For the sake of the loyal, hard-working journalists remaining at The Kansas City Star, I really dislike flogging the paper and its owner, the McClatchy Company, for their shortcomings.
Fact is, though, the problems are increasing, and subscribers, readers, employees and former employees are entitled to know about them.
Here’s the latest:
:: The Star is now running some editorials that are not being written by the four members of the editorial page staff.
The Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, among others, are “outsourcing” some editorials to a service called “Opinion in a Pinch,” run by an Oregon man named Chris Trejbal, a former editorial writer for the Roanoke Times in Virginia.
The Columbia Journalism Review had an interesting story on Trejbal, who has shrewdly capitalized on reduced editorial-page staffs at newspapers across the country. The journalism review story says of Trejbal:
Chris Trejbal
“One of his first clients was The Kansas City Star, whose editorial page was then run by Miriam Pepper—who, after retiring from the paper in 2014, would go on to join Opinion in a Pinch as a freelance editorialist.”
…This is all news to me — The Star running some outsourced editorials and Pepper apparently writing some of the “commissioned” editorials in The Star.
The problem for me — and I trust for many of you — is that The Star isn’t identifying outsourced editorials. They are simply dropped in along with editorial researched and written by the four remaining editorial board members — Steve Paul (editorial page editor), Yael Abouhalkah, Barb Shelly and Lewis Diuguid.
The Post-Dispatch, on the other hand, has chosen to identify editorials not produced by its editorial page staff, which is now down to two members.
The Post-Dispatch uses this disclaimer in parentheses: “This editorial was commissioned from freelance editorialists and edited by the Post-Dispatch editorial board.”
…Now, that’s at least being straightforward. But listen to how Steve Paul rationalized The Star’s lack of transparency to the Columbia Journalism Review:
“When we’re ‘in a pinch’—vacation mode, etc.—we call on him (Trejbal) occasionally to help back us up. I discuss topics with him, we discuss ed (editorial) board positions, he reports and writes, we edit. I don’t see the need to disclose that; in a sense, he’s an adjunct member of the editorial board, a leg man who reports for us, or a ghost writer of pieces that never have been signed anyway.”
I think the non-disclosure is reprehensible, and I totally agree with the assessment of the former KC Star reporter who alerted me to the journalism review story.
Steve Paul
The former reporter — who declined to be quoted by name because he respects Steve Paul — wrote in an email: “I regard editorials as one of a newspaper’s sacred duties — they should be thoughtful, local and well-researched. It’s hard for me to imagine that they accomplish any of those goals this way.”
…For the sake of its remaining credibility, The Star should immediately begin identifying outsourced editorials. To Steve Paul and KC Star editor Mike Fannin, I say, “Stop misleading the readers!”
:: Another example of The Star misleading, or at least confusing, readers appeared on the back page of Saturday’s paper.
In a legally required “Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation,” The Star listed Fannin as editor and Greg Farmer as managing editor.
But the part about Farmer is incorrect. After Steve Shirk retired as managing editor a few months ago, The Star didn’t name a successor. Instead, it divided his duties among a few people, including Farmer.
I left a voice message for Farmer this morning and he sent me an email addressing the published statement.
“That was a mistake,” he said. “I’m leading the investigative/enterprise team as Senior AME (assistant managing editor).”
…My guess is that whoever prepared the statement simply plugged in Farmer’s name for the sake of convenience. But to be totally honest and accurate, the statement should have said the post of managing editor was “currently not filled.”
It would have been that easy to be transparent.
:: Major problems persist with distribution of the print edition.
A longtime carrier told me today that changes over the last few months have prompted some carriers to quit and that many inexperienced and incompetent carriers have been hired as replacements.
The changes include:
— The Star distancing itself from direct responsibility for delivery of the paper by hiring distributors who have formed LLCs and assumed full responsibility for delivery operations. Carriers’ checks no longer come from McClatchy but from the distributors. In addition, when carriers don’t show up for one reason or another, the distributors — not The Star — are responsible for getting the papers delivered.
— Reductions in the pay carriers receive for delivery of each paper. (Loss of circulation has also hit carriers hard in the pocketbooks, since their pay is on a per-paper basis.) The carrier I spoke with said his income from delivering the paper was about half what it was several years ago.
— Installation of a new computer system, which has resulted in paycheck delays, among other things. “The new system has not worked from Day One,” the carrier told me.
Along the same lines, it continues to be very difficult to get through to a live person in the circulation department. A friend who was having delivery problems was put on hold for more than 30 minutes yesterday, and today, as a test, I held on the line for at least 10 minutes before giving up.
:: Finally, McClatchy announced today it is closing its foreign bureaus and bringing those staff members back to the Washington bureau.
The bureaus to be closed are in Beijing, Mexico City, Istanbul, Berlin and Iraq.
A Poynter Institute story about the restructuring said:
“In discontinuing its foreign bureaus, McClatchy is scaling back its international coverage in favor of an editorial strategy that emphasizes regional stories and political coverage.”
Poynter said McClatchy’s international reporting will be “project based and less frequent.”
Jonathan Landay, a high-profile reporter in McClatchy’s Washington bureau, was quoted as saying:
“At a time when the world is careening into greater chaos and mayhem, Americans want to know what’s happening and how this is going to affect them. By closing the foreign bureaus, we’re shutting off an important source of news and analysis at a time when we need to be paying more attention because our mission is to inform and educate.”
Perhaps not coincidentally, Landay recently announced he was leaving McClatchy for a job with Reuters. When Knight Ridder still owned the papers that McClatchy later bought, Landay produced some of the most skeptical coverage of U.S. intelligence claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Although McClatchy said there would be no layoffs, you can be assured that this is a money-saving move. Maintaining a foreign bureau is an expensive and time-consuming proposition.
In the same money-saving vein, many major metropolitan dailies, including The Star, have shrunk their national and international coverage in recent years. The emphasis on “local, local, local” is simply a cover story for reducing page count.
**
With all this going on, it is no mystery why publisher Mi-Ai Parrish departed for The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, where she will be working for a new company, Gannett, that was recently spun off from its parent company (renamed TEGNA) and is starting afresh with no debt.
With McClatchy, every publisher who gets up in the morning and goes to work carries with them the burden of the parent company’s nearly $1 billion debt — a debt incurred when McClatchy unwisely bought the Knight Ridder chain just when things were starting to go south for the newspaper industry.
Now, at the local level, every McClatchy paper is crying out to be set free.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
This is an outrage, and I will let you know to what extent I am outraged when my adjunct opinionmeister provides me my statement.
Well…not the kind of lead-off comment I was anticipating. But we take what comes over the transom.
Jim, that was good shoe-leather reporting on your part to find a carrier to interview. As I have said, I stopped taking the print edition of The Star a few weeks ago because of delivery problems. I now subscribe to the electronic edition.
It is still very important to me to read the paper every day. I care about what’s going in Kansas City for my own sake, and I need to know what’s in the Star to do much of the work I do on behalf of clients. But it disappoints me that The Star has never, at least to my knowledge, published anything about the recent changes in the delivery system; the resulting problems; and how readers could best resolve those problems. The Star could still do a story about the delivery situation. I hope they will.
Telling readers what’s going on with circulation would mean the paper would have to hire and train a bunch of people and have them take calls from live readers, Julius.
As the carrier told me (from a different perspective but still hitting the nail on the head), “All they want to do is print the paper and pass it on.”
Did you know on Saturdays if you call they do not have a live person you can talk to? You have to call on another day.
I am still having delivery problems. Saturday and Sunday were near 8:30 am before arrival and Monday was just about 8 am.
Also I am still awaiting the return call from The Star’s VP of audience. He said last Wednesday he would check into my delivery problem. Somehow I have a feeling no such call be coming.
Thanks, Jim, for your reporting on the rapid decline of The Star. I now find that it doesn’t even last me through breakfast, which for me is nothing more than coffee and two pieces of toast.
After the latest re-design, which amounted to more white space, larger type, huge photographs and graphics–all working together to reduce “content”–I sent a letter to the editor saying The Star ought to give up the ghost. It’s not even worth the half-price that former employees pay.
cheers, Don Hoffmann
Wait a minute, Don Hoffmann! What’s this about half-price for former employees?!!
I hope you haven’t been paying full subscription price, Julius …former employees can get 50% off if they’re willing to admit they once worked at The Star. — Don H
I’m up in the world,
but I’d give the world to be where I used to be,
A heavenly nest,
where I rest the best,
means more than the world to me.
It’s only a shanty
in old Shanty Town
the roof is so slanty it touches the ground.
But my tumbled down shack by an old railroad track,
like a millionaire’s mansion is calling me back.
I’d give up a palace if I were a king.
It’s more than a palace, it’s my everything.
There’s a queen waiting there with a silvery crown
in a shanty in old Shanty Town.
Damn…You brought a tear to my eye, L.A., and I’m just a hard-boiled former reporter who occasionally ate at a place called LaBruzzo’s on Grand, just south of 18th. That’s an amazing similarity between your name and theirs.
“One of his first clients was The Kansas City Star, whose editorial page was then run by Miriam Pepper—who, after retiring from the paper in 2014, would go on to join Opinion in a Pinch as a freelance editorialist.”
As a long time Fed I can tell you that Pepper’s jump to Opinion in a Pinch smacks of the worst sort of contractual favoritism; the immediate sense is Pepper steered the contract to Trejbal’s company in order to secure a position for herself after her retirement. Additionally, as a reader alerted to the arrangement I’m far less likely to read said filler (assuming I still read the Star with any regularity.)
Had that been a recently retired federal worker who had made similar arrangements, they would be facing legal charges with the real possibility of jail time. (Except if it had been a member of Congress; there are a special lack of “rules” in place for those worthies.)
I hadn’t thought about that aspect of it, Will — Pepper steering the contract to Trejbal’s company before she left, with at least an implied understanding she would work for the company after she retired. That is a problem…
Donn Hoffmann, I have been paying the full subscription price for The Kansas City Star. I’m proud to say I once worked at the Star with colleagues such as you. But I’m not going to pursue that half-price discount for former employees, if it still exists. I’m happy to pay the full amount if it will help the Star continue to publish.
Outsourcing may not be all bad. After reading this (and other of your entries on The Star) they could well outsource their position of public editor to you and be far and away better off.
As for Pepper, I always considered her to be an affirmative action appointee who would also be more controllable than her predecessor, Rich Hood. It is impossible for me to envision either Hood, or his assistant Steve Winn even using outsourced material much less failing to inform the reader that the material was not locally produced content.
While I had immense respect for both Hood and Winn and the copy editors I worked with, Pepper was an ethically challenged and narrow-minded disaster.
That said, I also ran into an example of this kind of conduct in the news sections. Several years ago a story broke about a note found inside one of President Truman’s books that was highly critical of the manner in which the Jewish community behaved after WW II.
The note was quite controversial and set off a discussion as to whether or not Truman was anti-Semitic. I first read the story in the Washington Post. There were several quotes in that story from interviews conducted by Post writers.
Later, I read a story written by The Star’s Washington bureau containing the same exact quotes from The Post article, however the article was written in such a way that it made it appear that The Star’s writers had conducted the interviews and were the source of the quotes.
There was a note at the bottom of the article that indicated that material from The Post had been used, but nothing that indicated that the only part of the article that contained what I considered to be original reporting had been plagiarized directly from The Post. I asked a journalist at The Star about that and was told that that occurred quite often.
I always liked Pepper. I heard she was a bit lazy, but, hell, many of us were! Reporters and editors down there now have very little breathing room, however.
…On the crediting of material taken from other sources, i.e., the Associated Press or The Washington Post, that is commonplace, and 99 percent of the time there is no problem with it. You might have a story that is pat-local, part-wire and can still legitimately carry the local byline. The important thing is the attribution at the bottom of the story.
I am a bit conflicted on the topic of outsourcing writing, especially ghost writing, because part of what I do for a living now is ghost writing.
But if the Star is assigning freelance writers to write editorials according to the Star’s directions and specifications, I don’t have a problem with that. It’s not customary and it’s not what readers expect, but the world is rapidly changing.
The question of whether the Star should disclose this practice, as the Post-Dispatch does, is trickier. One can make a case that it should, for the sake of transparency. But if the editorial is the Star’s idea, and the Star gives specific instructions on the sourcing and writing, and Star editors make the final edits before the editorial is published, then it can be argued that the editorial is the “voice” of the Kansas City Star.
I was disappointed when I read about the McClatchy cuts. I’ve read the McClatchy DC site for more than a decade and have always wondered why the Star hasn’t run more McClatchy articles. Too late now.
You’ll still have the company’s Washington bureau reports; there just won’t be a McClatchy-produced foreign report.
Jim, I am not one of the carriers for The Star but I do work for one of them three mornings a week, and I can accurately say that things are not going particularly well at the newspaper distribution facility in Lenexa. I have heard a few complaints about paychecks being late in arriving, and the new terminology being used to identify the actual size of a carrier’s load, be it The Star itself or another publication (e.g., The NY Times), sure leaves a lot to be desired. I mean, instead of referring to something as the “key size” – I think that’s how it’s worded – why not just say those are the number of odds (as opposed to full bundles) the carrier needs to pick up to complete his or her load?
And yes, the report about the formation of LLCs is true. The name I see out in Lenexa all the time is Milford Valley Distributors, if I have the spelling right and I think I do.
The Lenexa facility currently has several “down” routes, routes that lack a regular carrier, which forces what little management is still out there to do the delivering themselves. This is one reason why someone’s paper might be consistently late.
Also, the seemingly ever-changing faces in management tend to be fairly incompetent and lack good people skills…And one more thing, carriers have to buy the bags they use for the papers, and the bags don’t even say “The Star” on them. McClatchy needs to show some real pride in the paper it owns and start furnishing the carriers with bags that say “The Star”. It also needs to demonstrate more honesty and transparency in its operations.
P.S. Hey, L.A. Bruzoo, I love the poem!
The carrier I spoke with talked about the “down routes,” Rick. As I understand it, Star employees had been responsible for delivery on those routes, where somebody doesn’t show up or the routes just don’t have regular carriers. But under the new system, I believe, The Star has shifted, or is shifting, responsibility for those routes onto the distributors. That’s what the carrier meant when he said The Star just wants to print the paper and be done with it.
Everything you have said substantiates what the carrier told me.
Rick’s note about bags lets me know why last week both the Star and NY Times were delivered to me in Dow Jones bags. It’s back to either clear or orange bags this week.
Fitz, I have no problem with filling in the blanks with AP, or Post information. What I had a problem with in the Truman piece was the deliberate attempt to mislead the reader into thinking that The Star had done the interviews when they hadn’t and that’s a lie regardless the tag at the bottom indicating that they had “contributed” to the story..
Also, kudos to Julius for paying full freight on his subscription in solidarity with his former colleagues. That said, Julius, you’re not writing a newspaper now. There’s a vast difference between putting out a product for a corporate client and holding something out as being an objective and accurate picture of reality.
It reminds me of the local TV station who used to start off each segment of the newscast with some titillating bit that never appeared until the final segment. So i called the news director and asked him how I could trust the content of the story if he couldn’t even tell me the truth about when it was going to appear. Bless his heart he switched and they started telling you exactly when the stories were going to appear.
Congratulations on taking action, John, instead of just bitching and moaning about the TV station holding the teaser story til the end of the broadcast. (By the way, Julius isn’t paying full freight, at least not the print-edition subscription price, which is about $35 a month. He’s cut back to the digital edition only.)
Thank you, John Altevogt. My next comment is going to be a little off topic, but these discussions and other events over the past couple of weeks have me genuinely worried about the future of the Star.
The newly spun-off and debt-free Gannett newspaper chain is buying the Journal Media Group that includes the Milwaukee and Memphis papers. We all love to complain about McClatchy, and rightly so, and dream about Warren Buffett buying the Star. That’s an optimistic scenario. My dark view at this moment sees Gannett buying the whole McClatchy chain. If that happens, we will long for the days of McClatchy.
But I am fretting about something that hasn’t happened yet. The Star has plenty of faults, but so do I. I look forward to logging on to E-Star tomorrow morning. If I don’t see my name in the obits I’m going to howl, give thanks, read Fitz’s blog and get to work!
That would be an undesirable result…For one thing, Mi-Ai might be back!
Curious as to why you’re so negative on Gannett. If it’s debt free journalism and not dominated by bean counters, isn’t that a good thing?
Good question, John, and here are my thoughts on that.
Gannett has stripped down its major papers even more than McClatchy. My hometown paper, The Courier-Journal in Louisville, was once one of the top papers in the country. That was when the Bingham family owned it. After the patriarch, Barry Bingham Sr. died, some of the family members wanted to sell, and they got their way.
They sold to the highest bidder, understandably, and that was Gannett, which has been tearing the paper limb from limb ever since. The Courier has much less locally produced copy than The Star; much of it is pablum that Gannett distributes to all its papers…Basically, it’s a cookie-cutter, marionette operation, with Gannett pulling all the strings and doing everything on the cheap…McClatchy at least gives its papers more latitude to decide how they spend what money they do have in their budgets.
Gannett’s newspaper division was lucky in that the parent company, TEGNA, which has the broadcast (high-income) properties, kept the debt and let the papers start with a clean slate. So, it should become clear fairly quickly if they intend to invest in their papers and try to make them more substantial. But even with a fresh slate, I don’t really see things changing very much, and I haven’t seen any statements out of Gannett — or any journalistic commentary — that their goal is to restore greatness to those newspapers.
Unless big changes are on the horizon, going from McClatchy to Gannett would be like going from the county jail to solitary confinement in a federal prison.
Thank you.
Shame.
Jimmy C — or should I say the Colorado edition of JimmyCsays — your excellent blog piece today was eye-opening on many levels. First it shows what good reporting should be and the disappointing level our metropolitan “Daily Planet” has been reduced to in terms of quality and relevance. Secondly, the comments @ Ms. Pepper sheds more light on my difficulty in getting her & the Star editorial board’s attention on a midtown fair housing and discrimination issue in 2013/2014, which were covered more by online & print media outside of the KC region, The Pitch, and Midtown Post. Where is Superman or Supergirl when you need them most?
Thanks, Donovan. Rest assured the Colorado edition was a one-time thing — unless you want to volunteer to “string” for me in the Centennial State.
An interesting offer … “The Gotham on the Plains Journal” or “Paris on the Plains Star” …
“For the sake of the loyal, hard-working journalists remaining at The Kansas City Star, I really dislike flogging the paper and its owner, the McClatchy Company, for their shortcomings.”
But now that I have done just that and allowed others to join in, I would like to praise some of the fine work that the loyal hard-working journalists remaining at the kc star have published lately. Oh, wait, no, I couldn’t do that. I just like to bitch.
Check the post that just published, bright star.