bryanpalmernovogen.com

By AMY PALANJIAN

Gigi Lee Chang was on a trip to California in 2004 when she had a realization that would quickly alter her career path.

Her young son wouldn’t eat jarred baby food and it was nearly impossible for her to make him meals from scratch during especially busy times or while traveling to visit her family. Ms. Lee Chang, who was then a vice president of strategic planning for Euro RSCG and on the fast track, quickly learned that many of her friends with babies were having a similar problem. Her years of experience in market research and planning for other companies kicked in and she decided to start a business to fill what she saw as a gap in the baby-food market: There was no convenient frozen organic baby food available to busy parents in the U.S.

Finance Background

It was a different animal than her previous work. But, Ms. Lee Chang grew up in an entrepreneurial household in Orange County, Calif., so her launching Plum Organics didn’t surprise her family. Her father ran an import-export business with manufacturing facilities in Hong Kong, and from an early age Ms. Lee Chang was involved in the family business. “I started checking my parents’ business letters for grammatical errors when I was about 10 years old,” she says.

After earning an undergraduate degree in finance from the University of Southern California, Ms. Lee Chang joined her family’s company as a liaison between the Hong Kong and China offices and clients in the U.S. Later, she attended graduate school at the London School of Business and went on to work for Oracle Corp.’s consulting group in the U.K. and at two boutique consulting firms: Tessera, where she was exposed to branding and marketing, and Euro RSCG, where she was working when the idea for what would become Plum Organics hit her.

Ms. Lee Chang’s initial research into the organic frozen baby-food market showed that the category was already established in the U.K., Australia and Canada, but not in the U.S. With the financial security and stability of her husband’s full-time job, Ms. Lee Chang, now 41, left Euro RSCG in 2005 to make her foray into the frozen baby-food business. “From past work experience, I knew I could make Plum Organics a success because I had a good comprehension of most facets of a business,” she explains.

Doing Research

Still, Ms. Lee Chang didn’t have any experience in the food industry, the natural or organic sector, or even in starting a business. She began with research, including a class at New York’s New School called “How to Start a Specialty Food Business.” She also scoped out other products targeting her intended audience, including Healthy Handfuls, an organic kids’ snack-food line that specializes in cookies and crackers. “I realized that they were a noncompetitive business with similar positioning, so I called them for advice,” she says.

Ms. Lee Chang was referred to a consultant who specializes in organic and natural-food start-ups, and a few months later, she teamed up with a research and development firm that helped her with recipe testing and branding. She also worked with a team who helped her turn the sentiments and attitudes that she wanted her products to stand for into the design of her packaging. All told, launching the company cost nearly $1 million, financed mostly through her personal savings.

Trade-Show Launch

Within a few months, Ms. Lee Chang launched Plum Organics at Natural Products Expo West, a large trade show for the natural and organic food industry. By the time she left, Whole Foods and Wild Oats stores in almost every U.S. region had committed to carry her products.

“Plum Organics was one of the first frozen baby-food lines, but what really caught my eye was the packaging,” says Perry Abbenate, global grocery coordinator of Whole Foods Market, who also liked the organic nature and simplicity of the foods.

Ms. Lee Chang’s company is positioned at the center of a booming organic baby-food market, which grew by nearly 22% in 2007, according to market-research company Mintel. But she isn’t stopping there. “I built the business to be able to extend into other product categories, like we’re doing with our new toddler-friendly kids’ line,” Ms. Lee Chang says.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page B15

By JUSTIN LAHART

Getty Images

Veterans and family members wait on line to attend a job fair Nov. 23, 2009, in New York City.

Even when the U.S. labor market finally starts adding more workers than it loses, many of the unemployed will find that the types of jobs they once had simply don’t exist anymore.

The downturn that started in December 2007 delivered a body blow to U.S. workers. In two years, the economy shed 7.2 million jobs, pushing the jobless rate from 5% to 10%, according to the Labor Department. The severity of the recession is reshaping the labor market. Some lost jobs will come back. But some are gone forever, going the way of typewriter repairmen and streetcar operators.

Many of the jobs created by the booms in the housing and credit markets, for example, have likely been permanently erased by the subsequent bust.

“The tremendous amount of economic activity associated with housing, I can’t see that coming back,” says Harvard University economist Lawrence Katz. “That was a very unhealthy part of the economy.”

Reshaping the Job Market

Read more profiles of workers in different industries.

Tim Winter

Tim Winters, Aspen, Colo. Age 39

Hotel Director Forced to Give Up Own Home

After getting laid off in March from his job as operations director at a small hotel, Tim Winters could no longer afford his $1,200 a month apartment. He has been living at family members’ homes, an ironic twist for someone who often used to stay for free at hotels when he traveled. “It takes a lot of understanding and time to get used to living with other people again,” says Mr. Winters, who started his career in hospitality in 1996. Mr. Winters says he has applied for approximately 170 hotel-management positions and has had 14 interviews, but no job offers yet.

Daryl Jones

Daryl Jones, Tulsa, Okla. Age 45

Economy Chips Away at Cabinet Maker’s Business

Daryl Jones misses the smiles that would appear on clients’ faces after receiving the one-of-a-kind cabinets, bedroom sets and other wood furniture he built by hand while running his home-based business. But sales plummeted in recent years, prompting the third-generation craftsman to take a job building cabinets for corporate jets to make ends meet. Still, Mr. Jones is optimistic that one day he will return to his custom woodworking full time. “Once the economy bounces back and people feel comfortable again spending money, then things will start picking back up.”

Jeff Walker

Jeff Walker Brighton, Mich. Age 53

Auto Industry Executive Goes Back to School

Jeff Walker, a former auto industry executive, doesn’t mind being among the oldest students at Eastern Michigan University. “I’m happier than just being unemployed and looking for a job,” he says. In April, Mr. Walker lost his job as a vice president of operations at a small auto equipment supplier in Brighton, Mich., where he had worked for 22 years. Mr. Walker is studying technology management in pursuit of the college degree he started but never finished after high school. Now, he says, he just wants to “get out of manufacturing.”

Duane Dittbrenner

Duane Dittbrenner, Cleburne, Texas Age 50

Veteran Trucker Worries About Paying the Bills

Duane Dittbrenner was laid off last month from his job at Arrow Trucking Co. He has been struggling to find another trucking job in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. “Where I live, most of it is hazmat and tankers,” says Mr. Dittbrenner, who has hauled big rigs for the past 20 years throughout the U.S. Mr. Dittbrenner says he is worried he won’t be able to pay next month’s bills if a new job doesn’t come along. “It’s just getting out there and pounding the pavement,” he says. “I’ll have one soon. All you can do is be optimistic.”

Michael Benabib

Debra Allicock, Brooklyn, N.Y. Age 42

Growing Demand, but Low Pay, for Home Health

Debra Allicock migrated to New York from Guyana in 2000 and took a job as a home-health aide, helping the elderly with errands, meals and light housekeeping. She says the relationships she gains are what motivates her to work 12-hour days despite low pay and no medical insurance. “You get to get very close and attached with them,” she says of her clients. Ms. Allicock says her services are in high demand. “Why go to a nursing home when you can stay in your home surrounded by everything you love?” she says. “Maybe one day someone is going to return that favor for me.”

Richard Hawthorne

Richard Hawthorne, Laguna Beach, Calif. Age 58

Real Estate Executive Tries a New Path

Richard Hawthorne has been out of work since June 2007, when he was laid off from a small commercial real estate investment firm where he was director of development. “In past downturns I’ve done well, but this downturn has me stumped,” he says. Mr. Hawthorne enjoyed his more than 30 years in commercial real estate. “There was something new and totally unpredictable each and every day to solve,” he says. But now, tired of being told he is overqualified for jobs in his field, he is launching a business advising financial institutions on how to eliminate investment property debt.

– Interviews by Sarah E. Needleman

Unhealthy but a boon for men without a college education. One in three jobs, or six million total, have been lost in the manufacturing sector since 1997, the last year the sector posted job gains. The upsurge in construction jobs accompanying the housing boom provided these workers in manufacturing with an opportunity to earn decent wages.

Now that door, too, has shut. With 1.6 million jobs lost over the last two years, the construction sector has accounted for more than a fifth of the jobs lost since the recession began.

For more highly educated workers, finance may no longer offer as many high-paying jobs as it has in the past. Thomas Philippon, an economist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, estimates that the financial sector’s share of the economy was nearly 20% larger than it should have been. Since the start of the recession, the financial sector has lost 548,000 jobs, or 6.6% of its work force. Mr. Philippon’s estimate suggests there will be further pressure on financial jobs.

In other areas of the labor market, the recession accelerated job losses that were probably coming anyway. In November, there were 36% fewer people working in record shops than two years earlier, according to the Labor Department. There were 23% fewer people working at directory and mailing list publishers, and 46% fewer at photofinishing establishments. Those are jobs that, with the advent of mp3 recordings, Google and digital photography, were likely disappearing anyway.

But as the recession hurt already ailing businesses, workers were forced into a sudden adjustment rather than the gradual one they would have otherwise faced. The recession also provided companies with an opportunity to cut jobs no longer as critical as they once were. That may be particularly true of the secretaries and mailroom clerks that advances in information technology have made less necessary. The ranks of people doing office and administrative work have fallen 10.1% since the recession began.

“Those are the production jobs of the information age, and they’re being to a substantial extent automated,” says Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor.

The permanent loss of many jobs may keep the labor market from fully recovering for a long time to come.

Prior to the 1990s, jobs rebounded quickly once recessions ended. Payrolls fell by nearly three million in the deep downturn that extended from July 1981 to November 1982. But by the start of 1983, the economy was creating jobs again, and by the end of 1983, the U.S. job count had exceeded its old peak.

That was because more of the job losses were essentially temporary, with manufacturers and the like letting workers go with the implicit expectation that they would be hiring them back once the worst was over.

But since the early 1990s, jobs have been slower to recover from recession. After the 2001 downturn ended, job losses continued for nearly two years. It wasn’t until 2005 that the job count returned to its prerecession high.

Productivity-enhancing technology and competition from low-wage countries like China made more job losses permanent. And it took time for new jobs to be created and for workers to acquire the skills needed to do them. In the wake of a far deeper recession, creating new jobs and retraining workers to do them could take even longer.

It is anyone’s guess what those jobs will be. The Labor Department has done little more than extrapolate from recent trends. It expects growth in areas like health care, which has been one of the few bright spots. Given the exigencies of an aging population, that seems a fair bet.

One could also make the case that the U.S. is shifting from a consumer nation to a nation of producers, and that will lead to a resurgence in technology and high-tech manufacturing jobs.

But Harvard’s Mr. Katz warns that past experience suggests such conjecture is likely fruitless. “One thing we’ve learned is that when we attempt to forecast jobs 10 or 15 years out, we don’t even get the categories right,” he says.

Write to Justin Lahart at justin.lahart@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A15

By RACHEL BACHMAN

Getty Images

This year’s Rose Bowl Game between Oregon and Wisconsin.

WSJ sports reporter Rachel Bachman checks in on Mean Street and wants to see the tradition of college football’s Rose Bowl saved. She’d like to see the Pac-12 Big Ten secede from the BCS to make that happen. Photo: AP.

Within weeks, the conference commissioners and university presidents who run the Bowl Championship Series are expected to adopt a four-team playoff, the first in the history of major-college football.

Most people see this as progress, a step that the masses—and TV executives ravenous for live-sports content—have been clamoring for with escalating volume.

Years of drama swirling around the sport have been a prelude to this moment. All of the scathing critiques of the bowl system by fans and media, all of the schools ditching their traditional conferences to better position themselves for the football postseason, all of the TV networks bidding billions to secure conference broadcast rights for years to come. It’s all leading up to a playoff.

But when it comes time for the BCS’s committee of university presidents to render a decision on this playoff proposal, the two oldest and most intertwined major conferences of all, the Big Ten and the Pac-12, ought to do something unexpected. They should do the only thing that makes sense for them in this mixed-up, money-soaked, logic-challenged situation.

They need to say no.

The schools of the Big Ten and Pac-12, whose shared history dates to the early 20th century, need to push away from this diabolical poker table, hail a pedicab for two, make their way to the airport and book a flight to Pasadena, Calif. They need to renew their vows and pledge themselves to serve the greater glory of the best thing about college football: the Rose Bowl.

For better or worse, in sickness and health, these two conferences should go back to living as they have for decades. They would play their conference games, determine their champions, who would then meet in the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1 (where the Big Ten representative would be ritually humiliated, but that is another story). The Granddaddy of Them All would remain what it is now: one of the greatest spectacles in sports.

The rest of college football—from the Southeastern Conference, which wins the national title every year anyhow, to the Boise States and TCUs and other arrivistes who have demanded respect—could have their own playoff. The Big Ten and Pac-12, which have huge followings, would force the networks to decide what’s most valuable about college football.

Do they want to plunge into a playoff or bask in the glow of tradition? Or is there room for both?

This is a radical proposal, yes—albeit not as radical as author Buzz Bissinger’s recent proposal in The Wall Street Journal to ban college football entirely. Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany declined to comment on whether he would consider this option. Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott said such a move would be “a great thing for the Rose Bowl, and a lot of the schools in the Pac-12 and Big Ten would not be disappointed.” But he stopped short of endorsing the idea. Overall, Scott said, a playoff would be “a positive step for college football.”

The enthusiasm for a playoff is understandable. This is America. We like underdogs and upsets and second chances. There is also money to be made: an amount that Delany once said would “dwarf” what schools make from bowls. Support for a playoff extends from Washington State football coach Mike Leach to President Barack Obama.

University presidents, once seen as the strongest forces for limiting athletic expansion, are now promoting it. As state funding for higher education has plummeted, presidents have become their schools’ head cheerleaders. They have learned that nothing raises a school’s profile, attracts out-of-state students and rallies alumni like a winning football team. A playoff might enable more schools to take turns on the biggest stage.

Proponents say a four-team playoff is the perfect size. They argue it would barely disturb the sport’s existing structure, probably adding just one game for two teams at season’s end.

What they don’t mention is that a playoff would diminish the value of the Rose Bowl, which has long been college football’s most prized asset. Since it was launched in 1902 to promote tourism, the game has enjoyed a golden history. It was the first college-football game aired on national TV in 1952 and, 10 years later, the first broadcast in color. It consistently draws more than 90,000 fans to the cream-colored stadium nestled against the brick-red San Gabriel Mountains.

Since 1947, when what are now the Big Ten and Pac-12 began playing each other there annually, it has hosted classic matchups: the winged helmets of Michigan against golden-armed Southern California; UCLA’s sun-and-sky uniforms against Ohio State’s icy helmets; Oregon’s speed and innovation against Wisconsin’s massive linemen.

“It’s not only the Rose Bowl,” Delany said during BCS meetings last month, “it’s the Midwest, it’s the West Coast. It’s one of the top 10 single-day television properties in the world, and it performs.”

It is true that in the BCS system, in place since the 1998 season, the Rose Bowl’s tradition has eroded somewhat, since the Big Ten and Pac-12 champions don’t always play there. But the game would be further harmed by inevitable playoff expansion.

The playoff in the second-tier Football Championship Subdivision started in 1978 with four teams. It now has 20. The popular NCAA men’s basketball tournament started in 1939 with eight teams. Today: 68. About 20% of basketball teams and 16% of lower-division football teams make the championship tournament. In a four-team major-college football playoff, just 3% would. Such scarce opportunity wouldn’t stand.

A growing playoff would detract from college football’s regular season. With 12 games per team, the sport is unique in that every game is perilous. It is one of the main reasons people watch. The more playoff games there are, the less the season matters. The sport’s leaders have alluded to this danger, repeatedly stressing the importance of preserving the regular season. As former Oregon president Richard Lariviere said of a playoff, “I’m dubious about the advantages.”

It is possible that BCS leaders will find a playoff structure that preserves the Rose Bowl. They might decide that the money would outweigh the compromises. But it is worth asking what else the conferences involved stand to gain.

The Big Ten has some of the nation’s most massive stadiums and largest alumni bases. The Pac-12 has won more national titles across all sports than any other conference. Both have TV-rights deals worth about $250 million annually.

Beyond sports, both have a majority of members in the prestigious 61-member Association of American Universities. No other major athletic conference can say that.

History, if not common sense, suggests that this is the point of no return. A playoff, once installed and sold to TV, will never be repealed. That is what makes the Big Ten’s and Pac-12′s actions in the coming weeks so critical: They’re the only ones with the power and the wherewithal to hit the brakes.

In recent weeks, outsiders have all but dared the Big Ten and Pac-12 to strike out on their own. Georgia president Michael Adams has rejected the notion of special considerations to preserve the two conferences’ ties to the Rose Bowl. Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds said they need to stop blocking a playoff.

Adams and Dodds might be bluffing, but they’re right. The Big Ten and Pac-12 should pack up, move on and stick with the game that helped make them great.

Write to Rachel Bachman at rachel.bachman@wsj.com

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

Katonah, NY

Over the past 10 years photography by Chinese artists has received more flattering attention by U.S. museums than perhaps at any time in our history. After a blackout of more than a quarter-century, during which any cultural product under Mao Zedong’s reign was viewed—when viewed at all—as base propaganda, curators have hastened to atone for our ignorance and feed our hunger for information.

“Rising Dragon: Contemporary Chinese Photography,” at the Katonah Museum of Art, is only the most recent survey of that country’s artistic trends, following “Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China,” a traveling show organized in 2004 by the International Center for Photography and the Asia Society; “Whispering Wind: Recent Chinese Photography,” at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville in 2007; and “Photography from the New China,” at the Getty Center in 2010.

It would be encouraging to report that photographers there, having withstood or been born after the terrors of the Cultural Revolution, have responded to a less fearful political environment with dazzling work that either radically departs from or enriches their own traditions for a world-wide audience. That has yet to happen, however. To judge by the samples here and elsewhere, too many young artists of ambition have, with some notable exceptions, adopted the camera and digital technology to produce new forms of propaganda. However coyly subversive, much of it seems aimed both at foreign curiosity seekers and at a native moneyed class with an appetite for slick advertising and pop mockery. A regrettably high number of photographs made in China over the past decade are worthier of study as sociology than as art.

Miles Barth, guest curator of “Rising Dragon,” has selected many artists previously exhibited in the U.S. In two spacious rooms he has grouped the almost 75 works by 34 figures into four categories: “Performance and Photography,” “Narratives and Constructed Images,” “Landscapes and Cityscapes,” and “Photojournalism and Documentary Photography.”

The show opens with several pieces from the early 1990s made by a group of avant-garde performance artists who lived in an area of eastern Beijing they renamed the East Village. Zhang Huan and Rong Rong, both here, are perhaps the most celebrated of this short-lived community, quickly disbanded by the police.

Admirably brave though it was to do performance and installation art in the face of government oppression, the work that emerged from this movement was highly uneven. Typical of its cheeky spirit is Wang Jin’s deadpan “To Marry a Mule,” a 1995 self-portrait done in protest against the bureaucratic refusal to allow him to join his wife in the U.S.

The booming economy of the past decade has created its own expansive social desires, including a market for Chinese art among the Chinese themselves. In Weng Fen’s “Wish for a White Collar Life,” from his 2002 series “Family Aspirations,” he dramatized these pressures by photographing himself, his wife and their one child in various costumes denoting economic status. The elaborately staged tableaus by Liyu + Liubo, seen here in six examples, target this class of well-off Chinese office workers and consumers, some of whom have cash to burn on contemporary art.

Most of these photographs, though, are simple illustrations in pop colors that end up exemplifying the taste for vulgar riches they are supposedly satirizing: The assumption by art photographers in the U.S., Europe and Japan—that one should strive to make pictures full of barely contained energies, testing the limits of the medium itself, either in formal or philosophic terms—does not seem to have firmly taken hold yet.

Chinese documentary photography is more sophisticated. Liu Zheng, who left the East Village and began to record as many types of people as he could on a seven-year journey around the country, has 12 prints here, taken from his 2004 book “The Chinese.” A traditionalist, influenced by August Sander and Diane Arbus, he uses a medium-format camera and shoots in black-and-white.

Nonetheless, there is a stilted sameness to his portraits. Just as the foremost new buildings in China still originate from foreign-born architects, the landscape and documentary photographs done in China over the past 20 years by Lois Conner (an American) and Greg Girard (a Canadian) are more assured than anything in this show.

Two photographers who deserve watching are Li Lang and Adou. Both have portrayed the Yi people in the mountainous regions of southern China. Mr. Li achieves a harsh and unstaged realism using makeshift studios, while Adou travels with his subjects, documenting a world impoverished but mysteriously ancient. (It’s a shame his prints here are so big; the romantic intimacy of his ethnographic vision is enhanced at a smaller scale.)

As Mr. Barth points out, photojournalism is still a risky profession in China. The examples here—from Yang Yi’s series “Uprooted,” about his home village, now submerged by the Three Gorges Dam; and Lu Guang’s spot photographs of an oil pipeline explosion, part of his crusading project on pollution—certainly walk the scary knife-edge of acceptable protest, even though they lack artistic power as photographs.

It’s not clear if Western audiences are seeing only what Chinese dealers and artists (and Party officials) think we want to buy, or whether there are photographers producing more idiosyncratic, less flashy work only to be deemed not suitable for export.

Photography as an art is, of course, a relative novelty in the new China and is bound to mature. At the same time it’s hard not to be disheartened that so much art coming out of China falls short of what it might be. The years before and since the collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed a wave of art from many artists, including the photographers Boris Mikhailov and Nikolay Bakharev, that used savage realism to question the price of freedom in the new Russia. A colonized land and an oppressed people suddenly becoming a world power could not offer richer opportunities for photographers able to capture the ordinary, slow changes as well as the enormous ones.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

A version of this article appeared May 1, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Paucity of Inspiration.