JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

It’s no secret that as The Star’s ranks have thinned over the years, the overall quality of the paper’s local report has diminished.

The veteran reporters who remain are stretched thinner than ever, and the young, low-paid reporters who have been hired on are busy with OJT.

Where this downturn in quality is most evident is the astonishing lack of detail in too many stories.

It’s the details, after all, that differentiate one story from another and sometimes make the difference between mundane and compelling.

A glaring example this week was a story by longtime reporter Glenn E. Rice about a 20-year-old man who was acquitted of murder in the 2017 killing of his father but convicted of killing a man who had been standing beside the father outside a grocery store.

The question that immediately popped into my mind as I read that story was, How does a guy get convicted of killing one guy outside a store but beat the rap in the killing of the guy standing next to him?

Rice — a very good reporter with more than 30 years’ experience — gave the readers no inkling about why that happened. He could have found out by making a phone call to Mike Mansur, spokesman for the Jackson County prosecutor’s office, but apparently he didn’t make that call.

Instead, he merely repeated information Mansur had put in a press release. In fact, Rice didn’t even use all the information in the press release. He had one sentence about the actual shooting:

The younger Jones (Reginald Jones Jr.) pulled a gun and shot his father, prosecutors alleged. He then pointed the gun at (Daryl) Singleton (the man beside the father) and shot him.

I regret having to say it, but this is lazy reporting. It is irresponsible for a reporter to write a story like that and not explain the most obvious question: Why was Jones Jr. convicted of killing the bystander but not his father?

I got the answer by emailing Mansur. Mansur (a former Star reporter himself) said the defendant and two friends testified that just before Jones started shooting, the father, Reginald Jones Sr., started to walk inside the store. The witnesses said they believed Jones Sr. was going into the store to retrieve one or more guns and that they felt threatened.

“As you probably know,” Mansur said, “in Missouri we have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that defendant had no reason to believe he felt threatened — sometimes a high bar.”

If the men claimed they also felt threatened by Singleton — and I don’t know that they did — the jury didn’t buy it.

…In addition to this being a failure by Rice, it is an indictment of the editing. I get the impression that reporters often post stories on the website without another set of eyes being put on the stories. I hope that’s not the case, but it sure appears that way.

Small fry that I am in the publishing world, I fly without a net (no editor), and I frequently make errors. You readers are my editors, and I appreciate it when you call errors or omissions to my attention.

Reporters at a major metropolitan newspaper should not be flying without a net, however. That’s not right. Stories like the one Rice wrote cost the paper credibility. And when credibility ebbs, so do readership and circulation. I hope top management at the McClatchy chain in Sacramento understand this, because if stories like this become the norm, a lot of people won’t care very much if their paper — or the chain — goes under.

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Fortunately, we are still getting some good, everyday reporting from The Star, and I’d like to single out one reporter, Robert A. Cronkleton, who routinely demonstrates that he has the reader in mind when he writes.

Cronkleton, also a 30-plus-year veteran, is not one of the The Star’s big-name reporters. Last I knew, he had the early-morning to early-afternoon shift and covers a lot of weather-related stories and low-level crime stories.

One thing I appreciate about Cronkleton — whom I worked with in the Wyandotte County bureau in the late 1990s and early 2000s — is that he not only gets the “who, what, when, where and why,” but he is very explicit about the “where.”

Let me give you two examples:

:: On Tuesday, Cronkleton and another reporter, Luke Nozicka, wrote about an 18-year-old (later identified as Corey Robinson of Kansas City) who was killed during a disturbance in the Brookside area. The story said, “Police responded about 12:15 a.m. on an ambulance call to the area of 57th and McGee streets, which is just south of Brookside Park and two blocks from the Trolley Track Trail.”

Cronkleton

Most reporters would have let it go at “the area of 57th and McGee streets,” but not Cronkleton. He understands that in a metro area the size of Kansas City, many people are not familiar with 57th and McGee. So, he added “south of Brookside Park and two blocks from the Trolley Track Trail,” which places the intersection in a much broader context.

:: On June 30, Cronkleton wrote about a 17-year-old girl who was murdered and whose body was found in the back of a semi in Kansas City, KS. Here’s how Cronkleton described the location:

“Jasmine Mills’ body was found Saturday morning in the 1100 block of South 12th Street in an industrial area near the Kansas River. The area is filled with junk yards and railroad tracks, with many semi trucks parked in rows behind tall fences.”

A lot of reporters would not have gone beyond saying the 1100 block of South 12th Street. For context, though, Cronkleton put it near the Kansas River and then proceeded, in one sentence, to paint a picture of a forlorn area that would seem to be a place where a dead body might turn up. From that sentence, it sounds like he took the trouble to go out there. If so, that is great — a good service to the readers.

Congratulations to Cronkleton. And let’s hope other Star reporters — beginners and veterans, alike — follow his lead.