Cliffs Shake-up, Schneider Break-up, and a Surprising Website Breakdown

CLIFFS NATURAL RESOURCES is preparing for a potentially nasty and climactic shareholders meeting and vote on July 29th.

Casablanca Capital, the activist hedge fund which owns about 5% of Cliffs, is essentially attempting a coup of the company. It's putting up its own, hostile slate of candidates for the Cliffs board of directors.

If it wins the board vote, Casablanca would likely fire the CEO, radically change the company strategy and divest some of Cliffs international operations.

Cliffs, for its part, calls the Casablanca candidates inexperienced. It's attempted to appease Casablanca by offering the hedge fund a few slots on the board of directors, but Casablanca has rejected the compromise. It wants control of the company. It blames current Cliffs management for failed strategies, excessive salaries and plummeting stock prices.

How much of a plummet? How about a share price of $99.86 on July 22, 2011...and a share price of, oh, about $15 or so today. Quick math tells you that's an 85% slide in three years.

Worse news: there's nothing to indicate that iron ore prices worldwide are going up anytime soon. If anything, they may continue to decline.

Worse, worse news: a law firm has just filed a class action suit against Cliffs for allegedly misrepresenting itself to investors and misleading them about the company's financial condition.
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IF JASON SCHNEIDER, the former City Commissioner and current County Commission candidate,  had intended to botch his exit from his job at Accelerate UP and to sully his otherwise sterling reputation, he succeeded in admirable fashion.

For the last fifteen months, Schneider, with funding from the Lundin Foundation (yeah, the mining company), has been helping young businesses get on their feet with the aid of other established businesses in the community. By all accounts, he's done a wonderful job, and he, himself, has nothing but praise for Lundin and its role in supporting him.

Problem is, the Accelerate UP board of directors told him back in May it didn't like the idea of him running for county commission because it didn't like to mix politics with business. You can disagree with that logic--and many of us do--but the fact is, he was told back then that if and when he won the commission seat, he'd have to resign from Accelerate UP.

If he'd been so upset about the ultimatum, he should have resigned right then and there. That would have been the principled thing to do.

But Schneider chose not to resign then. Instead, he decided to wait for a couple of months before suddenly announcing his resignation last week. He informed his board of his decision by email...and then one hour later, notified the media. Soon thereafter, he then told all his friends on Facebook about his decision.

At worst, it sounds like a publicity stunt designed to gain sympathy and votes a few weeks before the election. At best, it was an unfortunate, ill-timed move by a novice politician.

Oh well. But what's more baffling is why he didn't continue working his  job helping entrepreneurs until the election came around. If he were to lose the election (he's up against incumbent Bruce Heikkila), Lundin had told him he would keep the job and continue his good work.

You also have to ask yourself: Which is more valuable? A fulltime job helping struggling, young businesses? Or a parttime job as a county commissioner?

Yeah, we'll hear all about "principles" and the big, bad mining company and the backroom conspiracies, etc but the fact is, a good man doing a good job took a messy way out when he didn't have to. And Marquette County is the worse for it.
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NUMBERS CAN LIE, and frequently do.

But here are some numbers that might force the local television industry to sit up and take notice:

TV6 in May reported 2.5 million page views on its website (impressive, a tenfold increase over just ten years ago).

But ABC 10 in June reported...(drum roll, please)...2.7 million page views.

What???

Okay, time for caveats. First, it is two different months but that shouldn't have made that much of a difference. And second, it's two different companies calculating the monthly analytics reports so maybe it's not quite apples to apples.

But still.

TV6 has long been the overwhelmingly dominant station here--its newscast numbers dwarf those of ABC 10 and TV 3 (the newcomer to the game). But online, ABC 10 apparently has been making huge strides. It does have a remarkably active social media presence.

It still seems hard to believe, because the TV6 website remains robust and ever-alert to breaking news and it's got many more reporter-contributors than ABC 10 does.

Let's see what shakes out in the months ahead. Maybe these latest numbers are just an anomaly. And yes, sometimes numbers do lie.


You got news? Email me at briancabell@gmail.com

Farm-to-Table, a Change of L'Attitude, and Enigmatic Anti-Semitism

Get ready for a new farm-to-table restaurant opening up in Marquette later this summer.

It'll be called The Marq and it'll be located in the space that the much-loved but short-lived Rubaiyat occupied a few years ago, next to the Childrens' Museum.

Chef Austin Fure and three partners, all from the U.P., are behind this new culinary venture that will strive to bring as much local produce and meat to their tables as possible throughout the year, including winter. Hoophouses are extending the growing season here.

Fure, who worked as a chef in New England and Chicago after graduating from the College of Culinary Arts at Johnson and Wales University, describes The Marq as a "gastro-pub." That's fancy restaurant talk for cool, hip food and great drinks. The drinks will include creative cocktails and craft brews.

The four partners will be adding a full sit-down bar to the restaurant but, otherwise, the changes will be only cosmetic. The empty restaurant is already a great space.

The hope is that the gastro-pub will attract both date-night diners and the more casual types, taking a break from their bike rides.

What's not to like here? It's an infusion of young and local energy into the Marquette restaurant scene which would seem ripe for exactly what The Marq will offer--fresh, local food.

Anticipated opening date is August.
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Meanwhile, a few blocks away, L'Attitude (no, it's not plural or possessive...there is no "s") is undergoing a few changes of its own.

The owners, Steve and Sam Nagelkirk, are bringing in a new management team who will be starting in about three weeks.

Tommy and Elizabeth Wahlstrom, the owners of Elizabeth's Chop House, had been managing L'Attitude for the last three years but the Nagelkirks say they'll be taking the parkside restaurant in a new direction.

Most of the staff will be staying on but a new wine list is on the way, and a new menu will likely follow once the new management team gets in place.

The Nagelkirks say they want the new iteration of the restaurant to offer a more casual, friendly, welcoming atmosphere with an emphasis on drinks as well as a good but limited selection of food. The kitchen is small.

Just an opinion: the food, under the Wahlstroms' management, has been good. Diverse and tasty. Let's hope that doesn't change too much.

L'Attitude is as good a restaurant space and location as any in Marquette. Aged brick on the walls, with high ceilings, and huge windows looking out on the park and Lake Superior. Inside and outside seating.

The furnishings were recently updated and made more comfortable. The only obvious improvement, it seems, would be a fireplace or wood-burning stove to warm the place up for the frigid winter months, but that apparently is not doable.

L'Attitude should keep doing what it's doing...just do it a little bit better.
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A strange and ugly story is playing out in Tennessee but it has a distinct connection to Marquette.

Seems that a former resident here who claims to have taught English here and published the weekly live-arts magazine Marquette Jam several years ago has had a conversion to rabid anti-Semitism.

The guy's name is James Laffrey who says on his Tennessee-based blog that he's 56 and once voted for Barack Obama but now he's seen the "truth." He describes himself as an educator and journalist.

There's a lot of nasty, angry, frustrated people on the blogosphere but the reason this is relevant to us here is that, for some reason, Laffrey is spewing some of his hatred at Jason Schneider, a former city commissioner and now a candidate for county commissioner.

Schneider says he once knew the guy and Laffrey seemed nice enough. Normal. Why did Laffrey change? Schneider's got no idea.

In any case, he and another man who was also the target of Laffrey's hate-mongering, notified the police and FBI of the problem back in December. Laffrey's now being monitored by authorities.

And Schneider, who's one of our brightest, most talented and forward-thinking citizens in Marquette, is left to wonder...What the hell? What did I do to piss off some middle-aged man in Tennessee?

You got news? Email me at briancabell@gmail.com