Sanford Herald Sweeps Awards at North Carolina Press Association

For Bill Horner, and especially Billy Ligget, North Carolina Press Association's annual awards banquet Thursday must have been a heartening time. It had not been an easy year with some readers adjusting to a change in layout, a change in printing platforms and key production practices, a new online offering, and its share of downsizing and turnover. Nevertheless, they left the banquet with 9 awards, a record for the newspaper. The Herald's newsroom won first-place awards for spot news reporting, appearance and design and graphic illustration. The "spot news" recognition, a paper's coverage of a single event. was a result of The Herald's coverage of President Clinton's visit to Sanford in late March of last year. Coverage was led by former Herald reporter Chelsea Kellner, news reporter Gordon Anderson, Community Editor Jonathan Owens, Special Projects Editor R.V.Hight and former Herald photographer Brooke Wolfe. With Clinton's stop being one of many in North Carolina as he stumped for his wife, then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, papers all across the state were faced with providing plenty of "spots news" opportunities. Two late September items, one of them including the preparation for last October's unveiling of the 2nd Century Project, Sanford's new branding campaign, brought in the gold for "appearance and design". The latter award should be especially appreciated by county citizens due to the long-term importance to the county's future. Editor Billy's Liggett's top finish for graphic illustration of Sanford city councilmen who were either for or against the city's business privilege tax should come as no surprise to Herald readers and others who gave their own personal kudo's for it at the time. Liggett was the only North Carolina columnist in all four daily newspaper divisions to be awarded for both "serious columns" and "light columns," winning second place in both categories. One of Liggett's "lighter columns" dealt with the joy and agony that came with raising a new puppy, while one of his "serious columns" focused on the area's need to complete the soon-to-be-built green way in Lee County.The awards should be especially gratifying in that newspaper editors in towns the size of Sanford can catch a lot of flak, and it shows his wide ranging talents. They do little, however, to help others who are still trying to decide his philosophy of life. Herald movie critic Neil Morris also received a second-place nod in the"criticism" category for his movie reviews, which included his glowing review of the 2008 blockbuster, "The Dark Knight." The fan of any local sport should be well pleased with Sports Editor Alex Podlogar's third place award for his sports columns, one of which included a story about his 5-year-old daughter playing soccer. The award was Podlogar's third sports column writing award in his four years with The Herald. The awards should be especially appreciated as alternative sources of state and national news abound on the Internet, but local sports fans must depend on the Herald for its excellent coverage of the many sporting events in the area. Publisher Bill Horner said.

"Winning second place and third place in the special section category is also a coup for The Herald. That means of the hundreds of special sections produced this past year by newspapers in our category, we have two of the top three. Credit for that goes to Special Projects Editor R.V. Hight and contributor Chip Pate who coordinated the annual industrial edition and a third place award for its annual Lee County Living magazine."

Horner also noted the work of former Herald photographer Brooke Wolfe on these sections as well as the "spot news award." That compliment was right on the mark. The volume, yet excellence of her work was incredible. Editor Billy Liggent wrote on his blog, "The Herald has a wonderful young photographer in Brooke Wolfe, and I’d say it’s about time we started paying her, and not just in Bojangles gift certificates." A decision on her part to "move on" was probably a good one for her, but her fingerprints are all over the work that brought these awards and she will be missed. One would not have been surprised to see her place in the categories of General News Photography and Feature Photography. Another category where an award might have been expected was Headline Writing, where Ligget has written some clever ones. No surprise in the General Excellence Web Site despite this year's improvements. The Paxton group, of which the Sanford Herald is a part, is not known as an innovator there and has not come to grips with the realities of the Internet market yet.

Kevin Bryant Had Grievance With Herb Hincks

May Explain Bryant's Involvement With False Forms

It is the season of choose your successor. In recent weeks the clerks of court of Lee, Moore, and Chatham County have resigned from office, each with just about two years left in office. In their cases, the Chief Superior Judge will name a successor who will have the advantage of incumbency in the 2010 election. This is how the last two sheriff's initially came to office in neighboring Moore County. Naturally, usually the person resigning the position and the individual or group filing the vacancy have come to some agreement on who that successor shall be.With a little less than two years in Sheriff Billy Bryant's term, Kevin Bryant, then the Chief Deputy, persuaded Billy Bryant to take the same approach provided that he (Kevin Bryant could) get the necessary appointment from the county commissioners. Doing so would have allowed him to face the assumed challenger, Tracy Carter, as an incumbent. Instead he could only run as Chief Deputy who had to publicly admit he wasn't allowed to make any policy decisions in the sheriff's office, a comment considered by many a turning point in the race.

Pfizer Buys Wyeth in $68 Billion Consolidation Move

Combined pharmaceutical company to layoff more than 19,000 workers to scale back costs.

According to Market Watch  Pfizer Inc., the world's top drug maker, said Monday it will buy rival Wyeth for $68 billion in the biggest pharmaceutical merger in eight years.  Wyeth is Lee County's largest employer, and the impact in terms of loss of jobs is at this point unknown.  Even without the merger changes, the nature of the industry would likely put some employees at risk.

At the same time,  Pfizer Inc. reported a 90% plunge in fourth-quarter profit, stemming mostly from a large legal settlement. The company also announced a 10% reduction in its workforce and said it would cut its dividend payment in half in order to help pay for the Wyeth acquisition. The layoffs will be folded into a larger round undertaken by the combined company, which expects to shed more than 19,000 workers -- amounting to about 15% of its combined workforce.(Read More From Market Watch)

But Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler, who took the top job in 2006, insists the Wyeth deal is different from its earlier mega-mergers with Warner-Lambert in 2000 and Pharmacia in 2003.

Kindler told a news conference that the Wyeth merger is not about "a single product or cost-cutting," as with past deals. Instead, "it's about creating a broad, diversified portfolio."

Nevertheless, cost-cutting there will be. Pfizer expects to achieve about $4 billion in "synergies" by 2012, enabling it to reduce the combined workforce of the two companies by 15%, or some 20,000 jobs. As part of those synergies, Pfizer announced Monday that it will eliminate 8,000 jobs, 10% of its workforce. It is also closing five of its 46 manufacturing plants.

Pfizer announced today that it plans to cut another 10 percent of its workforce, or 7,800 jobs. Analysts,pharma watcher Daniel Hoffman and Sanford C. Bernstein analyst, Timothy Anderson told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the job-shedding that will attend the merger will likely hit Wyeth harder than Pfizer. "Generally, in this kind of deal, you would be looking at 25 to 30 percent cost reduction," Hoffman told the paper, "but here it's going to be more like 50 percent." Timothy Anderson, however, predicts Pfizer would cut 70 percent of Wyeth's current $10 billion spending on R&D and marketing/administration.
 
In an article written in speculation of the merger, Business Week offered this analysis:

The general reaction: Acquiring Wyeth might boost Pfizer's fortunes in the short term, but it won't solve the long-term problems that are roiling the major pharmaceutical makers. As many observers have noted, Pfizer and the rest of the drug industry suffer from a lack of promising new products to replace older ones going off patent. What is less widely understood is that Pfizer also will face an increasingly constrained marketing environment, even if it succeeds in bulking up with Wyeth. 

Industry Analysis:  Biotechnology Firms Outpacing Big Pharmaceuticals Pfizer alone spent $8 billion last year which was greater than the sum spent by biotech’s top five companies. What this tells us is that pharmaceutical companies are grossly unproductive when it comes to drug discovery and development. This would explain why nearly three-quarters of all new medicines approved for sale in the US last year originated at biotechnology companies. 

It is becoming increasingly apparent that biotechnology companies are much more efficient at R&D than pharmaceutical companies. More importantly this suggests that something must change so that pharmaceuticals can continue to receive adequate ROI on internal discovery programs. Perhaps big pharmaceuticals ought to spend a greater portion of its R&D budget on biotech mergers and acquisitions rather than continuing to invest in inefficient and failing internal R&D programs.

While biotechnology companies are exceptional in drug discovery, they are severely lacking when it comes to clinical development of new drugs. This is largely due the high costs of conducting human clinical trials (which are required for regulatory approval of all new medicines). Most biotechnology companies are strapped for cash and don’t have sufficient funds to conduct clinical trials on their own.

Not surprisingly, given the recent financial downturn, there has been a recent spate of deals in which pharmaceuticals have been willing to pay large sums of money for clinical development rights to promising new biotechnology drugs. Moreover, a majority of the almost 160,000 employees layed off by pharmaceuticals companies in the past few years have been R&D scientists.  Unfortunately, this paradigm shift doesn’t bode well for doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows who are training in the life sciences. This is because many entry-level biotech positions, traditionally filled by newly-minted PhD's and postdoctoral fellows will likely be filled by experienced, pharmaceutical employees who lost their jobs in the recent rounds of layoffs.
Source: BioJob Blog

Editor's Note: Two Videos on the Pfizer-Wythe Merger have been added to the video page. In one two experts discuss the impact of the merger and in another Jeffrey Kindler, CEO of Pfizer, puts a brief spin on the merger. (click here)

Chief of Police, City Manager Refuse Mayor's Request

"Not Interested" in Elections Briefing


Police Chief Ronnie Yarborough lived up to his reputation last week when he and city manager Hal Hegwer refused a request to meet with the mayor and the editor of this blog so that information obtained in connection with the board of elections complaint could be shared with them. Actually they refused twice, once with Mayor Olive going through normal clerical circles and once when each was contacted directly by the mayor personally. 

The city manager, like others before him, appears to allow Yarborough, who in reality is just a city employee, to operate unchecked, free of supervision. The actions seem to confirm widely held views of Ronnie Yarborourgh's  running the Sanford Police Department free of supervision, a degree of secrecy and isolation.  While the mayor does not supervise the city manager or police chief, Cornelia Olive is the elected representative of all of the citizens of Sanford, disregarding such a personal request from the mayor shows his arrogance in his position.

The mayor had sought the meeting  to bring to their attention information obtained by the e-Lee Dispatch and was not to be an interview. The background for the meeting included relaying the position taken by Kim Strach who was adamant that the ongoing election board's investigation should not in any way impede any law enforcement from pursuing their normal procedures or legal responsibilities. (See previous post) Her position had no yet been published.

This information was thought to be of potential benefit in managing the difficult position for both Kevin Bryant and the department given the prevalent rumors regarding the involvement of the city detective. The meeting was also to reveal, as explained below, that a Sanford council member had initially claimed to have been told directly by Steve Thomas that a Sanford police detective was indeed one of the two "friends" who persuaded him to sign the form. More documentation than is being disclosed here was to be shared so that they could be assured of the reliability of the claim that Thomas had indeed told Stone. This appeared to provide much more creditable information at the same time the city was about to learn it was free to follow its normal procedures during the Board of Elections investigation--information neither the police chief or city manager might have yet had.  The claim of Kevin Brant's involvement would appear to have more credibity than local rumors.

The mayor had been told that there was potentially significant information that should be relayed directly to the city manager and chief pertaining to the election perjury information and was willing, as she put it, "to give it a try." No doubt she had dealt with the independent attitude of Chief Yarborough before and was also aware that the city manager had demonstrated no willingness to take him on.  In most towns and city, a mayor would have been more confident.

Most everyone agrees there ought to be a lot of care in reacting to rumors--even widely and quickly developed ones. That is particularly true when the rumor is potentially (in most towns) devastating to any law enforcement officer's career. Those rumors also had to be evaluated in light of what some expect to be another campaign, and opponents of such a campaign may have reason to start such rumors. Careful reactions would be appropriate for the City of Sanford to consider in reacting to them.

Careful investigation has confirmed from numerous highly responsible sources that City Councilman, and Thomas business partner, Mike Stone had claimed that Steve Thomas had told him directly  the name of at least one, if not both, of the two individuals involved in bringing him the false statement . Those sources all agree that Mike Stone had called the night the first form was filed to tell them that Thomas had given him Kevin Bryant's name as one of the two individuals involved. This was likely creditable information from an elected official related to a possible crime, not a rumor over breakfast.

With Stone now denying making those calls or ever making that claim, it seems unlikely he made this information available to the city manager or chief of police. Saying that Thomas had secured an attorney and told Thomas to stop talking, by mid day the next morning, Stone was no longer making the claim of hearing directly from Thomas. Over time, Stone has offered different descriptions of what happened that night, denies that Thomas told him or that he passed such information along, and claims that his source of information was the same rumors everyone else was hearing.

When asked in a follow-up call why he had declined to have the meeting, Hal Hegwer said "We just aren't interested." In most cities and town refusing such a request from the mayor at all would be unusual and dismissing it with such a comment would bring his future into doubt.  Apparently not in Sanford where it appears to be evidence that the manager understands that when it comes to the police deparment, it is only what Ronnie Yarborough says that matters.  that in such matters the chief of police, not he or the mayor, makes the decisions.

It would seemingly be important that there was now credible evidence that Thomas had claimed that a city detective was involved directly to a city official.  The information concerning Stone's claim  was support by reliable sources as to the their source, not the rumors. One would also believe that a city council member who has taken his own oath to uphold the law would have himself made this information available to the city manager or police chief. But Stone and Thomas are business partners, and Stone may have correctly assumed the information would have no influence on the long time chief who answers to no one and might chose to do whatever was necessary to protect Kevin Bryant.

Stone knows, as do most others, that  hired Kevin Bryant as a detective immediately after the sheriff election in 2006, filling the position without following normal procedures. Many took this as evidence that Yarborough, as rumored, supported Bryant over Tracy Carter. Carter had strongly supported the disbanding of the joint City County Drug Unit, which operated under the Sanford police department but included sheriff's deputies and had jurisdiction over all the county. Ronnie Yarborough strongly disagreed with that position since dissolving the unit  markedly reduced his jurisdiction.

 Perhaps there has already been an internal affairs investigation of the allegation or for some other reason Ronnie Yarborough is satisfied that there is nothing to Thomas's allegation. While the public information laws about such investigations would seemingly not require the disclosure of one of its findings, in most cities, clearing an officer of such a charge would be important to the police department and the officer.

With an unaccountable, arrogant police chief who doesn't care if one of his detectives was involved, an intimidated city manager would just be being practical when he said "We just aren't interested." Even if that is the case, the refusal to honor a request directly from the mayor by a deparment head supported in his refusal by the city manager, shows an attitude of indispensability and the kind of arrogance that should concern every citizen, especially when it is the arrogance of the chief of police.

Editor's  Note:  Sentence Structure Clarified at 6 pm 1/19/2009