In 2006, Chaz Allen, Newton mayor and current director of the Jasper County Economic Development Corporation, woke up in Washington, D.C., and picked up the newspaper. The mayor was in the District with business leaders from the Greater Des Moines Partnership to discuss the looming closure of Maytag Corp. headquarters and manufacturing facilities in his town of 15,500. He opened the Washington Post to the business section, and “Newton was the story,” he said.
Allen was elected in 2004 and currently is serving his fifth and final term at Newton City Hall. Due to Maytag’s departure, Newton felt the effects of the economic recession earlier than many other municipalities in the United States. The company’s Fortune 500 status and the nearly 4,000 jobs it took with it, Allen has presided over the city during an unprecedented barrage of national media attention.
In his JEDCO office Thursday, Allen compiled a list of media outlets that have told Newton’s story since 2006. It includes headlines from “Good Morning America,” the NBC Nightly News, CBS “Sunday Morning,” The Washington Post, USA Today, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and, arguably the most exposing, “60 Minutes” in the Scott Pelley piece “Anger in the Land.”
“I think it’s helped. It put us in the spotlight, so we were always front and center,” Allen said. “In 2007, Maytag closed in October. We were the only community going through that. But then in 2008, when the economy tanked on us, then we were just another community.”
Newton will again be under the national media spotlight again this weekend when Fox News’ “Special Report with Bret Baier” films a political roundtable discussion at Uncle Nancy’s Coffee House and Eatery. Airing 5 p.m. Monday, the panel will feature Des Moines Register senior political reporter Jennifer Jacobs, Radio Iowa news director Kay Henderson and Newton Daily News editor Bob Eschliman. The interview is closed to the public and will discuss issues surrounding the 2012 presidential election.
With so many journalists trying to tell Newton’s story to a broad, macro-audience in the last five years, do the people involved feel like that national media got it right?
Scott Creech has owned the Newton Domino’s Pizza franchise for more than 20 years. His story was featured in the “60 Minutes” piece, and although it was not a sentiment throughout the entire community, he said he believes the CBS News program hit the mark regarding Newton’s troubles.
“‘60 Minutes,’ in my opinion, was a good thing for Newton,” Creech said. “It’s disappointing to me that some (in town) have given it a happy dollar and said ‘that’s not the Newton that I know.’ They were not looking at the reality of the situation. Because we’ve still got a lot of empty buildings in Newton.”
In the nearly 13-minute story, Creech was presented as a businessman who was forced to lay off multiple workers and was himself working 80-hour weeks to keep the Newton Domino’s afloat. ‘60 Minutes’ came to town about six weeks after Little Caesars opened in Newton, and Creech had seen a roughly 33 percent drop in sales. He said the news show’s producers caught him at a point of “emotional weakness,” but he thinks they got the narrative right.
“I don’t know if they knew the story they were going to tell before they got here, but Scott Pelley was hitting the recession for weeks before he came to Newton,” Creech said. “I think they told the story the way they wanted it to be told. I was surprised as to how emotional they made it, but I was in that boat. I didn’t lose my job, because I worked, at that time, bunches.”
Creech said “60 Minutes” did edit comments he made regarding his willingness to work those late hours and that he still viewed himself as better off than those toiling with war and who suffered in a more precarious time.
“There are people that fought in World War II and that are in Afghanistan now, who are getting shot at,” Creech said. “And this is what I said: ‘There are guys whose feet froze at the bottom of the trenches. I’ve got it easy. If I get hot, I turn the air conditioner on. If I get cold, I turn the heat on. What I do is easy. What those people do is hard.’ And I said that in the “60 Minutes” interview, and, of course, they cut it and did not put that in there.
“But in my opinion, I think 60 Minutes told it the way it was,” Creech continued. “They could have done a happy-happy-joy story, but there were a lot of people that lost their jobs, making a lot less money than what they used to do. And it has trickled down to the small business people here in Newton. And low and behold, there goes the Capitol Theatre closing. People just don’t have the discretionary income they used to have.”
Creech’s sales have rebounded since the 60 Minutes piece, but they still have not hit his peak levels of 1999. Allen also sees the preliminary data showing an upswing. He said raw data has shown the taxable valuation of Newton’s properties in 2003 was $673 million. After a dip during Maytag’s departure, the city’s properties now have a valuation of roughly $800 million. Allen said the addition of TPI Composites, Trinity Structural Tower and Iowa Speedway have contributed. But what the national media showed, the lack of higher wage jobs, is still where the city needs to focus growth.
“The national media, we’ve been on it all,” Allen said. “I think our community’s been represented every way it can be. Both good and bad.”
Allen said he believes some of the national media portrayed the community accurately and some missed the mark.
“Some did and some didn’t. It all depended on what their angle was,” Allen said. “For the most part I think it portrayed an accurate picture of what people saw. But I didn’t always feel that way.”
Following the “60 Minutes” showing, Allen received nearly 400 emails a day at city hall. One woman sent Allen a check for $100 which he donated to the St. Nick’s Christmas Club. Allen also recalls an interview with the CBS Evening News discussing the potential purchase of Maytag.
“In the interview I said, ‘the bottom line is, Maytag is for sale. The company will decide where it goes. Our sole purpose is to keep the jobs here in Newton,’” Allen said. “I got called a communist sympathizer. I got two emails that were crazy.”
But regardless of the story, Allen said the exposure Newton has experienced has been invaluable. Allen points out that an advertising spot during “60 Minutes” prime time broadcasting hour is valued at $1.3 million for 30 seconds of airtime. The story regarding Newton’s economic woes, its workforce and available business real estate ran for 12 minutes and 54 seconds.
“That’s the exposure you get,” he said. “People are trying to buy that time, so you’re talking $16.9 million in advertising for free.”
This media exposure has captured the attention of not only employers, but national politicians have found Newton as a soap box to tell their narrative. In 2008, Newton had at least one visit from every major Democratic and nearly every Republican candidate for President. During the lead up to the 2012 Iowa Caucuses, Newton saw multiple visits from every Republican candidate except Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and GOP Presidential Nominee Mitt Romney. The candidates have drawn the national media to Newton and told the story of an economic recovery that is considered too slow.
But Newton has also received three visits from President Barack Obama, twice as a sitting president. He has used the national media that follows him to present Newton as a success story, hinging on jobs created by wind energy component manufacturers TPI and Trinity.
During the 2012 Iowa Caucus, Simon Mann was the Washington, D.C., correspondent for the Australian daily newspaper The Melbourne Age. He was in Newton covering Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum’s final campaign event Jan. 2 before the Jan. 3 vote. He said he did not get to “experience Newton” while covering the event, and a quick deadline forced him to ask local media about issues pertinent to the small Iowa town.
But despite any skew, some Newton residents affected by the coverage feel Newton is a story worth being told.
“I think that (‘60 Minutes’ reporters) are the best story tellers in the world,” Creech said. “They are the Mark Twains of our generation. They’ve been doing it for more than 30 years and there’s a reason that they’ve been on the air for 30 years,with the ratings as good as they are. And that’s because, they’re the best story tellers in the world.”
Mike Mendenhall can be contacted at (641) 792-3121 ext. 422 or via email at mmendenhall@newtondailynews.com.