Time to move on

Former Southeast Missouri State University lobbyist Marvin Proffer coached me in track my senior year in high school when he was a senior in college and a star athlete at Southeast. That would put his age in the mid-1970s.

I was briefly a partner with Proffer in the Jackson Cashbook-Journal newspaper and served six years with him from 1972 to 1978 in the Missouri Legislature. Marvin started earlier and served longer.

There are few legislators still serving that we both served with, mostly age and term limits being the reason.

In his 16 years as a well-paid lobbyist for SEMO, Proffer was especially successful with assistance from board of regents president Don Dickerson and Gov. Mel Carnahan in securing funding for SEMO campus buildings -- and not as successful during the limited budget era of Gov. Bob Holden.

Time marches on as has the makeup of Missouri state government. SEMO's Ken Dobbins served as president or vice president of finance at the university during the majority of years that Proffer lobbied for SEMO.

It is out of character for Proffer to claim his replacement as SEMO's lobbyist was purely political and not a combination of factors: age, political reality, fewer legislative relationships, the bidding process and a reduction of lobbying costs from $91,445 annually (more than the majority of SEMO faculty salaries) to $60,000 for the new lobbyist.

Jewell Patek submitted the only valid proposal in response to an ad for the lobbying position placed in the Southeast Missourian and a St. Louis newspaper.

Proffer has worked hard all his life in sports, business and politics to achieve his goals and the recognition he deserves. But as a former athlete we all know it eventually comes time to hang it up.

I do not know Patek, SEMO's new lobbyist, but if he doesn't do a good job I would expect the university to exercise its right and duty to terminate his contract.

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The Navy jet being cleaned up by the Civil Air Patrol and John Farquhar and friends at the Cape Girardeau Regional Airport is visible next to the airport entrance, freshly steam washed and soon to be painted.

I was told the CAP has 60 members who get the discipline, training and flying time that many young men and women desire thanks to their adult volunteers.

In the early 1940s the Cape airport, then called Harris Field, was a pilot-training facility for many who served in World War II and is a major asset for the greater Cape Girardeau area.

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Wendy and I recently visited Marty and Tootie Hecht in Palm Springs, Calif., where I attended the annual Suburban Newspaper Association meeting. They looked great. I served on the SNA board 30 years ago and was on a panel with some of the original founders of this group.

I'm proud that son Jon currently serves as a SNA board member and has been nominated to represent 50,000 and under circulation newspapers on the Associated Press board. The election is early April at the AP's annual meeting in Chicago.

Son Rex has also received major industry recognition as a board member of the 800-plus newspaper member Inland Press Association board.

Chief operating officer Wally Lage is president of PAGE, the newspaper industry's largest independent co-op purchasing group for newsprint, materials, equipment and supplies.

So while we strive to provide quality news, printing and advertising assistance to our readers and advertisers, we also help our industry.

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With the fragmentation of television with multiple channels and Tivo-style ad-skipping devices and the growth of satellite radio and expanded National Public Radio options, newspapers, especially in the non-metropolitan areas with their Internet sites, are attracting more advertisers' attention.

One of the fastest growing segments of the media field are small-market dailies and weeklies, newspaper Web sites that are generally dominant in their circulation areas and print niche publications.

The following are excerpts from Earl Cox, partner in a Richmond, Va., ad agency:

Independent consumer research shows that newspaper advertising is a "destination" for many consumers, not a distraction to be avoided. For them, advertising is a desired part of the content. You might even say it's the original branded content. In the language of the Internet, it's opt-in advertising in an opt-out world.

First, when you combine readership (not just paid circulation) of the core product and niche publications with unique visits to newspaper Web sites, newspaper media are growing at a double-digit rate -- diversification and growth that will surprise many advertising decision makers.

There's also a compelling audience engagement story. In the recent MORI Research study "How America Shops and Spends," 87 percent of newspaper readers say they read or look at ads in the newspaper. Newspapers are seen as the most "valuable" in planning shopping by 53 percent; the Internet and direct mail tie for second at 13 percent.

And, Mediamark Research Inc. in New York City reports 41 percent of opinion-leading, "influential" consumers are heavy users of newspapers (again more than any other medium), which can help advertisers harness the viral power of word-of-mouth and turn prospects into advocates.

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Charter schools now educate more than a fifth of the students in Washington, D.C., up from none in 1996. Washington's mayor, Anthony Williams, has championed the experiment, a stance that has not always made him popular with his fellow-Democrats. "Parents should decide," he says, adding that competition from charter schools should force the regular public school bureaucracy to change. -- The Economist

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As with just about every other precinct of higher education, liberals dominate law schools. A study in The Georgetown Law Journal last fall found that among professors at leading law schools who made political campaign contributions of at least $200, 81 percent of them gave almost exclusively to Democrats. Only 15 percent preferred Republicans. This preference was especially lopsided at Yale, Harvard and Stanford -- the top three law schools in the most recent U.S. News & World Report survey -- where donations to Democrats topped 90 percent.

Gary Rust is chairman of Rust Communications.