Orange County business leaders have something to chew on,a front-page, all-editions Sunday story in the July 9 Los Angeles Times that says OC has fallen behind in the race to become a leading center of high technology.
And they don’t like the taste of it. They complained that the story, headlined, “Dreams of High-Tech Glory Passing O.C. By,” meshed valid observations about OC’s culture and lifestyle with highly selective job and other economic numbers to inaccurately portray OC as a fading tech star.
“It is really way off base,” angel investor Chuck Martin, founder and former managing partner of the venture capital firm Enterprise Partners, said of the story.
Tom Moebus, vice chancellor for advancement at the University of California, Irvine, was more vehement:
“Five years from now they’ll eat those words, and I’ll be glad to feed them.”
Moebus complained about the story’s “lack of attention to the fact that we have a real and growing semiconductor industry,Broadcom and Conexant and Emulex and QLogic and smaller companies that we’re seeing at the (University) Research Park. They glossed over it.”
“It was wrong, so much bad information,” said Dick Sim, Irvine Co. group president of investment properties and overseer of the tech-oriented Irvine Spectrum and University Research Park developments. Sim said he attended a fundraiser for UCI last week and “I must have had 30 people tell me how bad this article was, how it misconstrued what OC is all about.”
UCI and the Irvine Co. were particular targets of the Times piece,UCI in part for being slow to start developing the University Research Park (see related story on page 1) and the giant developer for building business parks that have a bland sameness. And the county in general was rapped for not being as hip as LA or San Diego.
“This should be a rallying cry to Orange County. That story was more about image and perception than reality,” said Wallace Walrod, director of research at the Orange County Business Council.
Adding a little levity to the brouhaha, the council’s CEO, Stan Oftelie said, “People are suggesting we add nude sushi bars.”
Why all the fuss over a newspaper story?
Because, those interviewed said, the Times is an influential paper whose portrayal of the county now becomes one more item in the data bank, to be read by job candidates, journalists and others who want to learn more about Orange County.
“When you’re recruiting people who don’t know Orange County, it can hurt you. It’s image,” Sim said.
Still, the upset parties said there wasn’t much they could do other than complain. Several said they were writing letters to the editor taking issue with points in the story. Sim also said he was sending a note to Steven Lee, president of the Times Orange County edition and a fellow member of the UCI Chief Executive Roundtable.
Times OC business editor Don Lee oversaw the story.
“Our aim was to assess the high-tech economy in the county in the most comprehensive and critical way we could do it. Those are the findings,” Lee said.
One person who generally defended the story was journalist and author Joel Kotkin, senior fellow at the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy, who said he provided the Times background information. But asked if he agreed with the story’s headline, Kotkin said, “No, that’s not fair.”
Conversely, many of those upset with the story acknowledged that some of its characterizations of Orange County were on the mark; and most acknowledged one of the secondary points of the story, that Orange County seems to attract proportionately less venture capital funding than LA or San Diego.
Bill Ellermeyer, senior VP with the executive outplacement firm Lee Hecht Harrison in Irvine, said the Times “overstated it.” But he said the paper got some things right about the county: “There is a lot of hype and self-promotion and there’s no leadership.”
But the critics took issue with some of the story’s data.
The Times’ numbers, for example, showed Los Angeles County producing several times as many tech jobs as OC from 1995 to 1999, but the bulk of those new jobs in LA were in the motion picture industry.
“Give me a break,” said Martin. “And they included ‘aircraft and parts.’ If you take out those areas, Orange County beats both Los Angeles and San Diego.”
But Lee defended the paper’s methodology: “These days, when there’s a conjunction of technology and digital technology, it just doesn’t make sense to me not to count motion pictures.”
Moebus found fault with the Times’ statement that “high tech enrollment at UC Irvine has slumped 7% since 1995.”
He said the Times reached that conclusion by counting life sciences enrollment in the high-tech numbers. But he said most of the students who enroll in life sciences are in pre-med, not high-tech fields, and that the university intentionally scaled back its life sciences enrollment over the past few years. In the remaining programs cited by the Times,engineering, computer sciences and natural sciences,UCI’s enrollment has increased 30% since 1995, compared with 20% for UC San Diego and 3% for UCLA.
“It’s debatable whether life sciences is not a contributor to high tech,” Lee said.
Kotkin suggested that all of the quibbling misses a bigger point:
“This is the kind of thing that leads to why Southern California is so dysfunctional. We’re worried about Orange County vs. LA vs. San Diego while other areas get 10 times the attention and in some cases more of the venture capital.”
“We feed on each other,” echoed Chapman University economist Esmael Adibi. “If Los Angeles becomes the fastest-growing high-tech sector, we’ll benefit, and vice versa.” n
