The Kansas City Star is now three weeks into its new rotating metro columnist system, and, while it’s far too soon to judge the success or failure of the initiative, it’s a good time to take a closer look at the concept.
Personally, I think it’s going to be difficult for any of the six new columnists (there are three carryovers, C.W. Gusewelle, Steve Kraske and Mary Sanchez) to gain traction with readers. That’s the whole idea of columnists, you know — to have them become trusted, if controversial, voices whose work becomes a destination point for readers.
Maybe this is an experiment designed to cull the reporting ranks for a new, marquee columnist or two, but this move strikes me as more of a money-saving mishmash, a cheap alternative to hiring or promoting at least one new, permanent columnist.
But I certainly don’t claim to have a perfectly clear perspective on this, so I sought the views this week of two top, former editors who have deep wells of experience in newsroom leadership and organization.
One is former KC Star executive editor Mike Waller, who went on to become publisher at The Baltimore Sun; the other is Mike Jenner, former editor at The Bakersfield Californian, who last year was named the Houston Harte Endowed Chair at the Missouri School of Journalism. At MU, Jenner focuses on innovation in journalism.
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Before we hear from them (and more from me), let’s back up and look at how all this evolved.
Setting the stage for the columnist shake-up, The Star lost two longtime columnists within three weeks. First, Steve Penn, an African-American who frequently wrote about African-Americans and developments in the black community, was fired in mid-July for plagiarism.
On Aug. 3, Mike Hendricks, a Lenexa resident who often donned his white, suburban columnist hat, announced that he was returning to full-time reporting.
The same day, next to Hendricks’ column, The Star ran a graphic laying out the new lineup. Here it is:
Gusewelle continues on Sunday, the only day there is a stand-alone Local section;
Sanchez runs on Monday and Thursday (as well as on the Op-Ed page on Tuesday);
James Hart (police blogger); Alan Bavley (medical writer); and Joe Robertson and Mara Rose Williams (education reporters) alternate on Wednesdays;
Christine Vendel (KCMO cops), Glenn Rice (who primarily covers the Northland) and Mark Morris (federal courts reporter) alternate on Friday;
Kraske (politics) moves from Sunday to Saturday.
Of those nine, Gusewelle, Kraske and Sanchez have the strongest name identity with readers. While the names of the six others, all reporters, will ring bells with many regular readers, they’re not well known.
In addition to their regular duties, those six reporters will write periodic columns — columns, that you can expect to be rooted in developments and stored knowledge from their respective “beats.”
For example, I don’t expect Christine Vendel, longtime KCMO cops reporter, to suddenly start writing about the Kansas City nightlife scene. Ideally, she’ll be giving the readers an inside look at investigations and operations at 12th and Locust.
Now it’s time for our experts to weigh in.
Mike Waller
Waller (in an e-mail):
“I have two thoughts: Having nine columnists is about four or five too many, if only because there aren’t that many good columnists on any paper!
“Writing a column is an art, and it takes a couple of years to get really good at doing it. My second thought is…rotating nine columnists means that none other than Gusewelle, who is already established, will be able to get much of a following. Readers need regularity and consistency. So do the columnists.
“This is simply a bad idea.”
Mike Jenner
Jenner (in a telephone interview):
“I’m intrigued by their approach. It is kind of unusual…Certainly some of them (the six reporters new to the mix) are going to generate a following and some are not.”
Jenner, who worked with Waller years ago at the Hartford Courant, said The Star’s strategy, as suggested earlier, might be to see if a few of the new columnists can “separate themselves and gain a following.” If so, The Star might reduce “the mix” and field one or more of them as marquee columnists.
Jenner added that one element that major metropolitan papers badly need these days — and which marquee columnists can provide — is personality.
“There’s not enough personality in newspapers,” he said. “In the old days the staff writers got to have their own brand, or cache, and I think that was a good thing.”
In general, then, Jenner puts The Star’s move in the “innovative” category rather than the penny-inching category.
“We tend to cling to the traditional,” Jenner said, “but the traditional is not necessarily moving us forward.”
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Me? Well, I put in 37 years as a reporter and editor at The Star, and my instincts have run along the traditional lines. More and more, however, as the newspaper business, in general, continues its downward spiral, I recognize the need for innovation.
So, if I were editor of The Star, here’s what I would try…The best and most recognized columnist at the paper now is sports columnist Sam Mellinger, who succeeded Jason Whitlock, after Whitlock was dumped last year.
Mellinger, a young guy with amazing perspective relative to his limited experience, is The Star’s only marquee columnist. Recognizing that, the editors have started to run his column, from time to time, on the front page of the paper, not just on the front of SportsDaily.
Just last Saturday, for example, his column about the fight between Kansas City Chiefs’ veteran Thomas Jones and rookie receiver Jonathan Baldwin ran at the top of Page One. That was a bold, smart move by the editors, in my opinion.
For years, it has been a truism at The Star that reports of Chiefs games and developments within the organization are the one sure thing that causes newspaper sales to spike. When I was at The Star, box sales always took a big jump on Mondays after Chiefs’ games.
My idea, then? Give Mellinger a foothold on the front page every Sunday and let him write about whatever sports subject is on his mind. Last year, if you’ll recall, The Star made a huge mistake when it commissioned Whitlock, the marquee columnist at the time, to write a weekly Op-Ed column in addition to his sports columns. The column dribbled away after a few weeks.
So, have Mellinger stick to sports. It’s one news product that sells now.
Think about it: In most big cities, good sports coverage — intermingled with insight and strong opinion — is about the only thing that people relish or want any more from their local papers.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Big shout out to Mike Jenner. When he was a sports reporter for the Columbia Tribune in 1976, I was one of the hippies in the composing room pasting up his pages along with his sister, Julie (who was not a hippie). I slept on their parents’ couch for a few hours one late night in St. Louis prior to catching a plane to Louisville. Wonderful people.
Re: the columnists; it seem much more about saving money than anything else.
Hey, Jimmy–you’re my columnist now. You got somethin’ to say, your WordPress blog emails it to me, automatically because I requested it. Then I read my coffee and comment.
I used to read The Star (and The Times!!) first two sections cover to cover before I put on my mascara. Wouldn’t THINK about venturing out into the world without either.
Now I don’t take the Star and don’t even THINK about or miss it. I tried a Sunday Groupon for 26 weeks. Nowthat’s expired, and really I just miss the Arts section.
When I called to cancel, the girl clerk, who didn’t read the paper by the way, said, “Aren’t you gonna miss the coupons?” I replied, “Is that what you think you were delivering?”
The Star — it’s over. Sullinger retired, there’s no honest JoCo news coverage. Hendricks? Biased liar. Brad Cooper–ditto; in the hip pocket of the OP City Council; doesn’t even pretend to write both sides.
This deal is over. This social contract with the best and the brightest of Greater Kansas City, fell apart when OJ Nelson created “readership apartheid” 20 years ago. He told you reporters and editors not to cover “bad news” in JoCo, just leave that for kicking KCMO. Well, so much for writing off where 60% of the business community operated.
I just wonder, when the outside printing contracts dry up, what museum will get that gorgeous glass building as their new downtown home?
These columnists do lack personality…You nailed that.
Bless you, Jimmy. You’re my paperboy now! AND my paper…
I can’t believe you moved off your old block in Brookside. Where shall I trick or treat now?? The good old days were the best…
OK, I’ve dried my tears. Time for my mascara.
There’s a third motivation for this arrangement that you haven’t thought of, but which follows from Mr. Waller’s comments.
As Mr. Waller points out, columnists need regularity and consistency, something this approach will greatly restrict. But, perhaps that’s the motivation.
As you point out, Steve Penn went out on a note of scandal. Also, Hendricks also went out on a note of controversy. What this new lineup suggests to me is that the new publisher may still want to present opinion based analysis of local events while limiting the liability of having yet another marquee columnist embarrass the paper, as Hendricks and Penn did.
Look at this line-up. Kraske, Sanchez and Guswelle are all adults with solid records of quality, if not edgy, writing. Their work will be supplemented by working reporters who also will not be able to go off the deep end if they’re to maintain credibility with their ongoing news sources.
Even if one of this number were to do something goofy, it would weeks, if not months before the readers even missed them, if then.
I say this because there is historical precedent for this approach.
When Rich Hood was head of the editorial page he decided that there was not enough local conservative content on the editorial page. He hired two of us to write regularly scheduled columns, one of us from Missouri, the other from Kansas.
The Missouri columnist was an attorney. While his columns weren’t terribly controversial, if memory serves, they were occasionally irregular owing to his professional workload. That raised questions on why his columns were missing when he didn’t produce them.
I wrote the Kansas column and with the encouragement of PBS host Dale Goter I decided to focus on local issues. That proved to be controversial for a number of reasons. One was that I occasionally wrote about issues that weren’t covered in the paper itself. For instance, I wrote a column describing a local shock jock’s racist rant at a couple of Hispanic kids during a remote. Neither of The Star’s entertainment reporters wrote about the issue even though they were aware of it.
The column was eliminated by Art Brisbane the day after I wrote a second column on a scandal involving David and Lisa Adkins, YouthFriends and The Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, all friends and associates of Brisbane’s. Shortly after that Hood was also given the boot after 29 years as a reporter, investigative reporter and editorial page editor.
The two regularly scheduled conservatives were replaced by a rotating panel of readers who were randomly picked for a variety of interests and then allowed to write 3, or 4 columns during a one year tenure when a new panel was selected.
Under the new system any hint of controversy was eliminated since the public never knew who, or what, would be scheduled at any given time. The potential for any problems was restricted, and the 1 year tenure solved any that did arise, all without any hint of embarrassment to the paper.
Mr. Waller is exactly correct, this system is not going to generate marquee players. What it will generate is a series of intrinsically non-controversial, but solidly written analytical pieces on local issues. After Whitlock, Penn and Hendricks, maybe that’s just what the publisher ordered.
Let the ad hominems flow.
If it’s cost cutting, revenue and edgy interest The Star is looking for, how about expanding the obits? It’s frequently the most interesting reading; it runs every day, often seems reader generated…….and with the pipeline of aging boomers, subscriptions just might increase.
Dr. Seymour orders up more deaths?
Well I’m just saying that it is suppose to take something like 30 (successive) days to create a habit (maybe a following). I read the obits every day out of curiosity (I might be in there) so guess it is now habit. Mr. Altegovt’s last paragraph has got it right. For me, alternating every third week printing some burning issue the columnist ran into a couple of weeks ago really isn’t the kind of edgy reporting that’s going to keep me subscribing/looking until “my” columnist turns up. Times are changing, lord only knows I need to evolve too, but there’s a difference between evolution and wholesale exprimentation that could be too subtle to grasp by a drowning daily. But good luck to them that tries to stay afloat.
John Altevogt “Kraske, Sanchez and Guswelle are all adults with solid records of quality, if not edgy, writing”. ———- [Huh?]
Says who. I attended UMKC, UMC and UMSL. After HS I was exposed to the FACT that other media had other view points. I have an extensive, minor-league journalistic background.
Before John Robert Anderson [JoCo] moved Runners World to Silicon Valley, KSU Doctoral candidate Arne Richards was cranking out Mo Valley RRC News. I am an early contributor and subscriber. I (not Joe Henderson) coined the jump start phrase of the running boom: LSD training.
My take: Kraske, Sanchez, and Guswelle are ‘junior varsity’ ——- on a good day. Also, The Star, and others, have been sitting on an irritating preacher’s pulpit for decades. Soothing to true believers ——– but they don’t learn any thing. And just plain irritating to neutrals and contrarians.
Then comes along the digital mining of FACTS in the Information Age offering not just low-cost, free advertisement, news and opinions, but documented, verifiable FACTS. Any media, but especially the stodgy ole dead-tree, overly opinionated print outlets might want to go to data, data, data and get out of the preaching business.
The obits, that is nearly the ONLY clipping my friends and family mail me!
Trust me, nothing done at The Star is done to improve the product, not really. It’s all the bottom line. Thanks, Milton Friedman.
I have long advocated eliminating the editorial staff at The Star, spending the money instead on beat reporters. The one thing that a newspaper and a group of trained journalists can do better than anybody is original news. So why compete in the glutted market of blogging and opinion writing when you can provide a service others can’t?
That said, I disagree with Mr. Lake’s assessment of Kraske, Sanchez and Guswelle. I understand that all tilt to the left. That does nto mean they aren’t competent journalists.
When Hendricks screwed up on another issue and was called on it by O’Reilly, The Star sent Sanchez to debate him. I thought she did as good a job making his case as anyone I’ve seen on that show.
Kraske has covered politics for a long time and, like Sullinger, most people trust him to do a fair job. He knows what he’s talking about and is a large part of the political institutional memory at The Star. He’s a good, solid journalist.
Guswelle, I don’t read, but he’s been around forever without alienating people the way a Lewis Diuguid, Barb Shelly, or Mike Hendricks have. I don’t know, maybe that’s because he’s boring, but that would sort of make my point.
They’re a good core group who will provide solid, if not colorful, writing. Right now, it’s a step up if The Star just stops alienating so many people. When news junkies like myself and Ms. Thomas don’t take the paper, that’s gotta be bad news.
Indeed, I don’t know that I’ve ever met Tracy Thomas and don’t know whether we agree on issues, or not, but I do agree with her assessment of both Hendricks and Cooper. The people out here aren’t stupid. They know garbage when they read it and both Hendricks and Cooper are/write garbage.
Ms. Thomas, it would seem, is the most readable (informing) of all you tedious fucks pissing, moaning and over-anal-izing journalistic minutiae about dead shit. Hire Ms. Thomas but don’t let her have too much caffeine.
I Remain,
Hubartos vanDrehl
I try to discourage (sometimes with the red pen) the use of shocking, off-color language, but van Drehl, being my first friend in life — back on Ruth Avenue in our beloved Louisville, Ky. — gets a pass. (By the way, Hubartos, I could probably fix you up with Tracy, if you’re willing to make that big trip over the Rockies.)
My most regular read is Abouhalkah. Wasn’t Mike Davies at the Hartford paper?
That’s right, Mike. Waller and Davies were a tag team for quite a few years, starting at the Louisville Courier-Journal, then coming to Kansas City after Capital Cities, the media conglomerate that later bought ABC, purchased The Star.
Davies left The Star a few years before Waller, going to the Hartford Courant and later becoming publisher of The Baltimore Sun. I don’t recall the exact timing, but Waller also went to Hartford and later, following in Davies footsteps, became publisher of The Baltimore Sun.
Davies left the newspaper business in 1993 and has held a variety of other posts in media-related businesses.
Waller stayed in the news business, as publisher of The Sun, until he retired in 2002.
JimmyC,
The Star readers will get a column from different areas of Kansas City from the police, local politics and other beats. I think the readers may begin a pattern of identifying the column and columnists with the their beat. The three with the strongest connection to readers currently are Gusewelle, Kraske and Sanchez.
Working for Mike Waller and with you Fitz, I respect your opinions.
I am not opposed to putting Mellinger on the front page with sports columns.
I would leave the editorial page in its current configuration. Never know when a School District Superintendant will resign.
“beat reporters. The one thing that a newspaper and a group of trained journalists can do better than anybody is original news. So why compete in the glutted market of blogging and opinion writing when you can provide a service others can’t?”
Mike, Mike, Mike, your words, my thots, and more aimed at the suburban weeklies. So true, so true
We proibably will not solve any problems, but if you wish to waste a couple of moments of your existence B4 you die. donlake@localnet.com and or 619.420.0209
I would like to discourse on ‘prophany’ at length