and Marketing

Among media at Olympic trials in Omaha, WAVE stood alone. (But in the Instagram age, does it even matter?)
WAVE screen grab
Connie Leonard reported live last night from Omaha, with in-studio anchors Scott Reynolds, left, and Shannon Cogan.

WAVE’s solo was hardly surprising, of course, because the station is an affiliate of longtime exclusive Olympics broadcaster NBC, which paid $4.4 billion in 2011 for rights to the 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020 games.

The station was in Omaha to cover 21-year-old University of Louisville swimmer Kelsi Worrell, who made the U.S. swim team last night after beating her own personal best time last night, to win the final of the 100 meter butterfly in 56.48 seconds.

WAVE is owned by Raycom Media of Montgomery, Ala. The summer games start Aug. 5 in Rio de Janeiro; latest news.

The Omaha coverage — including this broadcast story — was a reminder of how much the city’s once-dominant media outlet, The Courier-Journal, has retreated as newspapers across corporate parent Gannett continue losing readers and advertising. The CJ apparently covered last night’s final by watching WAVE. “It’s a dream come true,” the paper said Worrell told NBC.

But in the age of Twitter and Instagram, more newsmakers bypass conventional media altogether. Worrall celebrated on both platforms moments ago.

Latest Headlines

Louisville companies snap two-day losing streak, as Dow Jones soars 269 points; and Yum China bidders reportedly bust deadline, balk at $10B valuation

A news summary, focused on 10 big employers; updated 4:16 p.m.

Those 10 companies tracked by Boulevard joined U.S. stocks clawing their way back from two consecutive days of steep losses, following Britain’s stunning vote last week to quit the European Union. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed moments ago at 17,410 — up 1.6%; the broader S&P 500 index jumped 1.8% to 2,036 points, and the Nasdaq climbed 2.1% to 4692.

June 28 Guardian
Today’s Guardian.

“This is going to take a long time to play out and I think the initial shock is being a little reversed right now,” Doug Cote, chief market strategist at Voya Investment Management told CNBC. “This is not 2008. It’s more like 2011.” (Read the latest Brexit developments in Britain’s Guardian.)

In Louisville, virtually all of Boulevard’s top 10 rose by the time markets closed at 4 p.m. They included Kindred, which got pounded yesterday, falling 7%. The closing prices:

Those gains came even as Ford said it expects the double-whammy of any softer post-Brexit industry and a weaker British sterling “would have an adverse impact on our operations in the long term,” a Ford spokesman told financial news site The Street. Ford also said it would issue revised 2016 guidance during its second-quarter earnings call July 28 (The Street). Ford shares have now tumbled nearly 8% since Britain’s surprise vote to leave the European Union — nearly twice as much as the broader S&P 500 index.

In its most recent annual report, in February, Ford warned about the impact of a possible Brexit, saying it “could cause financial and capital markets within and outside Europe to constrict, thereby negatively impacting our ability to finance our business, and also could cause a substantial dip in consumer confidence and spending that could negatively impact sales of vehicles.”

Last year, the U.K. was Ford’s single-biggest market after the U.S., accounting for 8% of the automaker’s $149.6 billion in sales:

Ford sales graphic

Ford employs nearly 10,000 workers at an auto assembly and a truck factory in Louisville.

In non-Brexit business news: At YUM, potential bidders for the fast-food giant’s mammoth China division  Continue reading “Louisville companies snap two-day losing streak, as Dow Jones soars 269 points; and Yum China bidders reportedly bust deadline, balk at $10B valuation” →

Books

A UPS aircraft mechanic, her ‘Dark Brown Lies’ book, and a very expensive advertisement on the CJ’s front page today

Many Courier-Journal readers were no doubt left totally confused this morning when they saw an advertisement on the front page — one of the most expensive you can buy — for a three-year-old book written by a former UPS aircraft mechanic.

CJ June 26 detail

Debbie Simpson’s “Dark Brown Lies” doesn’t show up in the CJ’s database, which means a lot of readers were learning about it for the first time. The book, which she self-published through a company she apparently incorporated in Arkansas in 2013, is about her 19-year-career at Louisville’s biggest private employer — one that ended very badly.

Debbie Simpson
Simpson

“This true story,” she writes on her website, “is about a female aircraft maintenance technician that worked for one of the most powerful companies in America and the consequences she faced for standing up and speaking out against harassment within the workplace. The consequences were: employee entries, warning letter(s), retaliation, intimidation, suspension, the constant real threat of termination and termination.”

What exactly happened isn’t detailed. But her beef with UPS, which employs 22,000 people at its hub here, may stem at least partly from a whistleblower case she lost in 2008 before the U.S. Labor Department.

Simpson’s advertisement this morning is only indirectly about her book. Instead, she’s drawing attention to another legal case where a pilot, Douglas Greene, has sued the Frost Brown Todd law firm in federal court in Louisville and two of its attorneys. Simpson says she’s dealt with one of the attorneys, Tony Coleman, in her own legal fight against UPS.

Wayback News

50 years ago today: Dressing for establishment success at Stewart’s

It may have been the swinging ’60s somewhere in Louisville, but you wouldn’t have known it from a Courier-Journal advertisement for some seriously sober women’s attire on June 23, 1966. Stewart’s department store at 4th and Walnut (now Muhammad Ali Boulevard) was offering a “trans-season costume” from the Quaker Lady company for $14.98*.

Stewart's ad 1966.png

“You’ll look your ladylike best all through summer and into fall in this town costume of polyester and combed cotton,” Stewart’s promised. “So easy-care, it’s a wash and wear, requires little or no ironing! Dress is freshly and femininely styled with jewel neckline, slenderizing straight skirt. Jacket has stylish notch collar, tab pocket trim effect, ¾-sleeves. Sizes 12 to 20, 12½ to 22½. Blue, green or wineberry plaid.”

* That $14.98 would be equivalent to $111 in 2016 dollars, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator.

Here’s what the store looked like in 1923, when it was known as Stewart’s Dry Goods, in a photo from the University of Louisville Photographic Archives. The building now houses a 304-room Embassy Suites Hotel that opened in April 2015.

Stewart's Dry Goods
Muhammad Ali is on the left, Fourth Street on the right.

Stewart’s continued as a separate nameplate until early 1986, when parent Associated Dry Goods sold most of the stores to Ben Snyder’s. By 1992, the last surviving former Stewart’s — the L.S. Ayres location in Evansville, Ind. — closed amid the Associated Dry Goods merger with the May Co. of St. Louis.

Related: Read a short history of Louisville department stores.

Media and Marketing

Long-time CJ columnist Kay, who pioneered cutting-edge features and loved lavender, is dead at 87

Joan Wood Kay’s “Speaking of People” column helped turn the traditional society and women’s pages into an “issue-oriented features section that was nationally admired,” said retired Courier-Journal editorial page editor Keith Runyon. Kay worked for the paper for 34 years, ending in 1987. She died Sunday at 87, the CJ said this morning.

Speaking of People ad
Kay at her typewriter in 1969.

In a 1969 advertisement, the paper told readers Kay’s column was the “up-to-the-minute and very much ‘with it’ successor” to the paper’s old social notes stories — like this one from Aug. 5, 1917:

“Little Miss Virginia Gray Montgomery was honored with a party Wednesday afternoon when her grandmother, Mrs. James W. Montgomery, asked the future belles and beaux to an al fresco affair which she gave at her home on Shelby Street. The children presented a lovely sight in their dainty white dresses  with varicolored ribbons on bobbed heads. . . . The large galleries were festooned with ropings of red, white and blue, and flags were hung in the pergola. Toy balloons and baskets of candies were the favors given.”

Writing this morning about Kay, another long-time CJ correspondent, Sheldon S. Shafer, said: “Kay had a keen appreciation of art, especially impressionist and modern, and she was an avid reader of mysteries and newspapers. She was skilled at needlepoint and knitting, and was a world traveler who wrote humorous poems and limericks for friends. She also acquired a vast collection of teddy bears. She spoke Italian and French and was always fashionably dressed — often in her favorite color, lavender.”

Herman Meyer & Son Funeral Home is handling final arrangements.