A local newspaper doesn't seem too thrilled with a positive rticle about Ithaca in the US Airways in-flight magazine:
Carsten Morgan, director of special projects for Pace Communications, displays the first page of a section about Ithaca in the US Airways Magazine Monday during a press conference in Ithaca. The piece produced in cooperation with Tompkins County Area Development is in the February edition of the airline's magazine. A detail of Weill Hall on the Cornell University campus is shown in the cover picture. (SIMON WHEELER / Staff Photo)
US Airways magazine highlights Ithaca
By Tim Ashmore •
tashmore@gannett.com • February 3, 2009
An in-flight magazine featuring Ithaca this month skips any economic dark spots and paints a rosy portrait of an area of relative growth and prosperity.
US Airways magazine features a 16-page story touching on Ithaca's quality of life, sustainable growth and the collaboration between government, business and not-for-profits that Carsten Morgan, the director of special projects for publishing company Pace Communications Inc., said will reach about 5.8 million fliers in February.
The readers of US Airways magazine, Morgan said, are a more concentrated group of high-end business folks than readers of Fortune Magazine, Forbes or Business Week.
The story focuses primarily on Cornell University, the technology that turns into business from the university, the sustainable building and growth practices and general prosperity in the area compared to other struggling Upstate cities.
Morgan said Ithaca was picked for the story because of its national anonymity, relatively low unemployment rate, high quality of life, strong higher education foundation and because of the success of US Airways from the Mid-Atlantic to Maine.
"The reputation that Upstate New York gets quite frankly isn't all that positive. The story here in Ithaca is just so much better than that perception," Morgan said.
Unemployment in Tompkins County is lower than the national rate of 7.1 percent and the state rate of 6.8 percent, and unemployment climbed 1.6 percent to 4.7 percent in December, according to Elia Kacapyr's economic index of Tompkins County.
The story praises BorgWarner's $40 million investment in 2007 that added 170 workers, while neglecting the 330 employees laid off since September 2008.
Likewise, aspects of the story that include Ithaca College and Cornell University make no mention of the job cuts or economic turmoil each institution is facing as the result of Cornell's eroding endowment and concerns over enrollment at Ithaca College.
Those facts come from a local perspective, and Morgan said the goal of the story was to gain national perspective on Ithaca.
"The perspective of a national writer is completely different," he said. "The strengths and assets that a region has isn't necessarily the same from a national perspective as what you think yourself. A lot of people need to keep in mind this isn't targeting people in greater Ithaca. It's targeting the rest of the world who don't know you exist."
Michael Stamm, president of Tompkins County Area Development, said that through the story entrepreneurs and CEOs from other parts of the county who are unfamiliar with Ithaca will have a chance to see the opportunities Ithaca offers.
Business leaders will "be able to read these articles and read about all the assets that the Ithaca community has to deliver to them if they located here as an entrepreneur or a CEO if they located a business unit here," he said. "We not only offer a very stable economy but we have intellectual capital here to support business development."
TCAD and Pace Communications collaborated to make the article possible.