Like a sunset, The Kansas City Star’s circulation continues to disappear on the horizon.
Between June 30, 2017, and June 30, 2018, home delivery of the Sunday Star fell by nearly 13 percent, from 92,247 copies to 80,444 copies.
During the same period, home delivery of the Monday-Friday Star dropped by slightly more than 16 percent, from 74,660 to 62,470.
In addition, the much-touted — and highly hoped for — transition from print to digital wheezes along, with The Star reporting slightly less than 7,700 stand-alone, digital subscriptions.
The Star, along with almost all other U.S. papers, reports its circulation data to the Alliance for Audited Media, an industry trade group that publishes quarterly circulation reports.
Meanwhile, The Star’s owner, McClatchy Co., continues to flag, with second quarter revenue down more than 9 percent from a year earlier, including a decline of nearly 15 percent in advertising revenue. The company also remains buried in more than $700 million in debt, dating to its ill-timed purchase of the KnightRidder chain in 2006.
But let’s get back to those raw home-delivery numbers…We’re talking about 80,000 Sunday subscribers. As recently as 10 years ago, home delivery of the Sunday Star was in the 300,000 range. That’s what you call a nosedive.
McClatchy executives keep talking about the company’s “digital transformation,” but I don’t see significant evidence of one.
Company wide, McClatchy reported 122,400 digital subscribers. With either 29 or 30 daily papers, that’s about 4,200 per paper…I don’t know how Craig Forman, McClatchy’s president and CEO, can look at that number and say, as he did in a recent earnings-report statement, “We continue to be excited about our digital future and to invest in the growth engines of our business.”
I’ll bet if you asked every remaining editorial employee at 1601 McGee (1729 Grand is in the rearview mirror) for their assessment of The Star’s future, not one would say he or she was “excited.”
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On the positive side, The Star announced on its website today the introduction of a sports-only digital subscription. The cost is $30 a year, which amounts to a very reasonable $2.50 a month.
That sounds like something that could be a big seller. And this is the right time to introduce it, with the start of the regular NFL season just around the corner.
The down side of it (leave it to me to find one, eh?) is that more and more moms are not letting their sons play football because of the high incidence of long-term brain injury. Because of that and increasing, general acknowledgment of the sport’s toll on the body and brain, football will probably give way to soccer as the nation’s most popular participatory and spectator sport in the coming years.
…Just yesterday, ESPN reported that former NFL offensive lineman Richie Incognito was arrested Monday in Scottsdale, Arizona, on misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and making threats at a funeral home where his father’s body was being held. Police were called after Incognito told an employee he had a “truck full of guns” in the parking lot. (He did.) Incognito has a history of erratic and volatile behavior and very likely suffers from football-related brain injury. Some of these former players are not only a threat to themselves but to others as well.
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Ryan
One more less-than-cheery note: At least one more KC Star editorial staff member has been discharged. Kelsey Ryan, who was hired 18 months ago as an investigative reporter, said on the Kansas City Star bylines Facebook page she had been laid off and was looking for work.
I have no inside information on why she was let go, but I can tell you it’s unusual for a relatively recent hire to be laid off. Most of those who have been laid off over the years have been long-term employees with significant salaries. And those that were replaced were supplanted by younger, lower-paid employees, like Ryan.
Ryan’s layoff comes on the heels of the departure a few weeks ago of Op-Ed columnist Mary Sanchez. That one took a lot of people by surprise, including former Star music critic Paul Horsley. On the “bylines” Facebook page, Horsely seemed to disbelieve my report that Sanchez was out.
He wrote, “Can anyone confirm this from the “inside”?
His question was met with silence. Inside, they’re shakin’, not talkin.’
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
I don’t understand why the digital only subscription isn’t doing well. While I prefer paper, I gave it up because of the price of paper and the advantages of digital (eStar), including convenience. When I talk to people about the paper, most often folks don’t know about it or assume I’m talking about the free version (kansascity.com).
But from a civic perspective, does dropping from 300,000 to 80,000 Sunday subscribers mean the folks who care about the community are disappearing, or tired, or disgusted with the paper? Or, maybe you’ll tell me, finding alternate news/opinion sources. I love KCPT WIR, but it should surely be regarded a high quality magazine, not a substitute for the daily. Do people think they can get anything substantial about how the city/county/state works from commercial TV?
KansasCity.com isn’t free, Vern. If you don’t have a subscription, you got a few free views )don’t know how many) before you hit the “pay wall.” Then you either stop viewing or buy an online subscription.
…I take it with WIR you’re talking about KCPT’s Week in Review show, which airs on Friday evening.
But could the sports digital package significantly reduce demand for the whole paper? Thereby leading to even more cuts in other parts of the publication?
One reason the digital subscriptions aren’t selling is that anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of their browser can bypass many of the so-called pay walls. The Star actually corrected that, but left the back door open on links from reporters’ Twitter feeds. And so all you had to do was wait for the reporters to boast about their latest story on Twitter and you still got to see it free. I think they’ve returned to a less restrictive paywall. Obviously, they can shut that back door down, but then there’s no point in linking to Twitter to boost your hits. No hits. no revenue.
The other flaw in the digital transformation is that TV news stations can offer free news coverage on their websites because their basic source of income is derived from people who watch TV. The Star really has no real alternative source of income and, as I’ve pointed out before, has about 1/4 the number of likes on FB, or less, than the top-rated local TV station.
It’s too bad that TV news has that advantage (but I understand why it is) because The Star still has better coverage of the vast majority of news, other than the “see the smoke, fire and police cars on the scene” action. The proliferation of news outlets and people’s indiscriminate preferences are the two main reasons we have reached this sorry point.