The call for KC Star suburban editor Tod Palmer came when he was in the shower on May 1, a week ago last Tuesday.
When he got out of the shower he saw that the call had come from the Human Resources Department. That concerned him. He listened to the voice message, and it wasn’t from someone in HR but from KC Star Managing Editor Greg Farmer.
That told Palmer all he needed to know: “Oh, shit,” he thought, “I’m getting laid off today.”
Sure enough, when he called back, Farmer and Star Editor Mike Fannin delivered the bad news: His last official day — and the official last day for nine other Star employees being laid off or taking early retirement — would be Friday, May 11.
Tod Palmer, back when he was covering University of Missouri sports
Just like that, at age 39, Palmer’s 17-year career in the newspaper industry had arrived at a crossroads. Quite possibly, it was finished.
“I didn’t dream my newspaper career would be over before I hit 40,” he said.
**
I had a lengthy and wide-ranging phone conversation with Palmer this morning. His situation — a young person caught in the uncertainty of the newspaper industry’s cloudy future — is emblematic of what tens of thousands of young journalists are experiencing across the country.
But this has happened so much in the industry the last 10 to 12 years — widespread layoffs and reorganizations — that it no longer comes as much of a surprise to anyone.
While not expecting the call at the particular time and particular day it came, Palmer had realized for months he was probably on borrowed time at The Star, considering the precarious situation of its owner, the McClatchy Co., which has carried hundreds of millions of dollars in debt since purchasing The Star and about 30 other KnightRidder newspapers in 2006.
After becoming suburban editor last August, Palmer predicted to his wife Angie Palmer that he would be laid off in six to 18 months. (It was nine months.) So convinced was he of his thread-thin status, he told me today, “I felt like a hospice caretaker for those (suburban) products.”
Palmer’s ongoing sense of job insecurity had spiked recently after McClatchy’s flagship publication, the Sacramento Bee, laid off more than 20 employees and after McClatchy issued its first-quarter financial report, which showed the company with a quarterly loss of $39 million and, more alarmingly, revenue of 10 percent less than the first quarter of 2017.
**
Palmer grew up in south Kansas City and attended Raytown High School. He then went on to William Jewell College, where, in 2000, he got a degree in communications with an emphasis in public speaking. His first full-time newspaper job was at The Chanute (KS) Tribune, where he was sports editor. In 2006, he got a job as a page designer at The Olathe News, which The Star had purchased in 2000. (That was six years before McClatchy purchased The Star and the other KnightRidder newspapers.)
When Palmer went to work at the Olathe paper, it employed more than 50 people. Between March 2008 and April 2009, however, employment plummeted to five employees, and it became an afterthought to The Star’s overall operation.
Palmer landed on The Star’s sports desk in 2009 and in 2013 was awarded one of the most important “beats” on that desk, covering University of Missouri sports. He held that post until late last summer, when Star management decided it wanted its MU sports reporter to live in Columbia. Palmer turned that down, partly because he and Angie have sons 10 and 4, and her family lives in the Kansas City area.
The Star then hired two young men fresh out of MU’s Journalism School, Aaron Reiss and Alex Schiffer, to take up where previous MU beat writers like the legendary Mike DeArmond (retired) and up-and-comer Terez Paylor (former KC Chiefs’ beat writer and who recently became an NFL writer for Yahoo.com) had left off.
To stay in town and remain at The Star, Palmer took the news editing job in which he oversaw publication of the 816 North and 913 publications; The Olathe News; the Lee’s Summit Journal; and the Cass County Democrat. (On the side, he did some contract work for the Sports Desk, helping with coverage of Kansas Speedway races.)
**
Unlike some who have been laid off at The Star — particularly in the early days of layoffs — Palmer is not bitter. He’s not even angry about being laid off over the phone. “I didn’t take it personally,” he said.
He’s grateful for the journalism experience he accumulated and for some of his memorable experiences as a sports writer, including getting to drive a race car 145 miles an hour at Kansas Speedway and having a hand in covering the Kansas City Royals’ World Series appearances.
“I can tell you that champagne burns when you breathe it in,” he said.
Currently, Palmer is applying for writing jobs, but he’s open to changing careers, if he has to. Right now, he’s not extremely concerned about finances. The Star is giving him — and the others laid off — six months’ severance pay plus eligibility for limited, ongoing health insurance under the federal COBRA law. And his wife works full time at a call center.
Looking at the newspaper industry as a whole, he thinks one of the biggest problems is that many people in the upper ranks at newspaper chains are not good business people and are “thinking with their hearts, not their heads.”
Assessing the situation in Kansas City, he said The Star remains uniquely capable of doing something no other local entity or company can do — putting out a first-class daily, printed newspaper.
Problem is, he said, “That’s the thing they don’t seem interested in doing at the highest possible level.”
Tod with his father at Fenway Park last month
Well, Cynthia stopped paying The Star bill — offended by the difference between home delivery ($700 yr) and digital only ($200 yr). We thought they would call and offer us a deal to keep home delivery. Took a month or longer before they called and they offered no deals. So no more home delivery. It’s going to feel very strange.
Like Tod, I think the print side is where McClatchy is really screwing up.
Under the previous publisher, The Star allowed horrible delivery problems to go on for months or years. I think Tony Berg has that problem mostly ironed out, but now they are asking way, way too much for the printed product — something like $80 a month, although it seems like there’s never a set price. (By negotiating with individual subscribers on rates, they have undercut themselves to the point that people won’t pay the asking rate, which they seem to have firmed up in recent months.)
In addition, McClatchy is not succeeding at its big push to switch people over to digital subscriptions. While some other papers are adding tens of thousands of digital subscriptions each year, the McClatchy papers eek out a few thousand here and a few thousand there.
Kansas City is still a good newspaper town, and, as Tod said, The Star should “play to its strength.” If McClatchy would allow local executives to put renewed emphasis on the print product, and if they would invest in a good marketing campaign — reminding people The Star is still the best news-gathering organization by far — I think they could increase print circulation significantly.
But it just doesn’t look like McClatchy exectutives have the will or interest to do so. They’re headed down the tubes. The tragedy is so many good journalists like Tod and photographers Allison Long and David Pulliam are having the rug pulled out from under them.
“(Palmer) thinks one of the biggest problems is that many people in the upper ranks at newspaper chains are not good business people and are ‘thinking with their hearts, not their heads’.”
If I am understanding Palmer correctly, he is saying the exact opposite of what I hear most frequently, i.e., many people in the upper ranks at newspaper chains are thinking with their ruthless business heads, not from a heartfelt love of journalism.
In any event, it’s sad that the Star seems unable to escape a never-ending decline in subscribers. And it’s sad when another 10 employees get laid off.
I’m not quite sure what he was saying there, Mark, but I liked the quote!
He and I are both of a mind, however, that McClatchy is undervaluing the print product.
He also thinks many newspaper company executives believe they understand more about making the transition to digital than they really do. Only a few papers have been able to make that transition in a big way, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and The Boston Globe.
I saw a picture posted on Facebook today by a longtime subscriber showing how thin the print product was, and I have to agree that they are undervaluing the print product.
As I’ve pointed out before, they are not competing digitally with even the lowest-rated TV news outfit in town, and they cannot. However, by focusing on the kind of lengthy stories they’ve done recently with their investigative team, they can compete with TV stations that want stories that fit in a 30-second to one-minute time slot.
They can also do the kind of stuff that people want a record of for their scrapbooks — high school sports, community events etc. — that the TV stations don’t feel are sexy enough.
The most valued asset a newspaper possesses is credibility, but if The Star fails to deliver the newspaper regularly to long-time subscribers, something I have experienced repeatedly, then those most cherished customers no longer believe or have confidence in the product. The most likely subscribers are older, dying off, and canceling subscriptions by the thousands because the paper fails to hit the front yard four or five days out of seven. That’s not a journalism problem, its a business logistics problem, and McClatchy executives are to blame.
Maybe Tony Berg doesn’t have that problem “mostly ironed out.”
I have/had a Wednesday and Sunday subscription. Yesterday was the third Wednesday in a row that I haven’t gotten the paper. Pretty sure I am going to become a digital subscriber at this point. The Sunday paper can be had at QT.
So, no, the problem is not “mostly ironed out.”
Good luck to Tod Palmer. But when The Star’s upper management doesn’t even have the balls or decency to lay you off in person, then they have no hearts.
Hey wild man, when as a journalist did you decide to stop returning calls?
It’s been obvious for a long time that the newspaper has – and continues to have delivery problems. This is not something new, as you seem to be finding out here.
That management is laying people off and cutting back in so many areas would appear to indicate they are looking at the bottom line.
Unfortunately as a senior citizen, your clinging to the print product says more about The Star’s readership and demographic. Now is not the time to double down on the most costly means of reaching readers by pushing print.
Largely because those readers (look in the mirror) are the past, not the future.
The other big thing that is working against them is continuing to emphasize national news over local and regional news. Which again speaks to appealing far more to oldsters than youngsters.
What they really need isn’t cheaper subscription rates (by the way mine is well under half what some of your readers have suggested), they need unique and meaningful (and largely) local news content.
Now about those unreturned phone calls…
(BTW, I’m headed back to KC, stay tuned for a far more aggressive approach on KC Confidential)