Business columnist Jon Talton looks out of place in the Arizona Republic newsroom. A bit professorial for a daily newspaper.
Nor did he first strike me as an incendiary, a writer who could stir up controversy. He doesn’t have that ascetic look, the piercing stare.
Then I started reading his columns.
“My job is to provide opinion, and you won’t find me shy,” he promised last October, when he returned to Phoenix, where he grew up.
He hasn’t disappointed, at least not those who agree with him. For Talton, Arizona faces serious issues about its growth, leadership and economic future.
And he’s demanding from business the same leadership and accountability that business has longed for from public institutions.
“You are starting to live rather dangerously,” Seymour Salt, a Scottsdale reader, warned him recently. “Developers are going to consider pulling their advertising to shut you up.”
No, Talton is not your chamber-of-commerce business columnist.
Instead, Talton offers a critical view, with the experience of watching economies in other urban areas such as San Diego; Dayton, Ohio; Cincinnati; Denver; and Charlotte, N.C.
And he’s blunt.
“Our (economic) model is an outgrowth of the Old West. We use up the land and move on.”
“For a place that sold its soul to the real-estate industry, we didn’t exactly drive a hard bargain.”
On the conservative, market-oriented Goldwater Institute: “As far as I can tell, this think tank is dedicated to keeping Arizona backward.”
But he’s no liberal.
“If we really hated high gasoline prices, we’d stop buying.”
Talton’s columns offer readers something increasingly uncommon among journalists — ideas.
He handles ideas the way Jason Kidd handles a basketball. Comfortably. With a purpose. He mentions Karl Marx and Theodore Dreiser in the same paragraph. And he makes a cogent point.
“Isn’t that what he’s supposed to do?” asked former Phoenix Mayor Terry Goddard. “He has his finger on these growth issues that I wish your news and editorial sections would pick up.”
His strong opinions stir angry reactions. From readers. From some business leaders.
“Let me know when he gets over his civic inferiority complex,” wrote Scott Barvian, of Mesa, angered by Talton’s periodic swoons over mass transit.
Real-estate developer Kurt Waltz resents the column’s “sweeping generalities” about his industry.
“This town, and your newspaper, have prospered and flourished as a result of the residential building in this Valley,” Waltz reminded me recently. “I just wish Jon, a thoughtful guy, would spend more time getting to understand the other side.”
Both Waltz and Rick Weddle, president and CEO of GPEC, the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, concede Talton has already achieved his journalistic mission — getting people to think.
That’s not too strenuous for Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.
