InkBlots

Gov. Haley Barbour referenced Mississippi’s improving image with global manufacturers such as Nissan and Toyota locating here, and touched on it again during remarks to the Mississippi Tourism Association Tuesday afternoon.

The Clarion-Ledger picks up the baton: “Mississippi and Alabama have emerged as the nexus of Southern automotive manufacturing, says Peter Morici, an economist who follows the automotive industry closely.“

From the business page of The Australian: “The plant, which will employ 2000 people and is due to start production within three years, will be Toyota’s eighth in North America. Toyota’s expansion is in sharp contrast to cuts by the three Detroit-based car makers, General Motors, Ford Motor and the Chrysler unit of DaimlerChrysler.”

From National Public Radio (includes audio): “Winning a new Toyota plant was an exhausting prospect for Ed Neelly, the mayor of Tupelo, Miss. Neelly and other city officials have worked for six years, traveling the world, to seal the deal with the Japanese automaker.”

Also from NPR: “Arkansas has now been twice spurned by Toyota.”

The Pine Bluff (AR) Commercial: Air quality, not Arkansas’ incentive package, was the deciding issue in Toyota’s decision to put a new, $1.3 billion plant in Mississippi instead of at Marion in Crittenden County, Gov. Mike Beebe says.

The Associated Press: “Gov. Bob Riley said Tuesday he tried to help Mississippi land the Toyota Motor Corp. assembly plant because it will provide jobs in Alabama.”

The Detroit Free Press: “Toyota, expected to pass General Motors Corp. this year as the world’s largest automaker, has been rapidly expanding its North American manufacturing base.”

From Reuters, via the Jamaica Gleaner: “Japanese business daily Nikkei reported earlier that the plan, to cost around yen100 billion (US$830 million), would have capacity to build 150,000 units a year and would produce the Highland sport utility vehicle starting in 2009. A separate report from Kyodo news agency put the investment figure at yen200 billion and output capacity of 200,000 units a year.”

National Association of Manufacturers blog: “At a simultaneous press conference yesterday in Tupelo and here in Washington at the National Press Club, Toyota announced its plans to build a $1.3 billion, 2,000-employee assembly plant in Northern Mississippi, an enormous project that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour rightly called, “the jewel in the crown of economic development.”

Now that Gov. Haley Barbour and a gaggle of Toyota officials have made the formal announcement, papers in Northeast Mississippi and across the state have been spilling lots of ink on the automaker’s decision to locate a plant near Sherman a few miles up the highway from Tupelo.

Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal: “Half a world away in Tokyo, while most of Northeast Mississippi was still asleep late Monday, the board of directors of Toyota Motor Corp. officially gave its stamp of approval for a project that likely will forever change the landscape of the region.”

The New Albany Gazette: “The once tiny town of Georgetown, Kentucky probably didn’t expect the economic boom it was about to undergo when Toyota announced the opening of a manufacturing plant there in December of 1985. Once a small community of roughly 10,000 that depended heavily on tobacco farming for its primary economic backbone, the city was able to lure in Toyota’s first entirely owned U.S. manufacturing plant 20 years ago. The changes felt from that move are monumental, according to Georgetown Mayor Karen Tingle-Sames.”

The Commercial Appeal, Memphis: “The primary reason Toyota selected Tupelo was the quality of the workforce and the leadership in the community,” Gov. Haley Barbour told a standing-room-only crowd at Tupelo High School’s Performing Arts Center. “North Mississippi has a strong and productive workforce and the selection of this site is a tribute to those outstanding workers.”

The Clarion-Ledger: “Toyota Motor Corp.’s Mississippi automotive manufacturing plant will end up with 4,000 jobs, twice as many as the company announced Tuesday.”

The C-L has extensive coverage, including commentary from Perspective Editor Sid Salter and a quick-read Q&A session.

The Daily Journal has confirmed that Japanese automaker Toyota is building an $800 million manufacturing plant at the 1,700-acre Wellspring Project megasite in Northeast Mississippi.

Something called the Business and Media Institute writes on its Website: “…Diane Sawyer promised viewers they could wake up to ABC’s morning program to find her colleagues ‘taking your case‘ to insurance companies and ‘getting answers’ about unresolved Hurricane Katrina claims.”Yet on the February 20 show, when the answers weren’t to her liking, Sawyer’s colleague Robin Roberts presented a Democratic congressman attacking the industry as a champion of homeowners, and only mentioned her own compromosing emotional connection to the story at the end of her report.”

Did we mention Gov. Barbour is in no mood to wage war on State Farm?

The Jackson City Council voted 4-0 to award the city’s annual contract for legal advertising to The Mississippi Link. Last month, the city had to rebid the contract after the Link and The Clarion-Ledger submitted identical bids.

“Unlike a good neighbor, State Farm is no longer there, at least for many Mississippians,” proclaims The Sun Herald in a recent editorial.

Meanwhile, members of the Preservation Task Force gathered at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art Tuesday to award $98,000 in grants funded by the Sun Herald Preservation Fund

Joe Lee, publisher of the Daily Star and the weekly Democrat, gets to brag on his production staff after his newspapers in Grenada and Senatobia were recognized for print quality. “…To even ‘place’ in a printing contest with newspapers of all sizes…is quite an accomplishments,” he writes.

Most of America’s newsrooms have few minority reporters or editors despite the fact that minorities make up a third of the nation’s population, journalism professor and former newspaper editor says. Pearl Stewart is an adjunct professor at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, where she teaches advanced reporting. She also heads Stewart Media Consulting Inc. in Jackson.

The Hattiesburg American has started a conversation between its readers regarding State Farm’s announced decision to discontinue writing new homeowner policies in Mississippi. The Sun Herald has its own page on sunherald.com, too.

The story broke on Wednesday. Here’s the reaction from lawyer Richard Scruggs.