SoJ Web Report | May 12, 2010
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| Courtesy photo by Pepper Watkins |
| Joel Whitaker is editor of trade journals reporting on the beverage industry. As with any reporting, "It’s all about the community you’re serving," he says. |
Despite his quarter-century of experience covering the alcoholic beverage industry as the editor of the trade journals Kane’s Beverage News Daily and Kane’s Beverage Week, Joel Whitaker, BS’64, MA’71, is a man of simple tastes. He orders a glass of chardonnay and settles in with a plate of popcorn at the Reliable Source, the fusty bar at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., where he is the membership coordinator.
We sit at a table between a flat-screen TV and a standup piano to talk about covering the alcoholic beverage industry, the transition from editing at major daily newspapers to a one-man-band trade journal and why success means carving out a niche in a hyper-competitive media environment.
Newswire: Tell me about Frank Kane, the founder of your newsletters.
Joel Whitaker: He was a writer in the ’30s. He wrote radio shows, The Green Hornet, The Shadow, pulp novels. I know exactly the sort of novels he wrote. Every one of those things would have some blonde bimbo spread across the bed, blood streaming from her left to right boob. He’d churn those out lickety-split because they were all the same. Change it from murder at the press club to murder at the Hilton then to murder at Ernie Pyle Hall. He also did some work for Seagram Company, which at the time was the largest distiller in the world. He had this mélange of activity. That’s how the publication got started.
Newswire: So how did you first come across it?
Whitaker: I answered a three-page classified ad in The Wall Street Journal. I’d gone from the Journal to Institutional Investor in New York, where I was managing editor of one of their newsletters, which was called Bank Letter. And it took me six months to figure out that putting out a magazine was easier than putting out a newspaper because you didn’t you have this big production tail that drives everything. Took me another six months to figure out that newsletters were easier than magazines because you didn’t have to worry about selling ads, you just had to worry about selling subscribers. About that point I decided that since I’m making a lot of money for the boss, I could make some of that for myself, and I started looking for a way to go off on my own.
Newswire: What’s the specific niche filled by Kane’s Beverage News Daily and Kane’s Beverage Week?
Whitaker: We report on the regulation of alcoholic beverages. For instance, the health care bill, as it turns out, has a hundred-some-odd pages devoted to the Indian health service. And in those hundred-odd pages, there are at least 20-some references to alcoholic beverages and the harm caused thereby to Indians, and lots of references to the Center for Disease Control. So, out of that, we can draw some deductions that I’ll try to follow up with reporting. One of the deductions we can draw is there’s likely to be a new focus on alcohol and health issues, leading to discussion about raising taxes.
Newswire: I thought the health care bill was so long no human could possibly read it.
Whitaker: I have people, sources who get it read. You know, in all of reporting, sources are everything. I’ve been covering this beat for 25 years, so yeah, I have some pretty good sources. People talk to me.
Newswire: You worked for some major newspapers — The Wall Street Journal, The St. Petersburg Times. How did your experience as a traditional journalist inform your experience at a trade journal?
Whitaker: You know it’s all the same case, in reality, it really is. Barney Kilgore’s contribution to journalism was not taking The Wall Street Journal from a 29,000 circulation Wall Street rag and building it to the nation’s largest daily newspaper and the only national newspaper when he died, but rather his insight that it all depends upon what your community is. Our audience is that alcohol-supplier and wholesale community, and the regulators and the lawyers. So we just do the same thing you do in any other journalistic enterprise. We sniff around and try to find stuff that is news and that is interesting and important and go with it.
Newswire: You wrote the page one news summary at The Wall Street Journal early in your career. What was it like being one of the first news aggregators?
Whitaker: I never thought of it that way, but I guess that’s what it was. Except it wasn’t aggregation in the sense of just ripping off somebody else’s copy, because it all got rewritten. The page one summaries were started by Barney Kilgore, so there had been a long list of people who had followed his format. It was a pretty decent work for me because I’d go into the office around 2:30 in the afternoon, and the first thing I would do is look at the afternoon papers. I’d get the overnight AP and other reports, and they came in on big rolls, and I’d sit there and unroll them into wastebaskets until I found something I thought was interesting and pull it off.
Newswire: So you had pretty much 100 percent discretion on what you printed on the front page?
Whitaker: Obviously you couldn’t have lousy news judgment. This was during the Vietnam era, and so most days I played Vietnam stories at the top. When the Pentagon Papers story was being broken by The New York Times, I ran that at the top because I thought it was truly important. The same thing went for the Watergate stuff. At a certain point I got just tired of the body counts because I’d done some work for army intelligence when I was the army back in the draft era, and I knew for a fact we were in an unwinnable situation. So I just the started at the end of every column to put down a line that said, “The army said that another 37 soldiers died today, in the 973rd day of the war.”
Newswire: What are the hot topics in the alcoholic beverage industry right now?
Whitaker: Taxes, alcohol abuse issues, drunk driving/underage drinking primarily, direct shipping of wine to consumers — the wholesalers absolutely hate that idea. And Sunday sales. I can make the Sunday sales argument either way.
Newswire: You’ve been able to scoop the big newspapers from time to time. What do you attribute that to — your sources?
Whitaker: Sometimes luck, too. One of the scoops we had was being able to tell the industry exactly when they were going to get hit with a tax increase. I was down here sitting in a very hot, very dull, very stuffy hearing room. I think it was for the House Ways and Means Committee. The guy testifying was the assistant secretary of treasury for tax policy. He was rambling on and on. Then all of a sudden, the chairman says to him, “Now Mr. So-and-So, don’t you think that there should be an increase in taxes on liquor and beer and wine?” He pauses for a moment. That woke me up. He says, “Well, Mr. Chairman” — and this is during the Reagan era — he says, “we are absolutely opposed to any sort of tax increase. However,” — another long, pregnant pause — “we’re not opposed to user fees.” That was all it took for me to go back and say flatly that their taxes were going up. General media didn’t pick it because they’re not focused on this little industry. My competitors weren’t there and if they were, they probably wouldn’t have been awake anyway.
Newswire: So what’s your pleasure? You like chardonnay?
Whitaker: Chardonnay.
Newswire: That’s it?
Whitaker: In the summer, I do vodka tonics. I’m unfortunately close to allergic to beer, if not allergic. We don’t do tastings, you see. I really don’t care how it tastes. I have very low taste buds. I buy cheap chardonnay.
Newswire: What would you say to a young IU journalist graduate coming into the world in these uncertain times?
Whitaker: If you’re asking me, do I think there is a future for journalists, yeah I do. I can’t tell you exactly where. I’m sure trade publications will be around. I think the demise of daily newspapers is vastly overrated, largely because our reporters have not done a good job at looking at the story themselves. If you look at the circulation numbers, you find out much of the decline of circulation is because newspapers themselves have decided to drop substantial amounts of circulation that were not popular to deliver. Case in point, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution decided to stop serving people in western North Carolina. A hundred thousand subscribers just gone with that decision.
Newswire: But it’s a painful decision.
Whitaker: Only if you’re not interested in making money. I worked for Nelson Poynter. I was in his little training academy program down there [in St Petersburg, Fla.]. One of the things that his circulation director pointed out to us was that our circulation territory is three miles to the east and three miles to the west of US 19. That’s it.
Newswire: In a sense, trade journals are about hyper-local coverage even though an industry may be national.
Whitaker: It’s all about the community you’re serving. I was a carrier for The Indianapolis News and delivered the Blue Streak, which was their stock market final edition that came out at 4:30 in the afternoon and you had to get delivered by 6. You had this huge circulation territory, a doctor or two on every block. You’ve got to know who your readership is, what their community is, what their interests are and then you go forward from there.
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