Newsroom Notes: 'Largest local companies' focus shifts emphasis

This week's special focus of "Largest Local Companies" is a new issue topic for us although local business coverage is something you'll find in our pages every week.

Last year, we put out an issue on the area's largest public companies doing business in Springfield, but what we found was that many of the public companies with presences in the area market are based elsewhere and it can be very hard to get those companies to answer our questions, frankly.

When it came time to fine-tune the editorial calendar for 2004, we decided to shift the focus to large local companies, as well as large public companies with a significant local presence. This opens our coverage to all types of companies.

Next came the challenge of how we would determine which are the largest local companies. Which should be considered the largest? Should it be those that make the most money, or those with the most locations, or those that provide the most jobs? To me, all of those companies would be logical choices.

But for this year, we decided to look at largest local companies in terms of the number of jobs they provide and/or whether they do enough business locally to merit placement on one or more of our listings.

That certainly doesn't mean that we won't come back to the other methods of measurement in future issues especially since this focus is bound to come around again.

Our primary guide to locating the largest companies is our 2004 Book of Lists, which ranks many different types of companies by number of employees.

In my quest to find companies for this issue, I found that some of the largest-by-employment companies accomplish an awful lot with fewer employees than you might expect. Case in point: The largest architectural firm on our list Butler, Rosenbury & Partners only has 58 employees. That's a lot less than I would've guessed given the many projects that have been worked on by the firm. These include Jordan Valley Expo Center, the soon-to-be-opened Starbucks Coffee Co. at 3628 S. Campbell Ave., Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World in Las Vegas and The Meyer Center for Wellness and Rehabilitation.

And while our primary focus is on the largest local companies we found on our lists, this issue still includes news and information about large public companies doing business here, even if they aren't actually based here. Those companies, too, are providing jobs and participating in the local economy, hence, it would be irresponsible to ignore them.

As with any new focus, I'm sure we'll look back on this one and think of plenty of ways to do it differently next time. But that's a good thing. Most of our topics come around at least once a year, sometimes more. (For example, we cover real estate often in regular news, but it's also a section focus four times a year.) If we covered our topics the same way every time, not only would we get bored with them, chances are that our readers would, too. And if we can't put out a newspaper you want to read, then what's the point?

Enjoy reading about the news and accomplishments of some of the largest companies in the Springfield area, and if you have any ideas about how we can fine-tune this focus of our coverage, give us a call.