SELECTED OLDER CLIPS
FROM WALL STREET JOURNAL
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE. June 28, 2002.
Entrepreneurs Feel Let Down by Schroder --- Loss of Support of Small Business Owners Could Be Factor in September Re-Election Campaign
By William Boston
PEWSUM, Germany -- Albert de Boer spreads his arms widely as he displays the subtle inlay pattern on a sheet of wallpaper to a local village woman.
Slipping gently into the terse dialect of the Friesian lowlands near the North Sea, he offers his customer coffee and advice, addressing her by her first name. He provides the kind of personal service that is fading as quickly as shops run by local craftsmen are overrun by big home-improvement franchises.
A few years ago, Mr. de Boer saw his painting business threatened by "big money," as he calls the franchises. Fed up with Helmut Kohl's government, Mr. de Boer, who is now 54 years old, wrote a letter to the governor of his state, Gerhard Schroder. At the time, Mr. de Boer didn't belong to a political party. He later joined the Social Democrats. He said if Mr. Schroder would help the small businessman, he would help him get re-elected as governor of Lower Saxony and then to defeat Mr. Kohl in the upcoming national election.
"He didn't keep his word," says Mr. de Boer, lighting a cigarette as nearby church bells break the afternoon silence. "A funeral," he explains with a nod.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE. June 5, 2002.
NOTE: Take another look. A few weeks after this story appeared, floods in eastern Germany turned an embattled Gerhard Schroeder into a hero, swinging the election to his favor.
Schroder's Chances Appear in Trouble In German Vote
By William Boston
BERLIN -- Does Gerhard Schroder still have a chance?
With just over 100 days before Germany's parliamentary election on Sept. 22, the incumbent chancellor's Social Democrat party has fallen far behind the conservative opposition in public opinion polls. So far behind, in fact, that many election watchers see a realistic chance that Mr. Schroder could be a one-term chancellor.
In Germany, common wisdom is that if one of the major political parties has a lead of more than five percentage points at the time of parliament's summer recess in July, it is difficult for a rival to come back from behind and win in September. As Germany's electorate begins preparing to head for Europe's beaches, Mr. Schroder's SPD is trailing between five and six percentage points in the polls. The point of no return seems near.
There have been comebacks in the past. SPD officials are hoping to copy Helmut Kohl's surprise recovery in 1994. …
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. January 11, 2001. A1 LEDER.
Past vs. Present: A Woman's Journey From German Terrorist To Repentant Survivor --- She Once Worked to Destroy Her Nation; In Kosovo, She Helps Repair Another
By William Boston and Roger Thurow
PRIZREN, Kosovo -- Silke Maier-Witt is getting an early jump on a wintry morning, steering her Mitsubishi van around hairpin turns on her way to an isolated mountain settlement called Brezovice. She and another German social worker, Esther Kurz, are bringing sewing machines to a group of Serbian women desperate to stitch together a living.
"This is my chance for me to get my foot in the door of the Serbian community," Ms. Maier-Witt says as she drives past a United Nations checkpoint that keeps ethnic enemies apart. "They live like in a prison."
The serpentine roads of southern Europe have brought Ms. Maier-Witt full circle. She travels now as a psychologist, to relieve trauma and resolve conflict. But when she first traversed these roads, back in 1974, she was careening down a path that would lead her to inflict trauma and incite conflict. She was driving back from a vacation in Greece then, when she heard that Holger Meins, an imprisoned member of West Germany's Red Army Faction terrorist group, had died while on hunger strike.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. September 28, 2000. A1, A-Hed.
Gondolas in Leipzig? A German Problem And Quite a Ride --- A Touch of Venice Is Difficult To Sell to the Bureaucracy, But Promoter Is Undaunted
By William Boston
LEIPZIG ,Germany-- For some, the Weisse Elster is a muddy river in a dank canyon of decaying warehouses. But when Vito Signorello, a 46-year-old Sicilian immigrant with jet-black hair and a salesman's smile, looked out from his riverfront restaurant, he dreamed about Venice.
In March last year, he bought two used Venetian gondolas. Locals were thrilled at the prospect of bringing a touch of Veniceto this drab commercial city in the former East Germany. The Reudnitzer brewery brought the gondolas here over the Austrian Alps in one of its trucks. Leipzig's mayor had his picture taken with Mr. Signorello as the gondolas were lowered into the river.
But then a bureaucrat here started making waves, forcing Mr. Signorello into a yearlong odyssey that nearly swamped his dream. …
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. August 16, 2000.
NOTE: A skeptical voice in the gaga years. The sad thing is that the telco honchos are still asking themselves the same question.
High Prices For Licenses Create Risks. European Operators' Wireless-Auction Bids
Might Be Out of Line
By William Boston
Now that European telephone companies are betting astronomical sums on the wireless Internet, it is time to come back down to earth.
Mobile operators are prepared to pay billions for licenses to operate next-generation wireless networks because they believe services ranging from ordering theater tickets to downloading music over mobile phones will create new streams of revenues and profits. Mobile-phone operators believe they can be the gatekeepers of this new wireless Web marketplace.
As the price of buying a license for universal mobile telecommunications services, or UMTS, spirals higher, so does the danger that the wireless operators are being too optimistic. No one knows what services customers will pay for. It isn't clear that the companies can meet promises of getting the new networks up by 2002. And some analysts say it will be nearly a decade before the companies break even.
"With the licenses being auctioned off at these prices, you wonder how they're going to make profits," Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson President Kurt Hellstroem said in May, just after the United Kingdom stunned the industry when it raised GBP 22.5 billion ($33.9 billion) for five UMTS licenses. …
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. March 3, 2000. A1 LEDER.
NOTE - The making of the following story is an interesting tale in itself. I pitched a leder to the WSJ and my bureau chief came back to me around 5 pm the same day with good news and bad news. The good news: they wanted the story. The bad news: they wanted it for the next day’s paper. So, I set about to write a 2,000-word page one leder on deadline, harvesting all of what I knew about Deutsche Telekom, its management, its strategy and the challenges it faced. From satellites lost in space to the tragic death in the boardroom of an exhausted executive, there was material in this crash leder that had never been reported anywhere else.
Familiar Ring: Deutsche Telekom Is On the Prowl Again To Buy Global Heft --- After Several Fizzled Deals, Telephone Titan Needs A Qwest-Type Trophy --- Others on the Target List
By William Boston
BONN-- Just last week, Ron Sommer, chief executive of German phone titan Deutsche Telekom, faced Europe's technology elite in a darkened conference hall and asked bluntly: "Will we plow the global economy or will it plow us under?"
He was speaking about the challenges facing Europe as it struggles to deal with the groundswell dubbed the new economy, but he could just as easily have been referring to his own company. This is the year that Deutsche Telekom AG either becomes a contender in international telecommunications or risks getting shoved aside by global rivals.
With its home market, which still accounts for more than 90% of revenue, under attack by companies large and small, Deutsche Telekom has been trying to go global for years. But its minority stakes in Asian telecommunications firms were nearly wiped out by the Asian financial crisis. Its Global One alliance with Sprint Corp. and France Telecom SA, which aimed to provide telecommunications services to multinationals, produced nothing but losses and now belongs entirely to the French. And a bold bid to acquire Telecom Italia SpA flopped. Turning a state-owned monopoly, still 65%-owned by the German government, into a fleet-footed competitive enterprise is tough.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE. April 15, 1999.
(Story makes case that Vodafone could bid for Mannesmann long before it happened.)
Mannesmann Fears Growth Could Make It a Target --- Incoming CEO Esser Hopes That Doing Job Well Will Prevent Takeover
By William Boston
DUESSELDORF -- Mannesmann AG has found that after years of successful expansion it has itself become one of the most coveted takeover targets in the industry -- a scenario that concerns the incoming chief executive.
"Theoretically speaking, we are vulnerable," said Klaus Esser, who becomes chief executive on May 28. He added that there was little the company could do to fend off a takeover bid. "The only thing you can do is to do your job better. We think that many people are studying the situation."
Mannesmann's core asset is its Mannesmann Mobilfunk GmbH digital cellular-phone network. It forms the nucleus of a company that has expanded into fixed-wire telecommunications and Internet services to become the clear leader among the host of challengers to Deutsche Telekom AG, the former monpoly carrier in Europe's biggest phone market. Mannesmann has also wasted no time expanding abroad and is involved in key alliances in Italy, France and Austria.
.
