The inattention being paid to production of The Star’s print edition is really starting to piss me off.
You might remember a few years ago when speculation was rife that the Kansas City Aviation Department was intentionally cutting back on maintenance of KCI in order to convince people of the need for a new terminal.
I never did put any stock in that — the city’s maintenance of everything under its 300-plus-square-mile purview is always in flux — but now I’m beginning to wonder if The Star is letting the print edition slide as part of its and parent company McClatchy’s big push to switch readers from print to digital.
More and more, the print edition — for which The Star’s asking price is $60 to $70 a month — consists of column after column of black type, with relatively few photos, graphics, quote boxes and other visual elements that would make it much more appealing.
But that’s not the worst part. More stories with big holes are popping up. I mean figurative holes that leave you scratching your head and wondering why the stories don’t make sense.
I’ll give you two examples.
Example No. 1: A few days ago — I believe it was Monday but I’ve recycled the paper — medical affairs reporter Andy Marso had a front-page story saying an auditing firm had discovered that nearly 70 percent of the patients whom Truman Medical Center officials had deemed eligible for help with their bills by the city were, in fact, not eligible.
The subsidies come from a city health levy that generates about $50 million a year. Marso did not estimate how much money the ineligible payments was costing taxpayers, but my guess is it could easily be several million dollars.
I wasn’t far into the story when it began alluding to someone named Walsh, who clearly was the primary source of information.
However, the story was missing a “first reference” to Walsh, that is, Walsh’s full name and title.
Paragraph after paragraph cited information provided by “Walsh,” but the reader never learned the full name or title.
Naturally, the story left me frustrated, so I went to kansascity.com and looked up the story to see how the online version compared.
As I expected, the online version contained the first reference very high in the story. The mystery source turned out to be Elizabeth Walsh, a Kansas City Health Department statistician.
Walsh was so important to the story that the online version also had a photo of her.
Elizabeth Walsh, mystery source (Photo by Andy Marso, KC Star)
Now that photo would have really helped the print-edition story, but I would have settled for a simple line saying, “Elizabeth Walsh, a statistician for the Kansas City Health Department.”
…What probably happened, I can tell you from experience, was an editor inadvertently cut the first reference in an attempt to make the story fit into the designated news hole. It was the worst possible cut and had the effect of making a muddle of the story.
Example No. 2: A story on Page 4A of yesterday’s paper ran under the headline, “Man stole KCPD car, drove wrong way.”
Well, you don’t have people stealing police cars every day, so that piqued my interest.
The writer was longtime police reporter Glenn E. Rice, who, like Marso, is a very able reporter. Rice recounted how 30-year-old Keith A. Conner of Kansas city stole a cop car and took police on a 15-minute chase on the west side of downtown and then into Kansas City, KS. At one point, he was driving the wrong way on Interstate 35.
Naturally, I was very curious as to how the chase ended and where.
Alas, I and other readers of the print edition were not to find out.
Here are the last two paragraphs of that story on Page 4A:
Conner eventually drove west toward Avenida Cesar E. Chavez, where he allegedly ignored a stop sign and continued into Kansas City, Kan. Other law enforcement, including the Kansas Highway Patrol and Kansas City, Kan. Police Department, joined the chase.
Authorities estimated that the chase caused nearly $6,000 in damages to the patrol car.
Now, the story started out naming the driver (Keith Conner) and saying he was facing criminal charges. So, how was he apprehended? And where?
Again, I had to go to the online version. What I found was that two paragraphs near the end of the story had been cut.
Here are the two pivotal paragraphs print-edition readers didn’t see:
Police said Conner drove through a barricade at S. 18th Street Expressway and Kansas Avenue and continued for about half of a mile before crashing into a guard rail.
He jumped out of the car and ran. Police arrested him after a short chase.
**
The foot chase might have been short, but for readers of The Star’s print edition, the chase never ended.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
If they are indeed sabotaging the print edition to encourage the digital edition, it is a pathway to failure. They simply cannot compete with the TV news stations who have a mutually synergistic product to sell.
Better they use the fact that the Star can do longer investigative stories and use those to bolster the print edition. Those are the only successes they’ve had lately and yet they seem oblivious to what works in favor of Berg’s (McClatchy’s?) silly fantasy that they’re outshining the TV folks digitally.
That seems to be what The Star is doing, John — putting 95 percent of the effort into the “big throws,” like “Why so secret, Kansas?”
With the pressure on the ever-thinning ranks of reporters and editors to “keep the line moving” on the digital front, they just don’t have the time or human resources to put out a consistently substantive, visually appealing and well edited print product. I’m just dubious about the digital transformation working for McClatchy. I don’t know what the problem is; management just doesn’t seem to have been able to come up with a winning strategy.
SMH, Jim … SMH …
I sometimes have to go to the urban dictionary to translate acronym-based comments, and this is such a time.
I believe Les, former “slot” man on The Star’s once-great copy desk, is saying, “Shake my head,” or “Shaking my head.”
Fitting.
That’s exactly what he’s saying — and we’re all smh in unison.
Gayle — Wouldn’t the grammatically correct version of that be SOH(s)?
I’ll submit it to the Urban Dictionary for consideration.
Yes, of course. However, I don’t believe that abbreviation exists at the present. Believe me, I thought about this long and hard before I submitted it, knowing you’d have something to say.
But what I came on here to say is, so now we’re using the p-word that means to urinate, and will it be used in the print version as well? What’s next, sh*t?
Yes, that put me back on my heels, too, Gayle. I don’t like it. But that website is such a chatterbox operation now — what with “latest news” being mostly Chiefs and Royals news — that we shouldn’t be surprised at much of anything.
My guess is that these screwups are more the result of overburdened writers and editors who are probably less diligent about grammar, style and word editing than those who served their time in the days when articles had to clear several levels of checking. Conspiracy theories are almost always more dramatic—whether it’s a cabal intentionally sabotaging the print product or one that meets secretly to plan the newspaper’s (all all the media’s) liberal agenda. The more likely explanation is that those levels of editing, now forever gone, served a valuable purpose.
You saw, Mike, that I alluded to “the ever-thinning ranks of reporters and editors” in my response to Altevogt’s comment. And, yes, I might have been a bit intemperate suggesting sabotage. However, McClatchy managers never, ever talk about the print product, so I feel sure that an attitude of benign neglect now permeates the entire organization insofar as the print products are concerned. McClatchy is making such small gains on the digital front, however, that print ought to remain a priority. I believe it still generates a majority of McClatchy’s revenue.
Jim: I guarantee that McClatchy is doing all of what you mention on purpose. The head of the news division, Mark Zieman, acknowledged that to me in a conversation I had with him about 6 months ago. Let me give you just one example (I could give you a dozen): At the Island Packet in Hilton Head, where I live, the paper quit publishing the results or stories about the games in Saturday’s paper. “You can get them online,” Zieman told me. In Sunday’s paper each game gets a paragraph or two, and that’s it.
The paper is no longer printed in Hilton Head; it ‘s printed in Columbia SC. It’s also edited and designed in Columbia (at The State, another McClatchy paper). Because Columbia is 3 hours from Hilton Head, deadlines had to be moved up to 7 p.m. Anything happening after that doesn’t get published in the printed paper. (As Zieman says, you can get it on line. Except, of course, many things don’t get covered because of staff cuts). Don’t high school fans get angry at this turn of events? Yes, says Zieman, but they’re a small, vocal group and we save a ton of money on our production costs. (In other words, to hell with them). Furthermore, according to Zieman, this is all part of a strategy to eliminate the paper product and switch to 100% online. The target for the Packet, at least, is 2021, or “earlier if we can do it,” according to Zieman.
I know I’ve been gone 15 years from the newspaper business and don’t fully understand today’s publishing world, but I see no way in hell that this new business model will do anything but destroy McClatchy.
Thanks for that straight-up information, Mike. I’m a bit surprised Zieman didn’t say, “Of course, this is off the record.” But I guess that’s how open they are about their disregard for print. (Also, maybe he doesn’t know you contribute comments occasionally to a high-profile — ahem — blog in a city with a McClatchy paper.)
And, yes, I agree, they are on the road to perdition, or at least financial failure.
Jim, as you noted, last week the Star announced their $30 online sports subscription. So since then:
– Their Royals beat writer has left to go to the LA Times to cover the Angels. According to Maria Torres on Twitter (the former beat writer), Sam McDowell, who covers Sporting Kansas City, has also been assigned the Royals beat. Note that this current road trip The Star on all their platforms are using the AP game story.
– Over the Labor Day weekend, if you tried to read any sport story on an Android device, the Star app showed a headline, maybe a somewhat associated video, and no text. It did show up properly if you read it on the website (after hunting around as usual to find it).
If you want to sell this sports package, you immediately assign another writer to cover the Royals for the remainder of the season. Your online competitor has a full time Royals beat writer plus other contributors talking about the Royals. Repackaging AP stories which are available many many places for free does not sell a $30 subscription.
This also shows they have no quality control behind the scenes at McClatchy checking to see if their news source apps are updated and fully working.
Sometimes I wonder if higher McClatchy management has just decided to milk the cow until collapses and then move on to something else claiming no responsibility for the collapse.
Interesting that Mark Zieman would say that, considering at a lunch meeting with our bureau in 1995, I asked him if a day would come when most people would be reading their newspaper on a computer rather than a paper and he smugly replied that the print product would always be strong.
On the other hand, I distinctly recall him saying at a staff meetng one day — and this probably would have been in the Disney or Knight-Ridder era — something like, “We could probably buy America On Line now, but we probably wouldn’t be able to buy it in a few years.”
I think he had a better-than-average-newsman sense of the Internet’s potential.
If saving money is the main objective of the Star, I’d say they were doing a pretty good job of it by keeping the number of printed pages to a bare minimum, cutting out expensive color photos and saving ink.
FYI- I just renewed my subscription for the paper edition after the Star called and offered it to me for $10.00 per month. I had cancelled them over a year ago over a dispute over how much I owed them and they sent me to a collection agency. I never did pay so I guess they relented.
I don’t know how they expect to make money with a price like that, but I’ll sure as hell take it for as long as I can. But once they try to raise the rates, I’ll cancel in a heartbeat.
Good to hear from you, Chuck…That’s been the m.o. for several years now: Let people in the door cheap and then keep raising the price. I’ve heard from several people who got turned over to a collection agency. Always a nasty business.