We figured our 65th anniversary was a good time to celebrate the people who make this publication possible. You know what I look like, but now’s your chance to meet the other editors, the designers, sales and other staff who work tirelessly to keep Site Selection and its parent company, Conway Inc., the most authoritative and dynamic publishing concern in the economic development field. Conway President Adam Jones-Kelley’s overview of the last six-plus decades, and a look back at some past Site Selection covers — the winners and the really bad ones — will round out the nostalgia trip unique to this first issue of 2019.
You’ll find familiar January issue content, too — our regional workforce development rankings and annual State of the States section with recent legislative activity and the latest demographic and economic data available for each state, for example.
Oh, there’s coverage of HQ2 as well. Lots of it. But you would expect that from a magazine called Site Selection. And you’d expect the kind of reporting and analysis of it that only Site Selection delivers.
To be honest, the topic was getting old. It’s not unlike the wall-to-wall coverage of Y2K in the late 1990s, when the world’s computers were going to grind to a halt at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000. Remember? Y2K. HQ2. These codewords seem to require a “2.”
But rather than the end of HQ2 coverage, it’s really the beginning. The New York City and Crystal City/Northern Virginia areas are in for quite a ride in the months and years ahead. So is Nashville, the winner of a key operations center and beneficiary of 5,000 new jobs in the coming years. That’s covered extensively in this issue, too.
Instead of endless speculation about which of the 20 finalist metros would get the nod, which metros suddenly found bajillions of public dollars with which to craft incentive proposals and the merits or motives behind so public a city search, now there’s new material to plumb: How will the already-very-built-up Crystal and Long Island Cities — and their transit systems — accommodate the tens of thousands of new workers coming to town, for example? Ramifications of the split HQ2 decision are not even known yet. Positive or negative, we look forward to sorting them out in these pages so that future investors in projects large and small, and the areas hoping to host them, are wiser for it.
We plan to keep doing that for at least 65 more years.
