Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 69

DETROIT FREE PRESS FRIDAY, AUG. 31, 1984 10A I WORLD'S LARGEST MARINE INSURER When sea disaster hits, the press and others go to Lloyd's The firm grew out of a group of wealthy individuals who insured ships and cargo in the 1680s. extraordinary information network covering about 1,800 ports. The network includes Lloyd's affiliated agents, between 1,000 and 1,500 of them, who can handle the firm's policies and boast its nameplate; government coast guards, including America's; ship's brokers; harbor masters, and rescue centers. Then there's what Lowes mysteriously calls "my contacts," some of whom are paid for telling what they know.

After all, they sometimes must pay in order to know it. Much of what Lloyd's learns finds its way into what some consider the oldest regularly published newspaper in the English-speaking world: the 250-year-old, Lloyd's List, published six days a week. By STEVEN ERLANGER Boston Globe LONDON Wherever and whenever a marine disaster occurs, the Intelligence Department of Lloyd's of London is often the first to know, and the first to reveal it to the world. In the 1700s, Lloyd's often was the first to inform the British Admiralty that it had won a naval battle; when the ongoing Iran-Iraq war escalated to missile attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf, Lloyd's knew first, and it was to Lloyd's that the world's press, and many of its governments, came for information. Open 24 hours a day, every day, Lloyd's Intelligence Department in Colchester, 50 miles northeast of Lloyd's headquarters here, is staffed by about 350 people.

Six of them are directly concerned with disasters, said Roger Lowes, Lloyd's casualty reporting off jeer. But his department is primarily concerned with gathering, purveying and purchasing more mundane intelligence. THE DATA affect insurance premiums, day-to-day profit and loss and the movement of particular ships from port to port. As casualty reporting officer, Lowes says with pride, he is the biggest user of the telex at Lloyd's, having sent out 30,000 messages last year and having received "possibly 50,000." His job is critical to the working of Lloyd's of London, which remains the largest marine insurance market in the world, handling about 40 percent of all the world's cargoes and ships. Though marine insurance was Lloyd's raispn d'etre and the source of its fame, non-marine insurance and reinsurance has been for some time the biggest part of its yearly premium income of about $4 billion.

THE FIRM grew out of a group of wealthy individuals who insured ships and cargo and met in the 1680s at the popular coffeehouse and auction room of a journeyman named Edward Lloyd. Lloyd arranged with the nearby post office to get shipping news quicker and cheaper than anyone else, which was then read aloud by one waiter known oddly as the "Kidney." In 1771, 79 merchants, underwriters and brokers set themselves up as a self-governing institution that kept the name of Lloyd's. To this day, staff members are known as "waiters." Lloyd's gathers its intelligence through an Cleveland is looking for lo vein a slog an I that I was right on the decisions I made, but you can assume a zealotry that causes you to go past the mark." Now that he represents a working-class ward on a council dominated by his old foes, Kucinich said he was trying to "let go of the concept of enemies." spend most days now talking on the telephone about getting chuck-holes filled, streetlights fixed, catch basins cleaned out, weeds cut, vacant homes inspected," he said. i By JAMES BARRON New York Times What's going on in Cleveland these days? Well, first there's the matter of which is the best phrase to describe this city of rusty blast furnaces and abandoned railroad lines: "Cleveland's a plum" or "Cleveland love it or leave With buttons, bumper stickers and T-shirts, a coalition of advertising executives recently began promoting the love-it-or-leave-it slogan. They were unhappy with the plum phrase, which had been the city's unofficial motto for more than a year.

Victor Zalupo, who heads the coalition, maintains that "Cleveland's a plum" was "a poor imitation of New York and its Big Apple image." "The trouble is," he said, "everyone knows plums are much less interesting than apples." Zalupo said he did not see political connotations in his substitute slogan and was surprised when some Cleve-landers linked it to "America love it or leave it," which was popular among conservatives during the Vietnam war. "We all agree we're no longer fair game for anybody to pick on," he continued. "But all the other campaigns were designed to entice out-of-state people to come here, and those slogans weren't believable. Those of us who know you can't get a pair of socks after six in downtown Cleveland know we're not perfect." Kucinu councilman now He was young and combative when he was mayor in the late 1970s. He dismissed the police chief and battled the banks, which he still says were responsible for Cleveland's $14 million plunge into municipal default.

These days, Dennis Kucinich answers his own telephone and quotes Huey Long and Ralph Waldo Emerson. "As mayor I had a scorch-the-earth mentality: Anybody who got in the way, I'd run over," said Kucinich, a Democrat who was recalled by voters in 1979 but won a seat on the City Council last year. "Time has shown Free Press Photo RICHARD LEE Endeering moment Tim MacGillis. 10 (left), and Paul Hadad, 9, both of Grosse Pointe Park, make friends with a Formosan deer at the Detroit Zoo recently. We hate to brag about our prices CHERRY PRICES YOU WON'T BELIEVE! but we feel this is one of the finest values Adam's has ever offered.

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I bll of 914 M.I.. DMroil 77M740 HOURS tu. 10-9; Tuai 10-6 cydthelich nursenym has used several of her articles for its daily front-page column of features and analysis. "If I can pull it off, it's a dream beat" she said. "I can call my own shots, and I'm not tied to the breaking news.

I'm not a political junkie, but I'm good at learning and talking to people." BENFELL, 43, never had been to Washington even as a tourist before she arrived here in May. Her basic approach to learning the city, she said, "is not to pretend that I know anything." "I ask people to explain the wheel to me, and when they're finished I ask them to explain it again," she said. The message she conveys silently, she said, is that "you can take advantage of me now, but six months from now I'll realize it and remember." She said she was surprised at how different life in Washington was from life in the San Francisco area. "A lot of Californians here feel that they're doing time in a penal colony," she said, noting that she found Washington more rigid in its social arrangements than California, less open to change and more respectful of tradition for the sake of tradition. "Washington is a magnet for young, ambitious, very charming stuffed shirts who have a real high opinion of themselves," she said.

"It's hard for me to take that seriously .1 don't have much of a sense of awe." a daunting prospect, Benfell has plenty of company. Washington journalism is more often than not a small-scale operation. Hudson's Washington News Media Directory, a book the size of a small city phone book that describes itself as a complete guide to "the largest concentration of journalists in the world," lists more than two dozen one-person bureaus and dozens of others with two or three reporters. Another indication of the scale here is membership in the congressional press gallery. Nearly every reporter and editor working in Washington for a daily newspaper is accredited to the gallery.

The 1,500 accredited journalists in the newspaper category represent 700 bureaus. MOST REPORTERS in small bureaus are here for the same reason as Benfell: not to try to duplicate the efforts of the major services iut to provide the special local perspective that readers at home would otherwise miss. For example, when the House of Representatives approved the immigration bill in June, the Tribune used a news service report as its main accompanied by Benfell's account of reaction by the California congressional delegation. For that delegation, particularly for the half-dozen members from the Oakland-San Francisco area, Benfell's arrival and the prospect of another communications link back home was welcome news. The five pieces of mmmd.

By, LINDA GREENHOUSE New York Times WASHINGTON If there is a glamorous side to life as a Washington correspondent, Carol Benfell has yet to discover it. A discount wig store flanks the entrance to her office building on a seedy downtown corner. Then there is the windowless office itself, rented sight unseen. It's down the hall from a broom closet to which she was mistakenly directed when she arrived from California three months ago to set up a Washington bureau for the Oakland Tribune. But the bureau is open, with its rented furniture and its Monet poster on the wall.

Benfell made the office functional for something less than her $2,000 budget. She bought a tape recorder with the surplus. The Tribune, a 110-year-old newspaper that was bought last year from the Gannett chain by its editor and publisher, Robert Maynard, never before had a bureau outside California, let alone a correspondent in Washington. Like most papers its size with an editorial staff of 150 and circulation iif 150,000 it relies on the major news services for daily coverage of distant events. BUT LIKE an increasing number of editors around the country, the Tribune's editors found that reliance less less satisfactory for Washington news.

"So much of the news flows east lo west," Mark Paul, the Tribune's national editor, said in an interview. "The agenda is set by East Coast -ditors who don't always think West Coast issues are very important." So the Washington bureau was born and Benfell, who was covering federal courts and agencies in the paper's San Francisco bureau, was chosen to be the pioneer. Though covering Washington as a one-person bureau would appear to be expires 9 4. "'pH i-aii ip Tnrr PLANTING AM' TIME. SEE New York Times rnoio Carol Benfell: "If I can pull it off.

it's a dream beat." first-class mail she received one recent morning included four press releases from Pete Wilson, California's junior senator. In her first months on the job, Benfell has written about subjects ranging from California water and wilderness issues to the legal status of the former Oakland Raiders (now playing football in Los Angeles) to the political future of Sen. Alan Cranston after the demise of his Democratic presidential campaign. The Tribune 6r v-. OUR GREAT -Lzrr TREES SALE PRICED! custom potted SHADE TREES compare at $34.95....

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