On-line Readings in Public Relations by Michael Turney
	Background on the city: Public relations practitioners in Greater Cincinnati
	©1995 Michael Turney	Table of contents	PR class home page	About the author

Take a quick look at Cincinnati.

More than 120 years ago Henry Wadsworth Longfellow dubbed Cincinnati "the Queen City of the West." And, long before The Places Rated Almanac named it the "best place to live in North America" (1993) or Fortune declared it one of the fifty best places in the world to do business (1994), it had a reputation as a great place to live and to work. Today, well into its third century as an economic, cultural, and transportation hub of the Ohio River Valley, it's more than the Queen City of southwestern Ohio.

It's an interesting and sometimes inconsistent blend of the old and the new, the traditional and the progressive. Cincinnati is a city that spent millions to convert an Art Deco train station into a museum, but it blithely bull-dozed other landmark buildings and left vacant lots in the center of downtown for over half of a decade when grand plans for a department store and hotel complex fell through.

It's a city where thousands of Sanchezes, Chens, Smiths, Joneses, and others with non-Germanic names come to celebrate "Zinzinnati's" German heritage at the oldest annual Octoberfest in the United States. It's also a city whose Contemporary Arts Center dared to exhibit Robert Maplethorpe's homoerotic art but whose chief prosecutor filed criminal obscenity charges against the exhibit. And, it's a city where one of the ten fastest growing airports in the country is just a few miles down the interstate from the public landing where passengers board the Delta Queen, a steam-powered, paddlewheel riverboat, for a 14-day trip downriver to New Orleans.

Cincinnati's economic base is strong and diverse.

Rather than being focused on single industry, Cincinnati's economy is multi-centered and cuts across several service and industry sectors. It includes heavy and light manufacturing, wholesale and retail sales, financial and insurance services, agriculture and food products, and a wide range of health care services and institutions.

The combined sizes of the Internal Revenue Service's regional processing center, the Environmental Protection Agency's regional lab and offices, a VA Medical Center, the Sixth U.S. District Court, and the offices of dozens of other agencies make the federal government the largest employer in the metropolitan area. It's followed closely by Procter & Gamble, Kroger, and GE Aircraft Engines. Other major employers and Fortune 500 companies headquartered here include American Financial Corporation, Chiquita Brands, Cincinnati Milacron, Eagle-Pitcher, Federated Department Stores, Penn Central Railroad, and U.S. Shoe.

Cincinnati is a long-time home of innovative communication.

Well-known for its political and social conservatism, Cincinnati is often portrayed as overly-traditional and behind the times. But, that's certainly not the case when it comes to communication. In programming and communication technology, Cincinnati's communicators have long been in the forefront of progress.

• From WLW, one of the first commercial radio stations to go on the air in the 1920s, to WCET, the first licensed educational television station, to Warner Cable's QUBE, one of the first cable systems to experiment with interactive television programming, Cincinnati media have been on the cutting edge of technology and experimentation.

• Programming innovations born in Cincinnati ranged from the first radio soap operas in the 1930s, to Fred Ziv's introduction of syndicated programming such as the Cisco Kid and Sea Hunt, to the early talk show efforts of hosts ranging from Phil Donahue to Jerry Springer.

• Billboard Magazine, the top-hits bible of the recording industry, got its start here, and the city continues to be headquarters for newspaper and broadcasting conglomerate Scripps Howard, the Writer's Digest's publishing empire, and more than 50 other book and magazine publishers.

And, more than 250 advertising, public relations, and communication consulting firms have offices in Cincinnati. They include such industry giants as Batten Barton Durstine Osborne Advertising and Sive-Young & Rubicam.