Forbes, America’s Most Miserable Magazine

Not Miserable!

Cleveland Ohio appeared on yet another Forbes list, this time Forbes calling Cleveland “America’s Most Miserable City” . Forbes puts Cleveland at the top of the list, saying that it “secured the position thanks to its high unemployment, high taxes, lousy weather, corruption by public officials and crummy sports teams (Cavaliers of the NBA excepted).” They bring up the city’s “colorful history” reminding readers about the Cuyahoga River burning in the late 1960s, and the city’s default in 1978, the “first U.S. city to default on its debts since the Great Depression.” It mentions the anguish fans have suffered over its sports teams, and grudgingly mentions the currently successful Cleveland Cavaliers NBA team. It also resurrects and old city nickname, “the Mistake by the Lake.”

The magazine used the “misery measure” which they explained as follows “Our Misery Measure takes into account unemployment, as well as eight other issues that cause people anguish. The metrics include taxes (both sales and income), commute times, violent crime and how its pro sports teams have fared over the past two years. We also factored in two indexes put together by Portland, Ore., researcher Bert Sperling that gauge weather and Superfund pollution sites. Lastly we considered corruption based on convictions of public officials in each area as tracked by the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice.”

The article explains how Cleveland rates poorly in the key categories, and then, in an section that I call “damning with faint praise”, they explain that “There are certainly bright spots in Cleveland. Downtown has experienced a revival over the past 15 years helped in part by the construction of three new sports venues for the city's NFL, NBA and baseball teams. The Cleveland Clinic is one of the top medical centers in the U.S. and the largest employer in northeast Ohio.”

I was unable to find on the Forbes web site the actual data used to compile the list. Here are the cities that Forbes lists, and their ranking:

The 20 "Most Miserable Cities" in America:

1. Cleveland
2. Stockton, Calif.
3. Memphis, Tenn.
4. Detroit
5. Flint, Mich.
6. Miami
7. St. Louis
8. Buffalo, N.Y.
9. Canton, Ohio
10.Chicago
11.Modesto, Calif.
12.Akron, Ohio
13.Kansas City
14.Rockford, Ill.
15.Toledo, Ohio
16.New York City
17.Sacramento, Calif.
18.Youngstown, Ohio
19.Gary, Ind.
20.Philadelphia

One thing I learned years ago when I worked in a job that included analyzing and reporting performance metrics and business expenses is that a person can make numbers say just about anything they want, as long as they pick and chose the right categories and the right set of results. Forbes, in this case, seems to enjoy picking and choosing those categories which puts Cleveland, and a lot of other Ohio cities, on the top 20.

Based on my own statistics, taken by reviewing comments from Cleveland area residents, and commentary from various local press sources, I have deemed that Forbes Magazine is the most miserable magazine in America. I can also say this also from personal experience, because I actually subscribe to Forbes Magazine and over the last two years, find myself reading it less and less because it offers very little. I should mention that I’ve never had to pay for that magazine subscription as it was a “freebie” that I got as a giveaway from another business web site. Apparently Forbes has to give away their magazines because it’s hard to get people to pay to read the tripe they publish. Thankfully, my free subscription runs out soon and even if it is free I won’t be taking it anymore.

But back to the miserable Forbes. Since Forbes dredged up Cleveland’s ancient past, let’s dredge up Forbes’. The magazine and web site’s performance seems to be slipping, with the web site 24/7 Wall St. saying about Forbes in May of 2009:

Ad pages at Forbes were down 17% last year and are down 19% year-to-date. The most recent issue’s ad pages were 33% lower than they were in the same issue last year. Forbes has a circulation rate base of 900,000 in the US. The company also has an edition for Asia and several smaller publications.

The print business at Forbes is doing as poorly as it is at BusinessWeek and Fortune. Forbes has the advantage of a much larger audience online. In the US, it has almost 5.6 million unique visitors and 66 million pageviews. Revenue from the Forbes online business is between $70 million and $80 million, but is not growing. Forbes management might say that its online operations are profitable and that its print business loses money. It is convenient to separate the two businesses, but they share so many resources, that this is not a realistic description of the Forbes overall business.

Forbes.com themselves reported on February 8, 2010 that “Circulation for U.S. magazines slipped more than 2 percent in the second half of 2009. A new report also finds that single-copy sales, which are more lucrative for publishers, dropped more than 9 percent.” It seems Forbes is part of a dying industry, and that has to be miserable.

And imagine working for a company run by Steve Forbes, president and CEO of Forbes, Inc. and chief editor of Forbes Magazine, a guy who tried to run for president of the United States and was largely ignored. Despite Steve’s wealth and life in his ivory tower, that failure has got to make a guy miserable. I guess his money can’t buy everything.

But the Cleveland Plain Dealer said it best, where Phillip Morris said in an editorial that “Forbes magazine is worse than a dirty lover, it's fickle” , going on to say:

"Just last year, Forbes was singing Cleveland's praises. The magazine said we were hot. It ranked us as America's 14th best city for single people.

What a fickle lover.

At the time, I took note of that ranking and called it a joke. Cleveland is full of beautiful, if slightly overweight, people. We have a nice theater district, and a downtown entertainment district with options enough to keep one from going stir-crazy. We have professional sports year around.

But this city has not been one of America's hottest cities since Halle Berry left. In 2008 Forbes ranked us as 38th in the dating category, which begs the question: How did Forbes suddenly discover that we were so hot?

With the latest ranking – that we're miserable – I wonder how we could make such an astounding leap in the quality of our dating scene at the same time we were busy killing each other and hemorrhaging jobs, homes, and population?

The magazine never explains its revision.”

Count me in as another Cleveland area resident who thinks that Forbes is way off base here. The Cleveland area has so much to offer (just spend some time reading my blog here and you will see what I mean). It has plenty of things to do and see, including beautiful Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River Valley, the world class Cleveland Orchestra, and let’s not forget the world class medical care, which draws in people from all around the globe. Living costs (housing, food utilities) are very low in the Cleveland metropolitan area. Sure, it has problems like crime, poverty, and housing problems in the inner city, but so do many other big cities. But it is unfair for Forbes to pick and chose certain “miserable” categories on which to base its ranking; one does’t get a clear picture by cutting out most of the snapshot.

So Forbes, let me congratulate you on being the most miserable magazine in America. You’ve certainly earned it.



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Cleveland: A Stressful City? Or Just Cloudy?

Forbes Magazine has listed Cleveland Ohio as one of the top 5 stressful cities in the United States. The list shows Cleveland as #4, tied with Providence, RI. Most specifically, the list groups the Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor Ohio area as a whole, which is a five county area defined by the Metropolitan Statistical Area as Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Geauga County, Lake County (Mentor), Lorain County (Elyria), and Medina County. Elyria and Mentor are about 50-60 miles apart, with the city of Cleveland in between.

According to Forbes Magazine , the criteria used to rank these cities was as follows:

To find the most stressful cities, we examined quality of life factors in the country's 40 largest metropolitan statistical areas, or metros--geographic entities defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for use by federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics. We looked at June 2009 unemployment figures provided by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics and cost of living figures from the Council for Community and Economic Research. We examined median home-price drops from Q1 2008 to Q1 2009 that were provided by the National Association of Realtors. Population density based on 2008 data from the U.S. Census Bureau and ESRI also factored. Last, we examined the number of sunny and partly sunny days per year, based on 2007 data from the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, as well as air quality figures, based on 2007 data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.


Sunny and party sunny days? This is a serious measurement? I can tell you that the weather problem in the Cleveland area, especially east of the city in the “snow belt” is not sunny or partly sunny days, it’s the lake effect snow in the winter. And we really can’t help that now, can we? By the way, even though Mentor and Elyria are just a short distance apart, Elyria is west of the city, and it's east of the city (Lake and Geauga counties) that are in the heart of the snow belt. I admit it is no fun getting “snow-belted” every year, but we have learned to live with it.

I also object to the inclusion of Elyria and Mentor (the latter being my home town by the way) in this list since these places are nothing like Cleveland proper. Speaking for my own community of Mentor here in Lake County, it is a great city with the largest beach in the state, Mentor Headlands, it’s the home of our 20th president, James A. Garfield(now a National Historic site), and it’s one of the top retail centers in the state of Ohio and home to many businesses. It’s clean, it’s got beautiful homes and great schools. As the Forbes list includes Lake County as a whole, the area also is proud of its many wineries, the shores of Lake Erie being a perfect place to grow wine grapes.

Cleveland also has many great things going for it, such as world renowned medical care, the world class Cleveland Orchestra, Playhouse Square, and many museums. Many large corporations make Cleveland their home and the downtown area is a vibrant place to work, live, be entertained, and have great food.

There is no doubt that the Cleveland inner city has been hit hard with the banking home mortgage collapse and the resulting vacant or abandoned homes. There are areas, like in many big cities, that are considered “bad” neighborhoods. In that aspect, I will agree that those people living there are faced with stress. But Forbes does the area a complete disservice by lumping such a large area with such diverse living conditions, and then making sunny days, or the lack thereof, part of the measurement.

My opinion is that Forbes list does more to add to the stress of residents than whether the sun is completely shining. Last year, Forbes reported that Cleveland was a dying city. Well, their report of the death of Cleveland was greatly exaggerated. We’re still here, now we are just stressed.




You can find the full Forbes Magazine Stressful Cities list here.






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To Forbes Magazine: Reports of our Death are Greatly Exaggerated

An editorial

Cleveland makes another list, this one from Forbes Magazine, calling Cleveland one of “America’s Fastest-Dying Cities”.

More specifically, in the pictorial summary of the cities, they list the area as the “Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, Ohio, metropolitan statistical area.” And I am not quite sure of the location of photo of Cleveland that they used (see below), but it hardly represents the region. (If they wanted to make us look bad, they should have used the Howard Johnson’s building.)

If the people from Forbes Magazine read this blog, they would know there is a lot more to Cleveland than one desolate looking photograph. In fact, I would venture to say that Forbes Magazine knows nothing about the Cleveland area at all.

I was born in Cleveland, and I happen to live in Mentor, and I can verify there is a lot of life in this area. Maybe if Forbes Magazine measured attendance in the sports venues such as The Q, Progressive Field, and Cleveland Browns Stadium, they wouldn’t see evidence of a dying city. More examples of healthy life are: the booming medical facilities and the fact that people come here from around the world for health care; the recent renovations at the Cleveland Museum of Art; The Euclid Corridor Project; the wonderful Lake Erie life, Cleveland’s beautiful architecture; The Cleveland Metroparks; University Circle; a world-class orchestra; well, I could go on and on. Of course, let’s not forget that my current hometown of Mentor is far from dead, thank you. Mentor is 6th in retail sales for Ohio, there are many new homes continuing to be built to meet demand of a growing population, and we have a lot of tourism. When I navigate traffic on Mentor Avenue on a daily basis, I frequently see license plates from out of state and Canada. This city is quite alive.

Here’s what Forbes had to say:

“America’s Fastest-Dying Cities”.

Joshua Zumbrun 08.05.08, 6:00 AM ET

Washington, D.C. - The turmoil of the mortgage market granted a temporary reprieve from hearing about the woes of America's Rust Belt. That doesn't mean things are better. Despite a decade of national prosperity, the former manufacturing backbone of the U.S. is in rougher shape than ever, still searching for some way to replace its long-stilled smokestacks.

Where's it worst? Ohio, according to our analysis, which racked up four of the 10 cities on our list: Youngstown, Canton, Dayton and Cleveland. The runner-up is Michigan, with two cities--Detroit and Flint--making the ranking.

These, and four other metropolitan statistical areas, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, face fleeing populations, painful waves of unemployment and barely growing economies. By our measure, they've struggled the worst of any areas in the nation in the 21st century. And they face even bleaker futures.

It wasn't always this way. Despite years of economic decline, in the first years of the new century the employment situation did not look so bad--3% to 4% unemployment was the norm, along the lines of metropolitan areas elsewhere in the country. The rest of the decade was not so kind. Thanks to a crushing downturn for automakers like General Motors and Ford, Detroit and Flint, Mich., have seen unemployment approach 10%.

Another brutal statistic all the cities share is a diminishing population. So far this decade, 115,000 people have left Cleveland, for other climes. Smaller changes in other regions can be just as painful. Nearly 30,000 people have left Youngstown, Ohio, and they aren't being replaced by either new babies or new immigrants.

Still, the cities we found to be struggling don't vary widely by age, and this factor had little influence in the rankings. The oldest city in our top 10, Scranton, Pa., had 45% of its population over 45; the youngest, Flint had 38% over 45.

The worst news is, of course, economic. When we looked at the most recent gross domestic product estimates for 155 metropolitan statistical areas estimated to have $10 billion or more GDP in 2005--economies about the size of Asheville, N.C., or Tallahassee, Fla.--the news was predictably terrible for the Rust Belt.

In the fall of 2007, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) published its GDP estimates from 2001 to 2005. Nearly every city in the country grew during this period (New Orleans, devastated from Hurricane Katrina, was the notable exception), but the struggling cities on our list grew more sluggishly. None of them grew more than 1.9% a year, versus a nationwide average of 2.7%. Canton, Ohio, managed to grow its economy just 0.7% annually. Flint was worse still at 0.4%.

None of these cities now face the huge declines in real estate prices seen by Phoenix, Miami or Las Vegas, where the Case-Shiller Home Price Index shows nearly 30% declines from a year ago. Detroit is off only about 15%, Cleveland only 8%. Don't call it a bright spot. Prices never went up in the first place.

From Forbes.com

Cleveland’s health is a lot more than just a few statistics like population, unemployment, or mortgage trouble. Sure, the city and the area suffer from those problems, but that doesn’t mean that those people who remain, or who are working here, or whose homes haven’t been foreclosed, are letting the city or the metro area die. It’s superficial lists like Forbes' that do more harm to a city’s reputation than anything else. A city is more than just the sum of a few statistics, it’s about the people who live there and the care, feeding, and support they give to their city. And while Cleveland may be poor right now in things like jobs or with mortgage foreclosures, we aren’t even close to needing life support.

But I think we should all pull the plug on Forbes Magazine, don't you?


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