As I read The Star, I can’t help but keep a mental scorecard, noting both where it does well and where it falls short.
Here are some of my pluses and minuses from recent days (and in one case weeks).
+ The Star gets a gold star for today’s lead story about Jackson County suspending implementation of a policy change that would have greatly limited the hours that people who were arrested would be able to bond out. Instead of 24-hours a day, every day, the new policy, which seems to have been rolled out of somebody’s back pocket (look what I’ve got!), people would have been able to bond out only from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, meaning many people arrested on minor charges would have to stay in jail overnight or over a weekend before having even a chance to bond out…If The Star hadn’t picked up on this, the policy would have quietly gone into effect next Tuesday. But reporter Mike Hendricks, who has broken several big county stories the last year or so, saw it on the county website and asked County Executive Frank White about it. White then his the brakes. And the brakes should definitely stay on; that is a ridiculous change, even though two St. Louis jail have similar bond-out restrictions.
= (That’s a minus sign.) Tuesday’s sports section contained three stories about today’s NFL college draft. One story, by Blair Kerkhoff, led the section; the other two, inside the section, were by Chiefs’ beat writer Terez Paylor…None of the three stories said when the draft was being held. Now, most NFL fans knew when it was taking place, but I didn’t, and I’m sure thousands of other readers didn’t, either.
Bill Turque
+ City Hall reporter Bill Turque gets a kudo (here) and a kick (next bullet). On Monday, he had an excellent enterprise story (one he had to dig for instead of coming from breaking news) about troubles with the ATA’s on-demand, ride-sharing system for disabled persons. Seems it’s much more popular than expected, resulting in sometimes long delays for riders.
= Last week, Turque wrote a story about a south Kansas City pastor endorsing Kansas City businessman Phil Glynn in the 2019 mayor’s race. This was surely one of the strangest stories I’ve seen in the paper in a long time. That’s because more than a decade ago, The Star stopped writing about endorsements in local political races. They have virtually ignored endorsements from major groups like the Citizens Association, the Committee for County Progress and Freedom Inc., not to mention endorsements by individuals. Turque, of course, is relatively new to The Star (although this is his second stint), so maybe he’s been given the latitude to cover the mayor’s race however he wants. The problem is this story sets a precedent. The field of mayoral candidates is going to be large, and with that endorsement story, every candidate will be able to go to Turque and demand equal coverage for their endorsements. If he writes about every endorsement, I’m fine with it because I love politics and want to know about the endorsements. But I doubt that was Turque’s intent, and I have no idea how he’s going to get out of this mess, other than to disappoint people.
+ You don’t see The Star covering very many evening and night meetings. That’s become a thing of the past. But hats off to Max Londberg for covering the MLK Advisory Group’s first public meeting Tuesday at the Linwood YMCA. It started at 6 p.m. and must have run at least 90 minutes, meaning Londberg didn’t get back to the office and start writing before about 8 p.m. The Star recognized this was an important meeting and a delicate subject — how to appropriately honor Martin Luther King Jr. in Kansas City.
Melinda Henneberger
= I’m not a big fan of editorial page writer and columnist Melinda Henneberger (who is married to Turque). She hits the long ball occasionally, but I generally find her writing stilted and opaque…I read with interest, though a recent piece in which she drew parallels between Gov. Greitens and President Trump. I was going along nicely until I hit the “kicker,” the last sentence. It reads like this: “Just as Trump himself would never willingly leave office, he won’t push Greitens to do that. But because the president really is sui generis, Greitens is a lot less likely to have a choice.”
I took three, maybe four years of Latin in high school (can’t remember exactly), but I don’t think I ever came across that term, and it stopped me short when I read it in Melinda’s column. At coffee yesterday with a friend — a learned lawyer with tons of political experience — if he knew what it meant, and he said, essentially, unique or one of a kind.
I think if I went out on the street, though, and asked the first 10 people I came across what it meant, I’d be lucky to find one.
The JimmyCsays rules of journalism (and probably The New York Times style book) says reporters should not use foreign-language phrases unless 1) it is abundantly clear what they mean (i.e., carpe diem) or 2) you say in parentheses what they mean.
…There’s a King’s English term for what Melinda did: SHOWING OFF.
