Pittsburgh's Fortune 500 Companies are Movin' on Up!

Welcome to the first post of Good News Pittsburgh!

The new 2007 Fortune 500 list was released on Sunday (read the end of the post to see why I waited two days to write about it). And it is generally good news for Pittsburgh area companies.

As noted in the Pittsburgh Trib article above, Pittsburgh's corporate status improved from having six Fortune 500 companies headquartered here to having seven, albeit temporarily. The increase from six to seven came from Allegheny Technologies which rose from #536 to #455. However, the list also includes Mellon, which recently announced a merger with Bank of New York that will move the company's official headquarters to NYC. That means that next year, after the deal goes through, we will be back down to six again.

But the good news--which is never reported by the mainstream Pittsburgh media-- is that we will be back up to eight in approximately two years courtesy of the meteoric rise of American Eagle Outfitters (now up to #683) and Dick's Sporting Goods (now up to #633). In total, we have 12 Fortune 1000 companies headquartered in Western Pennsylvania, not to mention Alcoa and Mellon, which only on paper are headquartered in New York.

Add to that the North American headquarters for Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline and FedEx Ground and we're doing just fine, thank you. And, oh, did I mention that we have two more companies headquartered here, Giant Eagle and Highmark, that would both be ranked in the Fortune 500 (around #350) if they were public instead of private? I'm not even going to go into the other local companies that don't even make it into these conversations: 84 Lumber, GNC, Mylan Labs, DQE, etc.

The point is- we're doing OK. Really. It's not all gloom and doom. But you wouldn't know that from the facts that are conveniently omitted by the major newspapers in the area. And that brings me to the reason why I waited until Tuesday to comment on this, even though the list actually came out Sunday. I did it to illustrate my point about how incompetent theses local media entities are. Two days after the fact, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Business Times still have absolutely NO MENTION of the new Fortune 500 rankings in print or online. And the Trib FINALLY has something this morning.

Predictably, the P-G and the Business Times will both copy off of the Trib now that they've seen the article and are aware of it. Way to be on top of it, guys! And that's how it works in the Pittsburgh media: lazy reporting. Just wait for the press release to come out and then print it word for word. God forbid someone actually do some research for an article or write something original. Or commit the biggest faux pas possible--gasp!--do a story on something positive in the region!

Believe it or not, there ARE positive things going on here, and people DO want to hear about them. That's why I created this blog. This is what you'll get- positive stories that go unreported or under-reported in the pathetic local media.

Until next time! Hey, that was pretty good for a first post, huh?