Groundbreaking blog.

Had another real estate event today, out in Rosemont, Illinois, a lilliputian suburb that thrives like truffles do, spouting in the muck at the foot of the mighty growth known as O'Hare International Airport. Hotels, restaurants, and other meeting facilities form the backbone of its tax base. Very few people (about 4,200) actually live there, or probably would want to.

This time, instead of moderating a panel, I was on a panel, consisting of me and two other members of the local real estate press -- one from another monthly, one from a weekly business tabloid. The luncheon was held by the Association of Industrial Real Estate Brokers. That group's acronym, AIREB, (pronounced "Arab") persistently inspires jokes and puzzled responses, so much so that the leadership is floating the idea of changing the group's name, though it's been called that for a number of decades.

The topic for discussion was Meet the Media, or Dealing with the Media, or something along those lines, and we got to talk about our magazines, the process of putting them together each month, what kind of information we like in press releases, and so forth. It went reasonably well. No one lobbed any spotty tomatoes or sulfurous eggs at us.

One subject that didn’t come up -- because I forgot to raise it -- was how we deal with groundbreaking photos. We get a lot of those, with a surprising number of pesky follow-up calls like this: "Excuse me, will you be using the groundbreaking picture we sent you of the new Three Initial Corp. headquarters building?"

Groundbreaking is a ritual in the real estate development business. At a certain point soon after that actual construction of a building begins (if it's a significant enough project), many of the people involved gather on site for a little ceremony that involves turning ceremonial earth with a ceremonial shovel; or turning several shovels at the same time, while everyone is wearing ceremonial hardhats.

Occasionally, such an event is on the evening news, if it's a widows 'n' orphans AIDS hospice or something else that major politicos want to be associated with. Usually, though, only members of the local real estate community know or care, or show up for the event.

Inevitably, someone takes pictures. And groundbreaking pictures photos look pretty much all the same, in an uninteresting way. Row of people, row of hardhats, row of shiny shovels. Sometimes so many people are jammed into the frame that each human head is about a big as a pinhead, and has about as much to distinguish it from the others.

There's another publication in the market that does run these pics, and in fact runs dozens of them in each issue, but not my magazine. My answer to "Will you be using the groundbreaking picture?" is no.