Marketplace of Ideas Blog

This month marks the 19th anniversary of the beginning of Marketplace, Northeast Wisconsin’s business magazine.

The early days of Marketplace were chronicled by our first publisher, Mark Karavakis, back in 1995. Edition number one, in October 1989, featured a car dealer you may have heard of named John Bergstrom. Edition number one, as Mark said back in 1995, was something less than smooth in production due to two unanticipated problems — competition in the form of another business publication area, and the fact that Mark had to fire Marketplace’s first editor after he demonstrated “the creativity of warm milk” in his two weeks in the job.

Mark was gloomily pondering these and other issues at Lambeau Field during the Packers’ second home game, when the answer to at least one of his problems walked up to him. Or, more accurately, walked past him — Tony Mandarich, the Packers’ first-round draft pick, who signed with the Packers after a lengthy holdout. (Unfortunately for the Packers, Mandarich’s holdout wasn’t permanent, given that Mandarich’s NFL career paled in comparison to his steroid-inflated college career, which prompted Sports Illustrated to call him “the best offensive line prospect ever.”)

Mandarich’s appearance amped up the crowd, and for whatever reason, the Packers were sufficiently stirred to overcome a 21–0 deficit to beat New Orleans 35–34 on a Don Majkowski (remember him?) touchdown pass to Sterling Sharpe (remember him?) with 1:26 remaining — a game one Packers blog called one of the best games in Packers history. And Mark came up with an ingenious idea — do a cover story about the business of being the Packers’ top draft pick, including endorsement possibilities. (Mark and the new editor put Mandarich on the cover in a yellow 4XL T-shirt that said “This Space for Rent.”)

The lead paragraph of the story, written by former Green Bay News–Chronicle sportswriter and news editor Ray Barrington (Barrington formerly worked for the News–Chronicle, which ceased publication June 3, 2005) is interesting to look at 19 years later:

Tony Mandarich’s future as a football player with the Green Bay Packers has yet to be determined. But, as if he’s not getting paid enough for his work on the field, he’s trying to moonlight in another area. And if experts are right, he could end up being an all-pro in the endorsement game.

Or not. But who knew at the time? (Had the Packers not drafted him, someone else would have immediately afterward, based on the previously referenced Sports Illustrated story.)

Ever since then, Marketplace has demonstrated that reporting on business should not be dull. This past June, we perched Life Promotions creator Bob Lenz on the edge of his building in downtown Appleton. (Fortunately Bob is not afraid of heights, and it wasn’t too windy that day.) Another cover story took place at the hunting cabin of an Appleton business owner; the story was about the business impact of deer hunting. (Marketplace’s first blaze orange cover type.) Another cover story about Indian tribal gaming was shot in record time, because we had a 25-minute window to get a photo of the chairs of the Oneida, Stockbridge–Munsee and Menominee tribes at Oneida Bingo & Casino. (And, yes, we’ve had Packers presidents Bob Harlan and Mark Murphy on the cover. The second Harlan cover was the summer before the Packers won Super Bowl 31, an event of some interest in this area.)

Being a regional business magazine gives you the ability and the responsibility to take global looks at issues affecting Northeast Wisconsin business. It’s amazing to look at old issues of Marketplace and see how much has changed here — the continued economic growth of the Fox Cities, big changes in the banking and paper industries, the burgeoning impact of the Packers, and this thing that started generating interest in the 1990s called the Internet, to name five. (On the other hand, Tom Petri is still in Congress, and whereas the president in 1989 was George Bush, the president in 2008 is … George Bush.) Our Web site allows us to combine the analysis for which magazine journalism is known with the immediacy of breaking news and opinion.

Marketplace was the first entity of any kind to recognize and promote Northeast Wisconsin as a single market in which to do business — that Green Bay-area businesses need not limit their customer base to the Green Bay metro market, or that Fox Cities businesses need not limit their customer base to the Fox Cities, and so on. Without Marketplace, The New North, promoter of the second largest market in Wisconsin, would have occurred far later.

Beyond just reporting on news and trends that affect Northeast Wisconsin business, Marketplace advocates for Northeast Wisconsin business. We’ve reported on such issues as the minimum wage, labor shortages, health insurance, environmental regulations and other things based on one directive: How does this story affect the readers of Marketplace?

When I write Marketplace of Ideas columns or entries in this blog, that is my guiding directive as well. (The principles of this column go back to my first term as editor.) Tax increases, for instance, negatively affect Marketplace’s readers, since every dollar spent on taxes is one less dollar that can go to the employees as profits, the employees as pay, or the business itself as investments. Business people know best how to run their own businesses, and should be left alone by government and others to run their own businesses.

Marketplace is read by the productive people of Northeast Wisconsin, the people who make Northeast Wisconsin a worthwhile place to live, to work, and to own a business. As I wrote seven months ago, this is, I believe, the best job in print journalism in northeast Wisconsin. The editor of Marketplace directs the work of writers in interviewing interesting and successful people successfully doing interesting things. Marketplace readers are better educated, wealthier, more accomplished and more successful than your typical newspaper reader.

And for those of you who might believe that generating heated commentary was only a byproduct of my hiring or rehiring as editor: In 1990 Marketplace did a story about G. Allen Bubolz, whose family owned what now is Secura Insurance, because Bubolz departed Secura to become president of the John Birch Society. The story prompted one reader to write a very succinct letter: “Stop sending us this fascist rag. We all hate it.”