Hey, What Happened to the Blog?

There’s no point in hiding any longer – yes, I’m Derivative Man, and one of the four people in the world who really understand Wall Street finance. I’ve been huddled with our nation’s leaders for six days on the bailout, and you don’t want to be in a room with these people for 16 hours straight. When Sen. Charles Schumer decided to give a working example of naked shorts at midnight last Wednesday ….

OK, it’s all hogwash (although I’ll bet you’ll have a hard time getting an image of ol’ Chuck out of your imagination.) I’ve been working like blazes to get the next issue of Stone Business primped and polished before heading to Verona, Italy, for the huge Marmomacc trade event. Something had to go on idle.

I’ll make it up to readers next week with some reports from the road as I cross a continent, an ocean, the Alps and invariably some Italian truck drivers along the way. You’ll also get a sense of what’s happening at Marmomacc, which resembles more of a small city than a trade show.

To those few who’ve missed me, my apologies. Keep reading.

– Emerson Schwartzkopf

You can read up-to-the-minute news on the dimensional-stone trade and search the archives at www.stonebusiness.net, where you can also find this blog at the Main Menu under the clever title of “Editor’s Blog.”

The advertisements that appear on this page are placed by wordpress.com, and constitute no endorsement of the products or services. And I don’t get a dime from them, either.

 

The November Surprise?

Granite countertops seem to be fading from local TV screens – save for some consumer advertising – but don’t think the reports on radon and radiation are gone for good. If there’s any life in the theme for getting back on the tube, it’s slightly more than a month away.

Since the beginning of the month and the long-awaited minutes on NBC’s The Today Show, the lineup at our Radon Theater remains much the same. A San Diego station gave the story another run on Sept. 19 for the latest entry.

If there’s going to be another slew of local news reports, it’ll be in four weeks or so. Think November, or at least the very end of October.

And, think ratings. Halloween is considered the usual start for one of the two “sweeps” months (May is the other) for Arbitron viewer ratings. It’s when the networks roll out all sorts of special programming, and local stations manage to uncover government corruption, tales of incredible courage and the occasional neighborhood Nazi concentration-camp guard.

Granite, radon and radiation can be a real bell-ringer, and may even spur a few investigative follow-ups from earlier in the year. Don’t be surprised when countertop shots pop up on the local news teaser halfway through Heroes or Boston Legal.

The kicker could be reports on lawsuits involving granite countertops, although one still hasn’t surfaced. It’s not from lack of trying or, to be more-descriptive, trolling for toxic torts.

One Houston law firm apparently had ideas about this, and posted an online video of the very same kitchen countertop featured in the KHOU-TV report in May. The accompanying soundtrack went through a litany of household health problems; unfortunately, the video went off the Net shortly after its debut on Radon Theater.

Other sites are attempting to prime the legal pump, most notably Lawyersandsettlements.com from Online Legal Marketing (OLM) in Santa Cruz, Calif. The company researches and publishes news from its own research department and, as the site explains, “from interviews with lawyers and victims.”

A page entitled “Granite Countertops Source of Dangerous Radon” offers two write-ups reciting personal health problems – although both use pseudonyms for the subjects, such as “Sarah S.” Go to the bottom of the page, and there’s a link to help you get your own story assessed by a lawyer.

What’s a bit curious, however, is a news item attributed to “Nebraska TV” on Aug. 18 with the following lead:

Radon testing in homes with granite countertops four counties in Nebraska have returned higher than normal readings.

However, click on the link associated with the article, and you’ll go to an Associated Press article. And, if you read carefully, you’ll notice that the AP article is about naturally occurring radon in the soil of central Nebraska – and the folks at OLM deliberately inserted “countertops” into the story for their own site.

I sent an email to OLM about this a few weeks ago. In the meantime, one of those anonymous-source articles about countertop woes found its way to an English-language stone Website in China.

And the altered clip from AP’s still there at the OLM Website.

– Emerson Schwartzkopf

You can read up-to-the-minute news on the dimensional-stone trade and search the archives at www.stonebusiness.net, where you can also find this blog at the Main Menu under the clever title of “Editor’s Blog.”

The advertisements that appear on this page are placed by wordpress.com, and constitute no endorsement of the products or services. And I don’t get a dime from them, either.

About That Letter …

No, that wasn’t a piece of malicious spam that hit the mailboxes of the masses in the stone industry this week. The letter for StonExpo/Marmomacc Americas bearing my name is authentic, right down to the mug shot. (Who else would claim to look like that?)

OK, so it’s a bit unusual for an editor to participate in a promotional mailing for an event, especially one that the magazine doesn’t own. Maybe more than a few of you out there wonder why I did it.

Well, the show’s promoter – Hanley Wood – asked nicely, and there’s always something to be said for good manners. And, as I stated in the letter, I did it for free.

The reason behind the letter, though, is more than just being a good guy. For all the grousing I’ve done about air travel and hotels and convention centers in my life, I still believe in trade shows.

Anyone who’s read Stone Business over the years know that I’ve run hundreds of copy inches previewing various trade events. I scour the Internet and promotional booths at trade shows to find even more trade shows to add to our Calendar section, which gives our art director fits in fitting proper Portuguese and Turkish typography.

Despite a continual fear of air travel, I get on planes for 11-hour flights across continents and oceans. I’ve braved Italian autostrades, Spanish bomb-sniffing dogs and airliners stuffed with high-school cheerleaders, full of pep and butterscotch lip gloss, headed to Orlando. And I’ll do it again a week from Monday, as I head to Marmomacc in Verona, Italy.

I believe that trade shows are the great community events of industry, especially with a producer-oriented trade like stone. Sure, I’ve had moments of painful dullness during some events, but there’ve been many more hours of seeing interesting products and meeting fascinating people.

Trade shows also mark a moment of solidarity within an industry, where people give up money and time to meet and move their trade forward. The main purpose is to buy and sell, but there’s also a statement being made about the state of an industry.

It’s why I also spend a lot of time and effort encouraging people to attend, of which this week’s letter is a logical result. You’re part of an industry with your work every day, but a trade show is really the best way to participate and join together with others in the field. You can shop in a supermarket of suppliers and talk shop with just about anyone else walking the aisles. And you’ll always take away something of value.

Maybe it’s StoneExpo/Marmomacc Americas. Maybe it’s Coverings. Maybe it’s an event thousands of miles away in Brazil, Spain, China, India, Italy or wherever else the stone trades meet. Wherever it is, just go. We’ll all be the better for it.

– Emerson Schwartzkopf

You can read up-to-the-minute news on the dimensional-stone trade and search the archives at www.stonebusiness.net, where you can also find this blog at the Main Menu under the clever title of “Editor’s Blog.”

The advertisements that appear on this page are placed by wordpress.com, and constitute no endorsement of the products or services. And I don’t get a dime from them, either.