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Kenny Irby: Good morning, it’s a pleasure to be here with you to interview Molly and Jaime about their challenges as they traveled and searched to localize the global story in their hometown newspaper’s region. I spent some time with Jaime via e-mail and conversations and then last night and they are just bursting with stuff to share with you so I could just let this go and let them go but we’re going to stay with the program as Chip has already demonstrated greatly. We’re just going to go to some slides and just let you have an overview. I should tell you that full sets of the work will be available at the back table there at the end of the session. But, just as a short intro, let’s take a look at some of their work.
The work is over four days, is that correct?
Jaime: It was published over four days, right. What you are seeing are pictures from Russia and Italy and Wichita in these first four pictures. This is Italy. This is day three, day two. This is in Russia. In Italy. In Italy. This is in Russia, inside an apartment building there with a family that we spent some time with. This is him at work. He’s an engineer for Boeing in Moscow.
Kenny: So the project has all the classic trappings and earmarkings of a project, a big project with some limited space challenges. Is that right?
Jaime: Right.
Kenny: Okay. So, let’s start with a conversation about…what did you learn in this project? What did you set out to learn when you started this? And Molly, why don’t you take this first question? What was the goal?
Molly: Well, the goal was…a little bit of background. Boeing is Wichita’s biggest employer. It’s actually the state’s largest employer. Every time the union contract comes up you hear a lot of, “Our jobs are going to China.” “Our jobs are going overseas.” And this time, given the downturn with Boeing had just laid off 4,800 people in Wichita, a lot of people…I guess the concern is even higher that what they see is that their jobs are going overseas at a time when the company is laying people off. So that was kind of the goal. Why did they have to do it? The initial goal was let’s explain why is Boeing doing this? What are the factors that lead into them needing to place work overseas, to do work overseas? It really evolved into not only an explainer but trying to answer the question: Do they have to?
Kenny: And you’re a native of Wichita, is that correct?
Molly: Uh-huh.
Kenny: And so you had grown up around Boeing and knew the impact on the city. What personal experience, if any, led you? Chip has often said, “Find the story that only you can tell.” Is this that story for you?
Molly: In a way, I guess. My dad retired from Boeing. When growing up as a kid, the cycles in aviation in Wichita are very well known for people who have lived there for a long time. This downturn is a little bit different. Before, we had Boeing, Raytheon Aircraft, Cessna and Bombardier’s Learjet plants, all in Wichita. Just a little bit of background. One out of four people in Wichita work in manufacturing. Of those, the majority of those are in aircraft or aircraft related. There’s a lot of subcontractors and suppliers and it’s a major industry. There have been 12,000 layoffs in the last 18 months, or 20 months. Since September 11, 12,000 people have been laid off, 5,000 of them at Boeing. If you’ve been in Wichita for a long time, there are downturns and then up cycles. Usually, though, when Boeing is down, General Aircraft is up. When General Aircraft is down, Boeing is up. This is the first downturn where they’ve all been down. So it’s a little bit different. And then you throw in a big mix of we’re not only competing. Like Wichita suppliers who have relied on Boeing for years to do work, now they’re not only competing with suppliers in the United States or California or Texas, their competing with suppliers in China, Malaysia, Mexico. So the mix is different. There’s an evolution. Boeing has been more open about their being a global company. Seventy percent of their sales of commercial aircraft are overseas and their market is definitely overseas. So there’s a change that the company is going through to globalize. They’re saying that to get orders overseas some of that comes with…if it’s not stated in a contractual agreement, there’s an agreement that we’ll buy your planes but you need to give us jobs.
Kenny: Good. Jaime, I want to read something to you from your “About the Series” projects. It says, “With thousands of Boeing in Wichita and across the country out of work, why put work overseas? Boeing appears destined to expand its presence overseas and, at times, to the detriment of the U.S. workers. Less clear is to what extent the shift will occur. The Eagle spent several months exploring this question in depth.”
Oftentimes, when the project occurs, it’s a project that the writing colleagues are exploring in isolation. Jaime, when did you get in on this project and where did the collaboration come in?
Jaime: I got in on the project very late. In fact, I think I booked my ticket like three weeks before the trip. It was because of a money issue. They didn’t know if we could swing it, if we could afford to send both of us overseas. Our option wasn’t to have Molly take the pictures but to hire freelancers in Russia and Italy. Well, we figured out…we did some cost-saving measures and we decided we could stay in the same hotel room, which was a huge way to save money, and basically it cost about $2,000 to send me, additional dollars in the airfare. At that point, I didn’t do the research on the story on my own. I did the research by talking to Molly about it. I mean, nobody knows aviation in Wichita better than Molly McMillin so I felt like I had a very good source. Then I did what I needed to do to prepare, getting my equipment ready, finding a lot of the things I needed to have over there because I knew it wasn’t going to be as easy as going to a local photo store to get what I needed.
Kenny: So would both of you say that one of the lessons learned, because that’s real important for a (unintelligible) like this, is to explore some of the challenges and try to do better next time. Should the visual colleague be in earlier on the planning and, at least, the idea generation.
Jaime: Yeah. I wish I was. But I wasn’t and I felt like we did the best that we could. I think the biggest thing that I learned, personally, was you’ve got to be able to react quickly. Nothing happened the way that we thought that it was going to and we had to think on our feet all the time and move quickly from one thing to the next.
Kenny: So, Molly, was that helpful, having somebody else, another set of eyes and ears as you were thinking on your feet and reacting?
Molly: Oh, definitely. We lived the story. We lived two weeks overseas. We spent a week in Russia and a week in Italy and the thing was we wanted to find people. We wanted to tell the story. The engineers in Wichita work very closely with Russian engineers at Boeing and we wanted to find someone that works on the Boeing project with Wichita. For us, we had to rely on Boeing a lot. Because it’s a Boeing facility there, we had to rely on them to get us in, give us a tour, find out what’s happening. But also, we wanted to find somebody to go to their apartment and they were very warm and hospitable. And we went to one engineer’s apartment and we realized that he didn’t work at all on the project. Not only did we spend the evening with him but while Molly was in meetings, I spent the whole day with this guy at work, making nice pictures of him interacting with people and going to his apartment and meeting his family. And then later we realized he really didn’t have anything to do with this story. That’s when that panic set in.
Jaime: We were told that he worked with Wichita and then when we got to his apartment he said, “I don’t work with Wichita. I work with Everett.”
Molly: Oh-oh, we’re in big trouble here.
Kenny: What leads to those kinds of miscues? Was this a language issue, a language barrier, or what?
Molly: I think maybe somewhere in the translation…Boeing had actually sent over a public relations person to meet us over there from Wichita. Actually, he was very helpful. He paved the way and opened the door for us to get into the design center. Like I said, they couldn’t have been more inclusive and warmer. There were some Wichita people there at the time we were there. We have a funny story to tell you later about that. We had made it clear with the PR person from Wichita that we were very much interested in going to someone’s home that worked on a Wichita project. I think somewhere in the…by the time it reached… “Well, we found somebody for you to talk to,” and it was “Okay, he’s from Wichita?” “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And the person from Wichita, Boeing’s PR person, was just as surprised as we were because he knew what we were wanting too and his eyes got kind of big too when I said, “And what projects do you work with? Who do you talk to in Wichita?” And he said, “Oh, no, no, no. I work with Everett.”
Jaime: As soon as we found that out and it took about five minutes to relax and to compose myself, we knew we had to find somebody. We were sent halfway across the world and, like Chip was talking about earlier, we didn’t want to leave without having this person. So we immediately started talking to people we needed to talk to and we found the person that we needed and that was Alex.
Molly: He’s on the photo with the shopping cart and he was actually wonderful and had invited us to the apartment and meet his wife and his child. We ended up going to the (unintelligible), which is a Turkish-based chain of stores, kind of like a Wal-Mart Superstore. They have like everything in the stores.
Kenny: So there were all kinds of resources that you had there. Recently, we’ve had a lot of discussions about fixers and translators and Middle East for coverage. How did you work through translation issues? Do either of you speak Italian or Russian?
Molly: Very little. In Russia, it wasn’t a problem because the engineers, many of them speak English. Alex, that you saw, is very fluent in English. He actually worked in the United States for a year and he travels back and forth to Wichita periodically. And they actually encourage their engineers to take English classes at night, so the language barrier wasn’t quite so bad. There were a couple of officials that we met that Alex actually translated for us one time and the other ones knew enough English that we could get by. It wasn’t really a problem in Russia. It was definitely a problem in Italy. I had hired a translator who was actually doing freelance for the BBC and she met us in Naples for two days.
Jaime: She was fantastic.
Molly: She was a lifesaver.
Kenny: So you were sharing with me, though, that in Russia there’s a…your colleagues in the newsroom…and as you come back, people think that you really went through a different experience from what you encountered. What other kind of questions…what were some of the surprises that you found in Russia where you probably thought it was going to be a lot more difficult than apparently it turned out to be?
Molly: Well, we had someone who worked in Russia in our newsroom, but it was during the nineties where the bread lines were very long and life was very, very difficult. We didn’t quite know what to expect exactly. We had talked to Alex, actually, before we went over. I think that life has gotten not as hard. So I wasn’t sure what to expect.
Kenny: So you were pleasantly surprised?
Jaime: Yeah. It was really pretty wonderful. About a week before the trip, I had actually talked to a friend of mine who had gone to Kazakhstan about a month before to adopt a baby. She and her husband went and spent a week there and she scared me to death. She and her husband both, because they had a completely different experience. They went to a very rural place and she’s like, “You need to get this, this and this.” And I did. I went out and got…She was like, “You’re never going to find toilet paper.” So I took over a tone of toilet paper with me. I brought over padlocks and all kinds of medication. I was just really frightened. I had a lot of anxiety before the trip. I wasn’t sleeping well for a week. “Oh, yes, I need to remember to get the Imodium AD, or whatever, because I’ll never be able to find it there.” I was very pleasantly surprised. It’s a major metropolitan city and it was completely different from his experience.
Kenny: What about equipment-wise? One of the challenges when you send a professional photographer in is that you have to make consideration about transmission and equipment. In either of these countries, post 9/11, was there a different reality or…?
Jaime: Well, thankfully, we didn’t transmit from there but it took nine months to get into the paper. But that’s another story. I did carry over with me two digital cameras and three lenses and two flashes, one (unintelligible) lots of equipment and a laptop. And I had that equipment with me at all times. The only thing my editor told me was “Make sure you have everything on you, with you at all times.” I’m very thankful because when we flew from Russia to Italy, my luggage got lost and I still have not received it, so my clothes are out there somewhere. But, thankfully, I wasn’t able to look very good but I was able to do my job. Everything I had with me was on my back and I would say that’s the most important thing. Molly’s luggage got lost too. She found it.
Molly: Well, it came the day before we left. And you’re right. We didn’t look very well. We kept wearing the same clothes over and over again.
Kenny: Molly, did you wear the same clothes because you were trying to be empathetic…?
Molly: (Unintelligible) mine showed up the day before we left but hers still hasn’t arrived. But anyway, our goal was to make sure what we needed to work with was on our backs.
Kenny: Molly, talk to us about how you built and constructed the (unintelligible). This was a project…did you have a project editor involved in this? Who else aside from the two of you were involved?
Molly: Our business editor was the main editor involved, but I will tell you that when you do a project like this, it suddenly rises to great importance in the newsroom and so our main editor, Rick Timms, was very interested in it and the story went through an evolution actually. The initial goal was to kind of do an explainer about what Boeing is doing, what they plan to do in the future, why they are doing it, and why that strikes such a chord with the workers in Wichita and the union. It evolved over time to more than an explainer. Let’s try to answer the question: Do they have to do this and what are some solutions? That took on a whole other layer of reporting and talking to experts and understanding trade. So it went through some…
Kenny: Layers and levels?
Molly: Layers, levels and evolutions.
Kenny: Who else was involved at the core of the project for production after you had done your reporting and you were editing images?
Jaime: One of our photo editors. He really kind of adopted it and we had meetings…actually, pretty regular meetings, where we pulled in graphics, photo, design. We all sat down and said, “Here’s where we are at. What do we still need to get?”
Kenny: It’s a very collaborative project?
Jaime: Yeah. We tried to be. In fact, some of the graphics you see was kind of group effort of putting our heads together and saying, “How can we best show this graphically through photos, not only the text?” Some of the graphics that you do see, the information in there took a long, long time to get.
Kenny: Talk about that. Were you reporting the story or did the graphics group have a graphics editor assisting you or how did that process evolve?
Molly: Basically, we kind of came up with a plan of what we wanted to show graphically and then I got the information and plugged it in as it came in. It kind of went through an evolution in that what we wanted to show was how much Boeing makes and how much Boeing buys. Boeing certainly wasn’t releasing the buy charts that you see there. That came from an engineer somewhere—a source—that said these charts are everywhere at Boeing here.
Kenny: I’d like both of you to answer this question. What was the greatest challenge in this project at the reporting level for you? At the reporting level, when you were in the field, out of the country, what would you say you single greatest challenge was? Molly, why don’t you start?
Molly: You mean while we were overseas?
Kenny: Overseas, right.
Molly: I think the language and just feeling like you were just…I mean, everything is totally unfamiliar. I think the bigger challenge was in Italy because Boeing very much, like I said, were very open and gave us access in Russia and even helped us get around. Transportation-wise, they even sent a taxi. They certainly didn’t pay for it, but they had someone pick us up at the airport with a sign with our names and to make sure we got to the hotel okay to kind of acclimate us, I guess. Because there were some Wichita people there, we all went to dinner one night. They gave a couple of tours and they invited us to go with them. So we were very inclusive. It was totally different in Italy. It was less scripted and that’s where the translator came in. We had a couple of days when we first got there that we went out and met the mayor of the small town. One thing that Boeing had told us when we went to Ellenia (?), it’s not a Boeing factory in Italy. It’s Ellenia Aeronautica and when we were there they were transferring some work on the 757 over there to their plant, so they were in this transition and I think they still are. We wanted to go out to someone in someone’s home that worked at Ellenia on Boeing projects that connect with Wichita. They told us no. There was no one at Ellenia that wanted to meet with us. Maybe they could have us meet in a café someplace but none of them…and there are hundreds of people that work at Ellenia, thousands of people that work at Ellenia, and not one of them wanted us to come to their apartment and meet with them, amazingly. So we went out and met the mayor of this little town through the translator. She had called him and I had had tried…before I left I had someone who teaches Italian at the university help me call and try to set up an appointment but we kept missing each other because of the time difference. They had said we could come but we didn’t have an exact appointment. We did when the translator came over and she called and the mayor said, “Sure, come on over.” So we drove out there. Thankfully, she did the driving. We were saying, “How important is this Ellenia plant to the town? How many people work there? How important is the Boeing work to you guys?” He was very nice and we said, “We’d really like to talk to someone that works at Ellenia.” He said, “Sure.” He got us in contact with not only one person but two or three different people and he was so helpful.
Kenny: So you got your real people?
Jaime: Yeah. He was great. He got on the phone and called somebody and said, “How much does your husband make?” Can you imagine someone calling you and asking you that? You wouldn’t be that open. I know I wouldn’t. He said, “These people from the States are going to be over at your house at 7:00 p.m.”
Molly: And they were really curious why we wanted to come there.
Kenny: So they were accepting once you actually made connections?
Molly: Well, now Boeing didn’t like it at all.
Kenny: No, the workers.
Molly: Sure, right.
Kenny: Jaime, what was your greatest challenge?
Jaime: It was knowing that I only had a certain amount of days to do this and I was sent halfway across the world and I better get it done because there was no trip back. It was a very anxious-filled two weeks. It wasn’t easy. It certainly wasn’t a vacation and it was physically exhausting and mentally exhausting. I mean, carrying around a forty-pound backpack…I consider myself to be in pretty good shape but I was beat because I had it with me at all times. It wasn’t safe to leave it anywhere. It was definitely wanting to get the job done, wanting to do it right, not wanting to disappoint anybody when I got back.
Kenny: Tell us, how did you deal with the time lag? You went, did all this great reporting; you had this work and then several months before it actually appeared in the paper. How did you deal with that transition time back?
Jaime: I think it was much more difficult for Molly. Me, for the most part, my work was done. It was just sort of figuring out when it was going to run, on which days. I did do some additional photography. Once I got back, we really localized it and we came up with new ideas and followed a Boeing worker around. It was probably much more difficult for Molly. Everybody in Wichita, somehow, had known that we had gone overseas. “When is this running?” I was like, “I don’t know.”
Molly: Yeah. That was probably the most frustrating thing, the length of time it took to put it into the paper. But a lot of that was that the story was evolving. The machinists did have their talks so there was like four to six weeks when I didn’t work on it at all. The paper was pretty good about letting me take carve-outs and intense time to work on it, but then there were other things that, you know, you can’t always work just on a project. As it evolved, I was like, “I just want to get this in the paper.” I’m glad that we took the time that we did, ultimately, to do it. It was harder getting some of the detail and the information. Some of the things that we think would be pretty simple getting were very difficult getting. Either there were some holes that needed to be filled or they just weren’t easy to get.
Kenny: Let’s go to your web presence here. You put the package up on-line. What were the differences, would you say, or any benefits from having the package on-line?
Jaime: We were certainly able to show more photos. In fact, we’re planning on putting up some more now. We have twenty photos now. But that was frustrating. There’s only so much space in the paper and that space—that news hole—is getting smaller as the economy gets poorer. That was frustrating for me. I felt like I went to Russia and Italy and I wanted to show some pictures and didn’t get to show too much, but was happy because I was able to show more on the web.
Kenny: Just for clarity, not too much in the newspaper?
Jaime: Exactly. I enjoyed having this outlet.
Kenny: Okay. This outlet…this is something I’ve been dying to ask. This is my question. Does fuselage go down the street very often in…?
Jaime: You don’t really see it. It flies by and we see it because we were actually standing on top of The Eagle on a very, very cold day. And this was nine hours after they told me it was going to leave. I think people were pleasantly surprised to see this picture because even lifelong Wichitans have not seen it.
Molly: If you’re not in a place where the train tracks run by, you don’t necessarily see it. But the fuselages are built in Wichita and then they are railed up to Renton. They’ve actually had to cut trees down to make sure they flow. The web site also allowed us to reach a lot more people. The series, I am told, got a lot of attention in Seattle and the Puget Sound area and in Chicago. Some of the feedback we got was from people who worked at Boeing in other places through the e-mail. We had a place where you could leave comments and we had a lot of people…
Kenny: You had a very vigorous discussion there.
Molly: Right. The discussion between them got pretty heated.
Kenny: Okay. I want to give you a little time as we start to wrap up here because you both have a story that you’ve got to tell. So I want you to both tell the one story that is memorable—at least you indicate that yesterday—there was one humorous story that you wanted to tell. Molly, why don’t you tell your quick story? And then Jaime you tell a story and then we’ll open up to the group for a couple of questions in our remaining time.
Molly: Well, I think this is kind of an aside but Boeing had cooperated a lot with us to do this because, obviously, we wouldn’t have had access without them, and not so much in Ellenia, because that wasn’t a Boeing factory, although they made their people who are in Italy as liaisons available to us as well. I didn’t realize until we got back that the Boeing spokesperson was a little hacked at me for finding an Ellenia worker without their knowledge and for going out and talking to the mayor. And we went and met with the head of the union in Naples and it was like, “We told you you couldn’t do this.” And we were like, “We’re going to find someone on our own.” His boss had to tell him, “Just get over it.” It was less scripted and I think that they felt like maybe they had lost control, that they weren’t control over there like they maybe were in Russia.
Kenny: It was just something that you had to be aware of.
Molly: Yeah. To be aware that there’s a certain point where they can lead you to water but it’s still your story.
Kenny: Good, good. Jaime, do you have a…?
Jaime: I guess this is a humorous story. We went to a very nice restaurant. I sat down and looked at the menu and it was like, “I’ll try the duck.” It was the equivalent of twenty dollars and so I’m like, “Okay, that’s not too bad.” The waiter comes by and says, “Do you want some champagne with it?” “Hmm, twenty dollar duck.” I didn’t ask the price so, “Okay, I’ll have a glass of champagne.” I had that and it was nice. He kept coming back asking me if I wanted more champagne and I was like, “No.” Finally, I said yes to the champagne. I later found out that the champagne was twenty-five dollars a glass. So ask about alcohol prices and also try to learn as much as you can about customs and what not and traditions. I went running two or three times while I was in Russia and I got all these very strange stares. It turns out that most women just don’t wear shorts. At first, I’m like, “Is it me?” I later found out that it was wearing shorts, so I wish I would have known that.
Molly: I think if we had to do it again, we wouldn’t have gone quite as quickly there. We might have developed the story more and then went. We had the grant and, “All right, let’s go.” We were focused on going and focused on planning the story but a lot of the time was spent figuring where are we going to go? What are the best places? Can we get in? That sort of thing. So, a lot of that…we had a budget line, certainly, but it changed so much when we got back that maybe if we had not been so fast to go we might have been a little better off.
Kenny: So along that vein, before we open it up—we’ve got about seven minutes here—if you were to do this over again or—you can answer this question another way—if you had to give advice, what advice would you give to folks pondering or considering similar kinds of projects? What would one suggestion or strategy be? Jaime, what would be…?
Jaime: Mine would be what I said earlier, and I mean it, have everything you need on you at all times. I was paranoid about losing my images because they were all digital files. Every night I made three sets of CDs of everything I shot and I sent one home to my house in the States, which the package from Russia never arrived. I had one with me and one in my bag, which never arrived, and then one set with me. I always had that. Make sure you back up everything because, especially for a photographer, there’s no going back. Molly could call some of those people we talked to but I couldn’t do that.
Kenny: Molly, what was your thought?
Molly: I think that just as much planning as you can but then realize that all the planning in the world is going to change once you go, and just really try to be nimble. Because, like I said, the best laid plans don’t always work out.
Kenny: Good. It’s fabulous work and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it and get to dive in and spend time with it. Are there one or two questions from folks in the group?
Question: I’m curious about the communication between the two of you. I think one of the most ignored aspects of what we do is communication between a reporter and a photographer in terms of developing a story. You seem like you go—especially on projects—you go together but you’re not actually not really together. The photographer goes and says, “You do your job and I’ll do my job.” Was there any kind of communication that (inaudible) the story?
Molly: Of course. That’s probably the most important thing between us. We were always going back and forth. We were usually right next to one another. That teamwork is so important. First of all, we were living with each other for two weeks. We shared a hotel room to save money.
Kenny: That may have helped.
Jaime: Actually it did. We did a lot of talking at night when we got back. And in between, “Who’d you talk to? Do I need photos?” Making sure that as we spoke to people…
and then we ran into what could have been a dead end—we got the wrong guy—we quickly got together and “We’ve got to find somebody else.” We went from there and we worked together. That, I think, has to be the most important thing.
Molly: I feel very lucky that Jaime…I think the paper certainly made the right decision in sending Jaime. It just was so much easier than trying to either take the photos myself—which you wouldn’t have seen the wonderful photos you do, if I’d been doing it—or trying to freelance it and not knowing…scheduling it and all that.
Kenny: It is a very cohesively presented project that shows the kind of teamwork and camaraderie that you demonstrated.
Molly: And once we got back, Jaime was fully involved.
Kenny: One more question. Last question.
Question: I haven’t had the opportunity to read the series, but could you share with us some of the central truths you uncovered?
Kenny: Summary of central truths.
Molly: Central truths. It’s not going away. Boeing is not going to…it’s going to continue to look across the world for partners to reduce costs and compete against Air Bus, which is trying to eat their lunch. And you have to adapt or not. The other companies in Wichita are pretty much doing the same thing. Raytheon Aircraft, just a few months ago, said that they are going to being a real vertically integrated company where they make the detail parts and subassemblies and all the way to the final assembly to just a final assembler to cut costs. That’s going to mean about 3,000 machinists’ jobs between now and 2006.
Question: Where next? And why? I’m wondering if you gave us a hint with your Mexico…
Molly: What I was thinking of, yes, when I just spoke about Raytheon Aircraft, is there are about 300 people who work in what they call a wire harness division. They make the harnesses that the electrical wiring goes through that goes into a business jet. About a year ago, Raytheon said that they were going to send that work down to Mexico and some of the women who were going to lose their jobs as a result of that banded together and got a team together—with management’s blessing, actually—with some lead manufacturing folks about how can they keep the work in Wichita. They spent several months changing processes, putting in other…making it simpler, easier. And Raytheon, a year ago March, said, “You guys won. We’re not moving the work to Mexico because we’re going to use you as a pilot program where we can roll this work out across other parts of our company and we can make these savings elsewhere. We would save about a million dollars a year if we went to Mexico, but we think we can take what you’ve done and roll it out and reduce costs.” Now, that’s all changed. They are again looking to Mexico to do this work and in this process they are saying by the year 2006 we want to be a final assembler and not make all the detail parts and not do all of this. That puts all those jobs back in question. Actually a source had given me a proposal from two companies in Mexico about making those parts and I have the names of the companies down there that are in running for the work. As soon as they make a decision where that work is going, I would like to go down there.
Kenny: One last summary statement. Would you give us a statement on what has been the impact in Wichita and what has been impact or response from the series from readers and citizens?
Molly: We had a variety of response. Both sides. The good thing, I think, about it is the machinists union said, “Good job. Right on.” I think they felt hurt and Boeing thought that we were really going to hammer them and I think they ended up saying that it was fair and balanced. So from both sides, we were getting good response and good readership responses.
Kenny: Thank you very much.
