Kansas City Star Editor Mike Fannin was on KCUR’s “Central Standard” show yesterday, and the uncomfortable subject was The Star’s future.
Fannin did a reasonably good job of spotlighting the paper’s bright spots — that it remains the strongest news-gathering organization in the region and its much-diminished staff is very talented and working hard — but he shied away from specifics about the changing newspaper landscape.
At one point, for example, he referred to the newspaper industry’s decade-long, downward spiral as a “disruption.”
It is not a disruption when the industry’s advertising revenue goes from $49.4 billion in 2005 to less than half that in 2011. (And it’s still falling several percentage points a year, by the way.)
And it isn’t a disruption when your local reporting staff goes from more than 50 to less than 20. Or when the company goes from more than 2,000 employees to about 500 or 600.
No, that is called the new normal.
It was obvious from Fannin’s tentative tone and overall lack of energy in his responses to host Gina Kaufmann’s questions that he understands the new normal. (Here’s the link to that interview.) It’s just that he doesn’t particularly want to talk about it. (Reminds me of Warren Beatty’s great line in “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” when drunk and talking about the difficulty of dealing with women, he mutters, ” “Money and pain. Pain and money…money…pain.”)
I can’t blame Fannin for not wanting to address it head on, but since it’s not a blip and not a temporary annoyance, he should.
And, in my opinion, the way he and publisher Mi-Ai Parrish should attack the situation is with energy and enthusiasm…even if they have to fake it.
You’ve heard the saying, of course, that the best defense is a good offense. Coming from a sports-reporting background, Fannin should have picked up on that by now. But he hasn’t.
At one point in yesterday’s interview, Kauffman asked him point blank, “Do you think that The Star has credibility?”
Fannin’s initial response was a meek, “Really?”
He warmed up to that absurd challenge and ended up giving a decent answer, citing the “instant credibility” that The Star got from its scoop about former Missouri House Speaker John Diehl’s “sexting” with a college intern. But Fannin should have gone ballistic and said something like: “What are you talking about? The Star has been the most powerful and influential news and editorial force in this city for the last 135 years, and I expect it to stay that way for the next 135 years.”
Hell, it might be gone in 25 years, but he should have kicked back hard, anyway; he’s got history on his side.
Alongside Fannin in his bunker mentality is Parrish, the publisher. I’ve said this before: She should be out there in the community, pushing and shoving for the paper and calling it to people’s attention every day. Past publishers, including Jim Hale and Art Brisbane, made their voices heard in civic circles, and the newspaper benefitted from their relatively high public profiles.
Under them, the paper was a sponsor, along with other big local companies, of some of the city’s major arts organizations. No longer. The Star’s name is conspicuously absent from sponsorship lists. To me, that’s frustrating and disappointing. Even though McClatchy, The Star’s owner is $1 billion in debt, I think it should encourage its papers to shell out money to attach their names to arts organizations, which are sources of community pride and beacons of optimism.
I’m told Parrish is the sort who shuns the limelight and keeps her nose to the grindstone, looking high and low for ways to generate more revenue for The Star. That’s fine, but I don’t think either she or Fannin understands that sometimes you have to invest money to make money.
Another investment The Star should make is in a marketing campaign. They haven’t had one in decades, and the newspaper’s profile has ebbed significantly. It isn’t enough to have your product out there in the market; you’ve got to promote it constantly, keep reminding people you’re still there and still relevant.
An advertising campaign might not draw tons of new digital subscriptions from the 20-to-35 set, but I bet it would get the attention of a lot of people in the 40-to-60 range…And that’s where the money is.
This whole damn thing…this standing back and watching while this great company and this once-great newspaper dwindle and shrivel is just maddening to me.
Come on, Fannin! Come on, Parrish! Come on, McClatchy! Let’s see you fight. Let’s hear you fight. Stop the damn whimpering and wound licking. Come out from your caves and make some noise!
Like the great Frank Sinatra said in his fabulous song from the movie of the same name, “Come Blow Your Horn”…
Make like a Mister Milquetoast and you’ll get shut out,
Make like a Mister Meek and you’ll get cut out,
Make like a little lamb, and wham, you’re shorn,
I tell ya, chum, it’s time to come blow your horn.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Fitz,
Nicely done…and I don’t even have a dog in this fight. This is the most realistic blog I have read on this subject. Of course your heart says one thing…your head another…but in the end, the readers (customers) are voting (subscriptions/news stand sales) each and every day.
I suggest you send Mr. Parrish and Ms. Fannin a hard copy of your blog! Maybe they just need a little wake-up call.
Thanks very much, John. As a former businessman, you understand sales and marketing…As for sending Parrish and Fannin a hard copy of this post, that’s not a bad idea. In April 2010, a month after I started the blog, I sent an email to Fannin — a Kentucky native (like you and I), telling him I had started a blog and inviting him to read it once in a while. Here’s what he wrote back:
“Jim: I appreciate the invite. No offense intended but I generally don’t have time to waste on things like this. Good luck and stay in touch…Regards, Mike.”
So, I expect that today Mike is solely focused, as always, on his mission of pulling The Star out of its tailspin. No “time to waste” looking for ideas from outside the bunker.
“time to waste??” Nice …
When someone says “No offense intended”, they REALLY are intending to offend. What an asshole! Tell those who lost their jobs at The Star and their livelihood whether what has happened to the paper is a “disruption.”
Jim:
I agree with you and Mike Rice totally. There is no leadership any more at The Star and certainly no guts at the top. It’s tragic.
Laura
Coming from you, Laura — the all-time KC Star loyalist — that speaks volumes.
Disagree. If anything The Star has often blown its horn when it had nothing to celebrate. Hale was certainly a community leader and under his stewardship the paper was indeed a powerhouse. Were Hale still around I suspect he would have been a daily reader of this, and other blogs, trying to get ahead of the curve instead of staying locked in tradition.
However, Brisbane was little more than the lawn jockey at the River Club. His subservience to the Civic Council and KCMO’s slimy establishment and his chummy relationship with sleazoids like Dick Bond and the Meneillyite loons destroyed the paper’s credibility across a wide swath of upcoming decision makers.
Fannin points to the Diehl story as evidence of The Star’s credibility and I would point to Yael’s daily hate against Brownback (rivaled only in it’s tedium by Milton Wolf’s daily rants) that is completely ignored. Influence and credibility are indeed linked and as long as The Star is perceived as simply a vehicle for propaganda its influence will suffer.
That said the ultimate disaster has been McClatchy. You and Fannin are both correct in the sense that The Star is still able to attract quality talent to report the news and so the potential is still there to make a significant contribution if they choose to exploit the available talent and focus them on delivering a solid journalistic product.
Roy Teicher at The Kansan demonstrated that even a paper on the ropes could make a difference in the community when reporters were allowed to report what they see in front of them and journalism, not an agenda, drove the reporting.
But even that will not save the paper as long as the McClatchy parasite continues to suck the life blood out of the paper. Compare The Star to the Minneapolis Tribune for size and content. Even now The Star could be a profit center if it were not being bled dry by McClatchy.
Think about it. They have a horrendous business model which maintains a pack of useless slugs in editorial over their unique ability to do original reporting; they have an inverted pyramid as an organizational structure (and I won’t even point out that their “public editor” is a thin-skinned baby who is incapable of dealing rationally with conflict) and yet despite the idiocy with which the paper is managed it is still capable of staying alive and generating enough of a profit to allow McClatchy to feed off the potential corpse.
Give The Star an intelligent business model, an efficient organizational structure focused on original news, rid it of the dying McClatchy carcass it’s tied to and it could be a blessing to this community once again.
In hindsight, the decision that majority Star stockholders made in 1977 to sell the employee-owned paper to Capital Cities, a publicly traded company, was a mistake. It looked promising at the time, and a lot of people, including me, made good money in the sale, where employees were paid $2 for every $1 worth of stock they owned.
Cap Cities was a good owner, but things started going downhill in 1996 when Disney bought Capital Cities/ABC. (Once a company yields private ownership, all bets are off.) A year later, Disney turned around and sold the Cap Cities newspapers (they didn’t jibe at all with the theme park/movie-making business model) to Knight-Ridder. Knight-Ridder had a listless leader in Tony Ridder, and K-R sold out to McClatchy in 2006.
The two major papers that are doing well today are the family-controlled (but still publicly traded) New York Times and the Washington Post, which is making a strong rebound after being purchased — and taken private — two years ago by Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos.
The Star probably would be a lot better off if Cerner or Garmin bought it; installed strong and innovative leadership; invested in the product; and didn’t try to use the paper as a marketing vehicle for its core business. The ideal owner might be that investment genius up the road in Omaha who has been buying newspapers because he loves them.
I don’t think the Times is doing as well as you may think. I also read an article where they referenced the same concerns there that I have with the Star here, i.e. that editorial had become an unrespected drag on the product. And that was the perception from within.
The Post live is a town that lives for the news and it will always be thus.
Ironically, the papers that seem to be thriving are the ones in small communities where they document the everyday lives of the citizenry with pictures of the high school sports, civic activities, etc. Not scintillating journalism, but a living.
I again mention the Minneapolis Tribune. I don’t know how well they’re doing, but their product is certainly superior to what The Star produces. And another thought is that many corporations look at a 3% profit margin as being pretty good, but there came a point where newspapers were expected to produce a 30% return on investment. Is that not the case?
Perhaps there needs to be a more realistic adjustment of expectations concerning what a newspaper should be expected to produce and once the money changers get the hell away from them, perhaps they can return to doing journalism instead of simply being a cash cow.
Good recount of the Central Std interview and as I listened I kept wondering if you were hearing this. I was really disgusted with Fannin’s on-air, seeming lack of enthusiasm and awareness of his role as the drum major. I too wondered when he was going to wind it up and let it go. His “Really?” response to that soft pitch from Kaufmann should end up on the Star’s tombstone. I’ve heard Parrish speak and wanted to ask a question when she vanished. Kinda like that house cat that empties the food bowl but all you ever see is that tail disappearing round the corner. That bunker-mentality comment couldn’t be more apropos. Where are the leaders? Oops, gotta go, just heard my phone ding.
Funny and right-on-target comment, Jayson…I saw the same thing with Parrish not too long after she arrived in KC. She spoke to the Forty-Year-Ago Column Club and read a prepared speech while mostly leaning against a wall…There isn’t a person in the house — the 18th and Grand house — who can get out there and promote the paper effectively. It’s gotta be board-breakingly frustrating for the beleaguered staff.
Mike Fannin owes Elvis Costello an apology for looking like him.
Funny. True, but funny, very funny.
Neither here nor there, but Gina Kaufmann has a wonderful voice for radio.
Fitz has the face for it. Can’t believe they picked Fannin over him to do the show.
less than 20 reporters?… c’mon
I’m talking about the Metro desk, Rick — not including business and features — and I think I’m right.
that’s sad
Fannin and Co. are doing their best in a bad situation. Mike still believes in going after the big story, is enthusiastic, smart and fearless. And that’s coming from someone who needed convincing. As for marketing, it’s going on where it needs to happen, on social media. Twitter, Facebook, etc. Check it out some time, oldsters. Billboards might make you feel important, but don’t do much for adding subscribers. TV is a waste of money unless you spend like someone running for office. A lot. As for sponsoring the symphony and such, I’d rather spend that money hiring another reporter or 6.
Don’t give up on us, Laura. We’re making the best of the situation and some of the oldtimers still miss your bourbon balls. Drop some by next xmas. We’ll still be putting out the paper and doing our best to kick ass.
Un huh, yeah…The Star is investing heavily in Twitter and Facebook to “market” new subscriptions…TV is a waste of money??? Tell that to the Super Bowl and Final Four advertisers.
Keep on singing the company line, Frankie…
“As for sponsoring the symphony and such, I’d rather spend that money hiring another reporter or 6.” One could only wish. Perhaps you could actually get a reporter to cover the legislature instead of using The Eagle’s stuff. Personally, I’ve been waiting for The Star to stop firing reporters, much less hire “another reporter or 6.”
As for social media, I follow most of The Star folks on Twitter and, as I pointed out above, watching Yael (the most frequent poster) belch out 10, or so of his hateschrift daily doesn’t give him any more credibility than it does Milt Wolf and his hateful, repetitive drivel. And Facebook? Everytime I see a local news item circulating on Facebook it’s from one of the TV stations, not the Star.
Indeed, I just checked, The Star has 62,000 “likes” on their page on Facebook. KSHB has over 110,000. KMBC has over 184,000. KCTV5, just under 250,000 and Fox 4 has over 273,000, but as we all know, TV “is a waste of money…”
So whatever you do, don’t let Fannin read this blog or he won’t even be able to utter that The Star is “the strongest news-gathering organization in the region” without making even Derek giggle like a teenage girl.
After responding to Ol’ Blue Eyes, I started thinking about specific marketing possibilities for The Star. One would be advertising on sports talk radio — 610 and 810 AM. Those stations have very large audiences, and The Star has one of the best sports sections in the country (thanks partly to Fannin’s good work there over many years). I think The Star could sell a lot of online subscriptions strictly by emphasizing its sports content.
i used to love Laura’s bourbon balls!….Merry Christmas everyone…but who the hell is Sinatra?…… isnt he ding dong dead?
“As for sponsoring the symphony and such, I’d rather spend that money hiring another reporter or 6.”
I talked with three different people – all seasoned reporters with other news orgs – who interviewed with The Star for positions last year. (Yes, The Star actually advertised reporting slots.) To a person they said Parrish wouldn’t allow Fannin to pull the trigger.
Because, you know…pennies.
That’s interesting, because I had heard that they intended to replace one reporter or another — one being the development-reporting job, after Kevin Collison left. But nothing ever happened…And if Parrish is the blocker, that undoubtedly means McClatchy is nixing any new hires.
Just wanted to clarify the numbers. Before the 2008 crash and the subsequent layoffs, The Star had more than 100 metro/state reporters. That included the bureaus in JoCo, KCK, Independence and Northland. If you need proof, several current and former reporters have old Star phone directories that I’m sure they will gladly provide you.
Today, the less than 20 reporters on the metro/state desks is about equal to that of Channel 9’s news team, which has 20 reporters and anchors.
The Star also has three business reporters and three or four features reporters.
Thanks, Karen…Good to hear from you. Your pre-crash numbers sound accurate, although I don’t know if, technically, the JoCo neighborhood news reporters were considered Metro reporters. They were in a category unto themselves.
Mike Rice and I compared notes and we came up with 19 Metro reporters, and that’s including Kraske, who is part time. It also includes Adler, who, I presume, is now a Metro reporter. So, what they’ve got, it appears to me, is 18 full-time Metro reporters.
Keep in mind too that The Star does not have as many editors and copy editors today as it did before the 2008 meltdown _ and I don’t think that meltdown is too strong of a term. Nearly all the bureau chiefs and night editors lost their jobs before the bureaus were closed in March 2009. The Star will continue to break some good stories but there are so many other stories and tales of corruption that are going untold because of this “disruption” that Mr. Fannin describes.
Also, Fitz, you mention the need for The Star to be more of a civic player and contribute to the arts community like it used to. I get that point but keep in mind that when The Star donated $1 million to the Nelson Art Gallery a couple of decades ago, it sent a very demoralizing message to low paid reporters like myself. During the late 90s when The Star was allegedly rolling in the dough, I was having to moonlight as a limo driver to make ends meet. I certainly understand that The Star was bigger than me but it definitely hurt that Brisbane and Co. would not share the wealth with all of their hard-working staff.