News from across the country

A few recent articles I found interesting or relevant to Northeast Ohio:

• Washington Post: The federal government takes a stab at defining the middle class.
• Washington Post: As broadband extends to rural areas, are urban poor being overlooked? "The Internet is becoming as important as electricity or gas," said an interviewee.
• New York Times: While everyone is talking about newspapers dying a slow death, broadcast networks are also struggling. Meanwhile, newspapers are trying to pump up ad sales by partnering with Yahoo.
  
• New York Times: While colleges are cutting salaries and the like, they're trying not to cut financial aid. Tuition discounts are mentioned, but charging high tuition while offering aid that students likely will have to pay back while starting their professional lives still seems like a broken system to me.
• Atlanta Journal Constitution: Columnist writes about the importance of a college education and how America has fallen behind.
• Boston Globe: A call to regionalism? Small towns are short on funds, including ones like this Massachusetts town that has firefighters hosting a ball to raise funds for a new truck.
• Chicago Tribune: If you're a mall, 2009 probably won't be a good year for you. Likewise, Borders is going to close its store on Chicago's Magnificent Mile by next year.
• Cleveland Plain Dealer: State budget cuts likely to hit urban universities, including Cleveland State University.
  
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: A little feature on a woman who's made the transition from working in a cheese factory to working in a medical lab.
• Youngstown Vindicator: Five counties from Ohio and Pennsylvania team up for regionalism effort. The Plain Dealer also has a story.
  

No, homicides downtown don't occur every weekend

It didn't take long for some local media outlets to trot out the stories questioning the safety of downtown Cleveland following the two gruesome execution-style shootings early Sunday morning. It's worth noting that as of Wednesday afternoon, four suspects had been arrested and police were looking for a fifth.

At least three TV news outlets have gone to the "Are you safe?" story this week: 19 Action News, News Channel 5 and Fox 8. Channel 19 went so far as to post a poll, which at last count showed 86 percent of those who voted no longer feel safe going to downtown.

Look, for one year, I lived in Reserve Square (the building that houses the bar the two victims left). Admittedly, that park is uninviting at night, to say the least. But for every one-time, high-profile incident like this, there are countless days and nights during which NOTHING happens. I also lived for one year in the East Fourth neighborhood, and both are relatively safe because there's a high concentration of residents and those enjoying what downtown has to offer. People really can be smart and safe.

If there was a crime wave, or homicides downtown were becoming a trend, then by all means we should question the safety of the area. But to this point, that's not the case, so all stories like the three listed above do is play on the irrational fears of those who don't visit downtown. Stories like these serve little purpose. Also, I don't see any of these same media outlets going to any of the suburbs to ask residents there how safe they feel after homicides in those communities.

What happened to these two guys -- and their families -- is a tragedy. And it's a serious issue. I'm just disappointed in the local media outlets that take an incident like this and use it for fear-mongering. An ongoing story, the tragedy itself is a big enough news item -- it doesn't need the sensationalism that's following.

Required reading

Anyone interested in reading about the issues facing the Midwest in today's global economy should check out "Caught In The Middle" by Richard C. Longworth. A native Midwesterner and former foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, Longworth goes from state to state and city to city talking to residents, workers, government officials and experts to discuss what their region is doing to answer the global call. He also takes a historical look at how things -- economics and lifestyle -- go to where they are today, offering up ideas and suggestions along the way.

When it comes to Ohio, I'd say Longworth spends more time writing about Dayton than he does Cleveland, but Cleveland certainly gets mentioned. One passage in particular stuck out:

In all my travels through the Midwest, Cleveland was the only place, big or small, that seemed heedless of the global challenge. Only 4 percent of its population is foreign-born, in an era that demands new blood; the city government isn't sure what it wants more. One of its leading economists told me, "You can't kill manufacturing -- that's stupid," but manufacturing is fleeing and cities need new ways to support themselves. ... The first-rate Cleveland Clinic is expanding, but every Midwestern city is building up its health industry: few actually count on it to carry the city's economy. The Plain Dealer ran an excellent series, "The Quiet Crisis," on the declining economy; one editor told me that many of the articles excited reader interest, but the two on globalization and immigration "just landed with a thud."

The book was just published in 2008, I believe, so that's a relevant passage to be sure. If you have any interest in the global challenges the Midwest faces right now and what, as a region, it can do about them, I highly suggest picking up this book.

BONUS: Here's an article/interview with Longworth from the Chicago Reader.

Connecting the 'polka' dots

I was pretty interested in this morning's Plain Dealer article about Bobby Yankovic, the son of polka legend Frankie Yankovic. Not that I'm a fan of polka, but the Oct. 9, 2008 incident happened just a few houses down from where I live. From my living room window, I was able to watch and listen to pretty much everything that went on surrounding the police standoff -- kind of a big deal for this little part of Cleveland's Edgewater neighborhood. The PD article examines how things got to where they did for Bobby.

Could health-care prescription remedy higher education?

Though it was published in the Feb. 1 edition of the New York Times, only today did I read "The Big Fix" by David Leonhardt. Call me old-fashioned, but for something that long (online it was seven pages, printed it was 13), I prefer to have a copy in my hands rather than read it on a computer screen.

It's a compelling article. It touches on topics such as moving from a consumption economy to an investment economy, what role "green jobs" may play in the economic recovery as well as the challenges facing America's health-care system.

In addressing the latter, Leonhardt quotes President Barack Obama's budget director, Peter Orszag. In delivering a recent speech, Orszag sums up health care's problem this way: "It's not primarily that we're going to have more 85-year-olds (in the future," he said. "It's primarily that each 85-year-old in the future will cost us a lot more than they cost us today." Leonhardt then writes: "The medical system will keep coming up with expensive new treatments, and Medicare will keep reimbursing them, even if they bring little benefit."

Leonhardt then writes that Orszag, in his speech, would show a map of the country highlighting which regions spent more on health care. The point Orszag then makes is that the regions that spend more on health care don't necessarily have sicker residents than those areas that spend less, nor do they necessarily receive better care. A possible long-range solution, then, may be to remake the high-spending areas to operate more like the low-spending areas.

I explain all of that because then Leonhardt goes on to address higher education. He doesn't really touch on it in the article, but I couldn't help but think of higher education in almost the same way he described health care. True, they're largely different animals, but what if Orszag's quote read like this: "(The problem) isn't primarily that we're going to have more (or bigger colleges or universities)," he said. "It's primarily that each (college or university) in the future will cost us a lot more than they cost us today."

Then, similar to what Leonhardt noted, the (higher education) system will keep coming up with expensive new (dorms, fitness centers, student unions, etc.), and (families taking out student loans) will keep reimbursing them, even if they bring little benefit.

Higher education and health care are critical to this country's economic future, but both threaten to become even more bloated than they already are without helping the bottom line. Here in Ohio, the rate at which college tuition has increased dwarfs that of the rate of inflation. Yet, where's the evidence that Ohio students are any better educated than they were, say, 10 or 20 years ago? Or that universities graduate a proportionately higher number of students? Meanwhile, families -- especially middle-class families -- are saddled with more debt, or students themselves are saddled with the debt as they try to start their professional lives.

So how do we make high-spending institutions of higher learning more like low-spending ones? Well, I don't have the answer. But what seems clear to me is that for meaningful change to take place, it's going to take more than two-year tuition freezes. It's going to take a change in culture. As Leonhardt points out, there will likely be a long line of special interests (be it university presidents or, in the case of health care, doctors) fighting to maintain the status quo because the status quo has served them well. Problem is, Ohioans in need of a 21st Century education for a 21st Century economy haven't been served well, and that needs to change.