JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

In my daily scouring of The Star and The New York Times, I consistently come across highlights — and sometimes lowlights — that make me stop, re-read and note things to pass on to others.

In this case, that would be YOU, loyal readers.

So, here goes — first on the local front.

:: Hereford House arson

Can you believe we had such a slimy but juicy case right here in Kansas City? You’d think it would be something out of Chicago or Miami — one of Kansas City’s most famous restaurants being torched for insurance money?

Mark Morris, federal courts reporter, provided his usual, outstanding trial coverage. The most compelling testimony, to me, was Jennifer Sorrentino’s testimony that her former husband, Mark Sorrentino, came home early the morning of the fire and started “screaming from the top of his lungs” for her to come to the garage.

When she entered the garage, she said, she found her husband “beet red,” with his shirt off and reeking of gasoline.

Wow…Could there be any more dramatic account of what a nasty, nasty business arson is…even from the perp’s side?

Another trial highlight was testimony (which you might have missed because Morris didn’t write about until the verdict story), that the company providing security at the restaurant had planted a dummy video camera in one room and had placed the real, working camera in another. Even Rod Anderson, part owner of the restaurant and the most prominent of the three defendants, didn’t know about the set-up, and it ended up hurting him.

According to testimony, Anderson learned about the second camera in a conversation with the restaurant group’s chief financial officer, James Stanislav. When Stanislav was on the witness stand, a prosecutor asked him how Anderson reacted upon learning about the second camera. “He was somewhat surprised,” was Stanislav’s answer.

Surprised? I bet his eyes bulged and his stomach flipped.

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Now, onto the national arena, which, of course, is awash in politics.

About once a week, dueling New York Times columnists David Brooks (moderate conservative) and Gail Collins (full-blown liberal) engage in an online give-and-take, which is consistently funny and insightful.

Recently, when they were predicting how they thought some of the key races might would out, they engaged in this exchange:

Brooks: “I think there will be one or two wild results. Like Akin winning in Missouri…”

Collins: “If Akin wins, I will personally set up a charitable foundation to help humiliated Missourians move to another state. There are a lot of jobs in North Dakota.”

I also got a kick out of this Collins commentary in both the printed and online editions:

“Romney is bringing half the Republican Party to Ohio to kick off the new ‘Romney-Ryan Real Recovery Road Rally.’ Everybody’s coming — Ann, the sons, Paul Ryan, Paul Ryan’s wife who we have yet to actually meet, Rudy Giuliani, a couple of Olympic medalists and pretty much every Republican elected official except He Who Must Not Be Named in New Jersey…Sudden plans for a road trip are usually the sign of a pressing need to escape reality.”

By now, my army of conservative readers is probably jumping up and down, thinking I’ve exposed myself as an unrelenting liberal. Well, hold it right there! (as s a prominent local blogger friend of mine would say).

Here are three withering (and funny) observations offered up by the entertaining and erudite George Will of The Washington Post.

:: “Obama’s oceanic self-esteem — no deficit there — may explain why he seems to smolder with resentment that he must actually ask for a second term.”

:: “Tis said two things not worth running after are a bus or an economic panacea, because another will come along soon. Obama’s panacea is to cure what he considers government’s unconscionable frugality.”

:: “It is remarkable…and evidence of voters’ dangerous frivolity regarding the vice presidency, that (Joe) Biden’s proximity to the presidency has not stirred more unease.”

Finally, a grab-bag column like this would hardly be complete without a reference to our beloved, bumbling Kansas City Chiefs.

This is not from print but from Soren Petro, host of “The Program” on radio station 810, WHB.

Last week, Petro was talking with Kansas City Star reporter Adam Teicher, who has covered the Chiefs for about 15 years. Petro put Teicher on the spot, asking him why Chiefs’ General Manager Scott Pioli shouldn’t be fired immediately. Teicher, whom you could almost envision squirming in his chair — it can be very difficult and self-defeating for beat writers to bash the people they work around every day — tried to rationalize why Pioli should not be fired, at least right now.

As recently as a couple of months ago, before the Chiefs showed their true colors, Teicher noted, most people probably would have predicted that the Chiefs were going to have a good season and that Piolo seemed, at that point, to be doing a good job. So why, Teicher suggested, should a guy who recently seemed to be doing so well be fired so quickly.

Without missing a beat, Petro fired back, “Half an hour before the battle, Custer thought he was going to kick ass, too.”

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There’s nothing like bad news in the newspaper business to make a semi-retired blogger forgo golf on a beautiful Thursday in Kansas City.

But this is really big and unpleasant news for The Kansas City Star.

(I hate to be ghoulish, especially the day after Halloween, but, as you know, it’s still the bad news — arson convictions, super storms and the like — that prompts some of us to jump out of bed every morning.)

On Tuesday, the Audit Bureau of Circulations came out with its circulation numbers for the period from March 1 to Sept. 30.  The numbers show that, over the last year, The Star has lost at least 8 percent of its subscribers in the three major circulation categories — Sunday, Monday-Friday, and Saturday.

To me, that is a breathtaking loss, even in these days of a relentless circulation retreat for major metropolitan dailies throughout the country.

It has to be terrible news for publisher Mi-Ai Parrish, who told readers in a recent column that The Star would implement in December charges for online access to The Star’s content.

As an aside, Parrish foolishly teased readers in her column by laying out absolutely no specifics. For instance, she didn’t say if print subscribers would have to pay for digital content, and she gave no idea how much subscribers and others might be charged for online access. To me, that is the equivalent of telling an employee that he or she is going to get a pay cut at the end of the year and then saying, “We’ll tell you in December just how much your paycheck is going to be slashed.”

But back to the new numbers…

As of Sept. 30, The Star’s average Sunday circulation was 275,784, including online subscriptions. That compares with 300,450 at the same time in 2011.

Not only is that an elevator-crashing percentage (8 percent), but the paper also now appears to have lost any chance to stay at or above the 300,000 mark for Sunday.

That 8 percent decrease will either force The Star to drop its advertising rates or almost certainly will drive some advertisers away.

Average daily circulation also plummeted 8 percent, from 199,222 to 183,307. Saturday circulation fell 8.5 percent, from 204,919 to 187,343.

For the daily paper, 200,000 is another key benchmark that The Star has been clinging to and which now appears out of reach.

What makes these new numbers even more disturbing is that just six months ago, ABC’s statistics for the six-month period ending March 31, showed average Sunday circulation at 310,500 and average daily circulation at 200,365.

Search me as to what went haywire the last six months, but it would appear that April stats were simply an aberration.

I suppose the new numbers shouldn’t be too surprising because a recent Pew Research Center study showed that the percentage of Americans who read printed newspapers has fallen from 41 percent in 2002 to 23 percent now. In addition, a New York Times Co. survey found that just 22 percent of 18- to 34-year olds read print newspapers, compared to 53 percent in the over-55 age category.

In the past, however, The Star, has been relatively fortunate because its circulation dipped less rapidly than that of many other papers. I attribute that partly to Kansas City being a good, deep-rooted newspaper town (thank you, William Rockhill Nelson) and The Star having maintained a quality product while the content of many other metropolitan dailies has slipped badly.

Now, though, it looks like the whirlpool has The Star firmly in its grasp.

To a blogger who spent 37 mostly happy years writing and editing for the powerhouse (still) at 18th and Grand…that is very disappointing.

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Way back in the days of Watergate, most newspaper-business watchers would have said that The Washington Post and The New York Times were neck-and-neck as the two top general-interest papers in the country.

Some people would have said, based on the Post’s astonishing scoop that eventually brought down President Richard Nixon, that the Post was the superior paper.

No more. Oh, no. In horse racing parlance, The Times has proved to be the equivalent of the great Secretariat, while The Post has been exposed as a sprinter that folds after three-quarters of a mile.

Consider:

:: While The Times has had some employee buyouts, The Post is in its fifth round of buyouts since 2004.

:: Based on a flexible “pay wall,” The Times last year launched a well-thought-out campaign to increase online subscriptions. Since then, the paper has added more than 450,000 digital subscriptions.

:: The Post, on the other hand, “hasn’t jumped into the world of online subscriptions and has suffered for it,” The Motley Fool, a multimedia financial-services company, said in an online story Thursday.

:: In reporting its first-quarter results last week, The Post reported a 10 percent drop in weekday subscriptions between the first quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012, and a five percent drop on Sunday. “On the plus side,” said The Motley Fool, “newsprint costs dropped 11 percent because no one is buying the paper anymore.”

:: Between last Friday and yesterday, The Post Co.’s stock price fell 10.4 percent, while The Times Co.’s price rose 7.4 percent.

The Post is also showing signs of stumbling on the journalistic side.

Yesterday morning, The Post ran online a 5,500-word story by reporter Jason Horowitz about some of Mitt Romney’s high school escapades, including an incident when he and some friends held down a student they thought was gay and cut his hair off, while the student screamed for help.

Horowitz recounted another incident, based on accounts of students who witnessed the events, in which Romney shouted “atta girl” to a different student at the all-boys’ school.  That student later declared that he was gay.

The story generated huge attention and comment on Twitter and other social media, and as of last night the story had drawn more than 5,000 comments under The Post’s online story.

And yet, The Post did not run the story in Thursday’s print edition, although it clearly was ready to go Wednesday night.

The Poynter Institute, a non-profit school for journalism located in St. Petersburg, FL, quoted Kevin Merida, the Post’s national editor, as saying that President Obama’s historic declaration on Wednesday that he favored same-sex marriage same-sex marriage was a factor in the decision to hold off on running the Romney story in print.

Poynter also quoted Merida as saying, “It’s also just a very long and involved tale, sensitive and complex, and it needed to be edited to our collective satisfaction.”

However, Michael Calderone of The Huffington Post got a slightly different explanation from Steven Ginsberg, the Post’s political editor.

“We’re mindful of the news going on this week, particularly yesterday,” Ginsberg told The Huffington Post. “We thought it was better not to have it in today’s paper.”

“The (Obama and Romney) stories aren’t really about the same thing,” Ginsberg added, “but the perception among some might have been that putting them together would have created an impression we didn’t want to create.”

Ginsberg did not say, as Merida did, that the story needed more editing.

All in all, print subscribers had good reason to be irritated, at the very least, that they didn’t get Horowitz’ story in the printed edition.

As Andrew Beaujon, who wrote The Poynter Institute, said:

“I can’t be the only Post subscriber wondering why I’m paying for the print edition of the Post when something this important flies onto my porch a day after the political world has chewed it over and reacted already.”

Horowitz’s story was scheduled to run in today’s printed edition of the Post.

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It’s not enough to prompt the staff at 18th and Grand to start singing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” but the latest figures from the newspaper Audit Bureau of Circulations do offer hope for better times — digitally speaking, anyway.

The figures, released yesterday, show that instead of dropping below the key 300,000 threshold, which seemed likely six months ago, The Kansas City Star’s Sunday circulation rose to nearly 310, 500.

In addition, Monday-to-Friday average circulation got its head back above 200,000 after falling below that benchmark in ABC’s September 2011 report.

That news on both fronts — Sunday and daily — must have Star publisher Mi-Ai Parrish and the other business-side executives breathing easier because those big, round benchmark figures are extremely important to advertisers. If The Star can stay above 200,000 daily and 300,000 Sunday and continue a gradual rise, it should be able to hold the line on print advertising prices, while waiting for digital-side circulation and advertising prices to move up.

Tuesday’s report showed that most newspapers across the country gained readers in the last six months, compared to the same period a year ago, primarily on the back of rising digital subscriptions. Nationally, average daily circulation was up nearly .7 percent for digital and print at the 618 papers reporting; Sunday circulation was up 5 percent at the 532 papers reporting.

In its report on the latest report, the Poynter Institute, a newspaper think tank in Florida,  said that digital circulation now accounts for 14.2 percent of newspapers’ total circulation, compared to 8.7 percent in March 2011.

The New York Times reported a 73 percent year-to-year gain in circulation, propelled by the growth of its online subscription business, which it launched last year. In fact, The Times’ daily digital subscribers exceed its daily print subscribers.

The nationwide jump in circulation is partly explained by new ABC reporting rules. A paying subscriber who accesses The Times on different digital devices — everything from a smartphone to a tablet to a desktop computer — could be counted three times in a single day.

Come on, Bill, how 'bout a little smile?

At The Kansas City Star, Sunday circulation still has a long, likely impossible road back to the glory days of the 1950s, when Sunday circulation probably was between 400,000 and 500,000.

In this day and age, however, it’s good to be able to cheer even minor newspaper-circulation achievements.

The Star owes its Sunday statistical improvement to a combination of higher print sales and higher digital subscriptions. Surprisingly, print sales rose by nearly 5,000 over the September 2011 reporting period, while digital subscriptions went up about 5,000. The digital increase was not a surprise.

You must keep in mind, of course, that digital subscriptions are not nearly as profitable as print subscriptions because the bulk of newspaper revenue is in print-side advertising.

On the daily front, print-edition sales of The Star dropped by about 3,400 from the September 2011 report, but digital subscriptions rose by 4,300, pushing total weekday average circulation to 200,365.

Saturday circulation stayed about the same — about 205,000 — from September to March.

The March report marks the one-year anniversary of ABC rules changes that allowed papers to include in their figures newspapers distributed through Newspapers in Education (NIE) programs and copies sold in bulk to places like hotels and restaurants. Those changes gave all daily papers a boost at a point when circulation had fallen sharply for at least a decade.

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I’m sorry to see that in the face of opposition to a proposed daytime curfew for school-age children, the Kansas City Council has folded like a flimsy tent in a thunderstorm.

As you probably know, a City Council committee on Wednesday put the proposed curfew on ice, partly because home-school advocates have launched a full-scale assault on it.

I have a suspicion, however, that racial politics is the main reason the proposed curfew is not headed to the full council. The home-school bit looks to me like a big smokescreen.

It’s preposterous that the council would back down to the home-school “community” or that the home-school contingent could even be much of a factor in this issue. What’s to worry about? That a group of wild home schoolers are going to cut Mommy’s algebra class, go down to the Nelson Art Gallery and egg Henry Moore’s bronze sculptures?

Come on…

The main thing fueling my suspicion is Lynn Horsley’s Kansas City Star account of Wednesday’s Public Safety Committee meeting. She reported that Councilman Michael Brooks, a committee member who is African-American, took a strong stand against the curfew, which would affect all 12 or 13 school districts located wholly or partly within the city.

Horsley’s story said that Brooks “wanted to see more intervention programs from the public schools, such as alternative schools and social workers, before the city adopts a potentially punitive approach.”

To me, that sounds not just like putting the idea on ice but putting it at the back of the deep freeze and forgetting about it. What is the likelihood of the Kansas City School District establishing more alternative schools just to find out if they helped reduce truancy?

No, Brooks wants the idea to go away. And I would suspect that most of the other black council members do, too. It’s got to do with this: “Don’t stick your nose in my business; how I choose to monitor my children is my business.”

(For the record, the other members of the Public Safety Committee are John Sharp, Scott Taylor and Jermaine Reed. I don’t know if a vote was taken or if the measure was held by consensus.)

Now, let me say…I don’t like announcing that racial considerations are the reason I think the ordinance stalled, but, in my opinion, racial politics has been a major factor in the Kansas City School District having been mired in quicksand for 40 years. And it just keeps getting thicker.

A council majority ought to tell the home-school advocates to go back to their three-hour-a-day teaching schedule and stay out of the truancy issue, which has about as much to do with home schooling as T-ball does to fast pitch.

A council majority ought to stand up to what little is left of Freedom Inc. and Brooks and any other council members who are dragging their feet and vote the curfew into law. I’ll bet Mayor Sly James would resist the expected, conventional back peddling on this issue and would vote for it.

Remember the flash-mobs-on-the-Plaza scare last year, when James had to go to the ground after shots were fired on a Saturday night? He came out a day or so later and said, in so many words, “Parents, take responsibility for your children’s whereabouts.”

Passing the truancy-prevention ordinance would hold parents more accountable for the whereabouts of their children (parents of truants could be fined up to $100 per occurrence, after the first violation) and, yes, it probably would reduce property crimes caused by bored kids.

Let’s give credit, however, to freshman Councilman Scott Wagner, who lives in the Northland, for bringing this controversial proposal forward. He has said he is motivated by one goal — to get kids back in school…I can’t imagine any  ulterior motives he might have.

What’s to be lost by putting a daytime curfew in place?

The kids should be in school during school hours, shouldn’t they?

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Editor’s Note: Today marks the second anniversary of the First Post on JimmyCsays. Since March 23, 2010, I have posted 251 blogs. It’s been a fun run so far, and I want to thank all of you for your readership, your support and, most of all, your comments, which are the lifeblood of any interesting blog. With that, into year three we lurch!

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