Otterblog

I’m no stock-picking guru—and this is neither an endorsement to sell or to buy stock—but with all the navel gazing about the quality and durability of Winston-Salem’s tech sector

, the clearest indication may come this Thursday, when Targacept has its long-awaited IPO.

This follows on the heels of last week’s announcement regarding organ-tissue regeneration done by researchers at Wake Forest University.

Targacept is the company spun off from RJR in 2000 that does a lot of ground-breaking research on nicotine and has been working to find pharmaceutical uses for nicotine in treating diseases of the central nervous system. It cut a huge deal with AstraZeneca in December to help with the marketing and development of its products.

The stock market, as many companies find out much too late, is unforgiving and unsentimental. It cares less about the past than the future and is obsessed with expectations. And it also has a herd mentality. Money follows the leader. Targacept’s success as a publicly traded company may not be THE barometer of Winston-Salem’s tech economy, but it will be a measure worth keeping your eye on.

There is the dizzy-bat contest and the pizza yell, but for sheer depravity at a minor-league baseball game, nothing quite compares to the Frozen T-shirt contest.

Two contestants are given a T-shirt that has been soaked wet and then frozen. The object is to put your T-shirt on first. It ain’t easy. The basic tactic is to beat the ice out of it by banging the block against the roof of the dugout. Yowza.

I witnessed my first—and hopefully not last—FTS contest last night at the season opener of the W-S Warthogs. Hogs won 4-3. The back story is that the city is still trying to figure out how to get a

baseball stadium closer to downtown

, and it doesn’t appear that we’re much closer than we were a year ago.

It’s all about money. Billy Prim, formerly of Blue Rhino and now of Primo Water fame, would like his Warthogs to be downtown, but there’s still a gap between the cost of a stadium and what he wants to put up or borrow.  Greensboro’s spiffy downtown stadium was essentially built without public money, courtesy of a grant from the Bryant Foundation that picked up half the cost. Without a similar gift, it’s hard to imagine a stadium here getting off the ground free of the taxpayers. And so here we are.

I like Ernie Shore field. It has a good vibe and

heritage

, along with the view of the Whitaker Park skyline. It reminds me of who we are in W-S. The question of course is whether that’s also what we want to be.

Tax day is 10 days away. Ugh. Nobody likes to pay taxes, but as an accountant friend of mine says, taxes are the price we pay for the government we deserve.

Which brings me to two “voluntary” taxes and our approach to them. First the lottery.

Sales were $1 million below expectations

in the first five days, $24 mm, instead of $25 mm. On one hand, being only 4 percent off is some pretty good estimating the first time out of the blocks. On the other hand, there’s a nagging feeling that it’s now up to all of us to buy tickets and keep the revenue stream strong, lest some kid not get his school improvements.

Second, the sales tax. Graham Pervier, Forsyth County’s manager, said yesterday at the chamber luncheon that FC’s tax base grew about 2.5 percent, but that the sales tax is up 5 percent. Again, that’s good news, but I hear a little voice that says I need to do my civic duty to keep the property tax at bay by shopping more.

Making a list: Remember back in the 1980s, when W-S bragged about having three Fortune 500 companies based in the city? Wachovia, RJR and Piedmont. Not bad for a city this size. We have two now, Reynolds American, BB&T and we’ll get a third later this year when Hanesbrands is spun off from Sara Lee. Again, not bad.

Winston-Salem doesn’t make the national news all that often. And when we do, it’s often for fairly predictable reasons, such as stories about cigarettes or doughnuts. It’s been said there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but it can still be a little tiresome.

So, the city hit a home run yesterday with

news about research on the regeneration

of organ tissue by Dr. Tony Atala at WFU. Stories in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post etc. 

The research is published in

The Lancet.

Discreetly hidden in most of these stories is the fact that Atala’s regeneration and transplant of this bladder tissue was done BEFORE he came to Wake Forest in 2004, but that matters not. When the music stopped, he was standing in front of the chair marked Winston-Salem, and he’s got a neat looking building at the research park to continue this work.

In this day and age, when every community with a test tube and a petree dish wants to be a biotech hub, it can be confusing separating the killabees from the wannabes. Which are we? Not the latter, not quite the former, but on the map.

Birthdays come in all shapes and sizes. Here’s one that most people don’t know about. The Journal begins its 110th year today. If you don’t believe me, check out the Inside Box on the front page. It says 110th year,  No. 1.

Not bad. The birthday is relevant at this time because there’s a little-known fact about the Journal’s early days and its ownership. The person who started the Journal was Charles Knight. He came to what was then the town of Winston and the neighboring town of Salem in 1897, started the Journal, then left in July (I’m getting this info from Frank Tursi’s history of the Journal.) After Knight left, he kicked around and eventually settled in Akron, bought that city’s Beacon Journal and built a publishing empire that eventually became Knight Ridder. That company was sold last month to McClatchy in a deal that will define the newspaper industry for many years. Goes to show you how much of life is interconnected.

Interesting issues raised in our Sunday stories about

immigration in the mountains and the politics of immigration in local legislative races

. Two points here. One, for many people immigration is deeply personal. It’s easier to talk about immigration in the abstract than it is in the personal. I was eating breakfast Saturday at a restaurant in W-S, and the waitresses, all Anglos, went into the kitchen and presented a birthday cake and sang for one of the cooks, who was Hispanic. Relationships change how we look at issues. Two, Immigration is federal, but that doesn’t mean the states won’t try to get into the act, particularly if Washington stalls on this.

Good read elsewhere. Big profile of Josh Howard in

ESPN magazine. Story talks about how he returned to W-S last summer to get his head screwed back on by his grandmother. What I also learned from the article was that the slang for Winston-Salem is Tre-4. Hipper friends of mine just smiled, but it’s short for 34, which is Forsyth County’s alphabetical place in the state’s 100 counties. Now you know.

Quick thoughts for a Friday.

Bracket calculus: I’m told that something like 4 million people sent brackets to ESPN. Of those, supposedly only four contained the combination of GMU, LSU, UCLA, Florida. Impressive picking. Hard to know who to root for. Like the Bruins for the history, the Patriots for the whole Cinderella schtick, the Tigers for the Band of Brothers stuff; and the Gators because the Florida-Butler game at LJVM in 2000 was the best game I’ve ever seen.

Lottery calculus:

First day sales $11 million

. Also impressive. The goal is to make $1.4 billion a year. For that, they only need to sell about $4 million of tix every day.

Good read: As some may know, it’s the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl. What’s happened there? Basically, it’s become a wildlife refuge. It’s all explained in

Wormwood Forest

, a fascinating book. Neat essay on the same in Natural History magazine (not online :(  ), one of the unsung great mags out there.

Well, the lottery is here. The scratching began at around 6 this morning. The world still looks pretty much the same. I was surprised that there didn’t seem to be that much pent-up demand for playing, no huge lines, etc. I guess folks who like scratchoffs have been playing them for a while, just going to Virginia to do it.

Afternoon update: My crack lottery sources say there are lines in some places, and that there is frustration that the lottery is a cash-only enterprise. No debit cards, tacking on a ticket on a gas fill-up etc.

For newspapers, our coverage offers an interesting case study in the separation between the news and editorial pages. Our editorial pages said the lottery was bad public policy and a bad idea. The newsroom—which operates independently of the opinion pages—doesn’t have a position. We just cover what is news, and the start of the lottery is a big news event. It can seem a little promotional, but it’s difficult to tell folks about something big starting without telling them that something big is starting.

The challenge for the N.C. Lottery moving forward is going to be to deliver the revenue it has promised to the state, and to figure out how to market the games within the confines of the

restrictive legislation

.

I appreciate everybody’s civil and interesting comments on immigration. Good discussion.

 

With the news of Graham Pervier’s impending retirement, Forsyth County now finds itself in the same situation as the city of Winston-Salem, which is hunting for a new city manager.

Nobody is irreplaceable, but replacing Pervier won’t be easy. He’s essentially functioned as an eighth county commissioner, and he has an institutional knowledge and understanding of how Forsyth County works—and doesn’t work—that can’t be picked up in a crash course or by reading a history book.

In addition, the politics and realities of the board have changed in the past 19 years. It’s more conservative, money is tight, demands are growing, constituents have gotten angrier. As I’ve noted before, the best city-county managers don’t just carry out the will of the elected body; they educate and lead. Tough balancing act.

The Google-free house: Interesting interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in Fortune. Yeah, he’s got gazillions of dollars, but he won’t hook his kids up with the technology that counts! Here’s what he says: Question: Do you have an iPod? Answer: No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children—in many dimensions they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you don’t use an iPod.

 

Here’s the full interview:

 

Busy day. Lots of fires to put out. Here’s the grenade tossed into newspapers collective lap this morning. It’s a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts

on how people get their news, and as you might expect, it’s not a ringing endorsement for print.

Boiled down, the findings say that for many folks—and particularly young people—the Internet is their primary source of news. The newspaper or the magazine is now a supplement. The good news would be that newspaper Web sites continue to be leaders in this category, and perhaps investments in these sites will pay off. The downside is the report’s suggestion that this transformation is happening quicker than many people expected and that the way people use and find news on the net is different.

Think about your own habits. We browse the Web differently than we browse a newspaper. One is more linear than the other. On the Web, itt’s much easier to skip over—or never even run into—stories you think you have no interest in. Newspapers are a serendipitous experience.

How you browse determines what you find and what you don’t find. My take is that the next big thing in news Web sites will be redesigns and reprogramming that reflect how people use the Internet. Very soon, successful online news sites will do more than just have a different delivery system. They will look different and be different.

Beyond the arc: Lots of criticism today from the Blue Devil hard core over

our story suggesting that J.J. Redick isn’t at his best in the Sweet 16. They say the Journal is anti-Duke. Tell that to the Wake fans ... All I want is a good game tonight and watch Shelden Williams and Glen Davis battle in the paint.

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Rather than talk about the War in Iraq or the collapse of the Tar Heels, I thought I’d just give everyone something fun to look at for a Monday and the first day of spring.

This map (click on above) comes courtesy of Wes Young, a reporter in our K’ville bureau, and cartographers at

East Central University

in Oklahoma. Wes is also our census guru, and he’s got a good radar for obscure but interesting factoids.

This is a county by county map that shows what people call sweet carbonated water: soda, coke, pop, other. It’s nice to know that in this day of homogenization and regional blurring, many things are still unique. You can see the Coke belt, the soda belt and the pop belt. What I found most interesting is the St. Louis area, a sea of soda surrounded by pops on the North and Cokes on the south.

I don’t know much about St. Louis, but if anybody has an answer, I’d love to hear it.

Also, check out the pop (blue) dots in Surry and Davie counties.