On Dec. 31, Mark Zieman, former publisher of The Kansas City Star, will be leaving the McClatchy Co., where he has been vice president of operations the last eight years.
In a day of other swirling developments, Mike Fannin, editor of The Star, is becoming president of The Star, replacing Tony Berg, who has been The Star’s editor and publisher since 2016.
Oddly, The Star’s story about Fannin’s elevation does not say a word about Berg’s move. It was Dan Margolies of KCUR who got the scoop about Berg. Margolies’ story says Berg is becoming publisher of The Wichita Eagle.
Berg had been regional publisher for McClatchy’s Central Division, which included The Star, The Eagle, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Belleville (Illinois) News-Democrat. Margolies said, however, that on Friday Berg’s LinkedIn site listed him as publisher of just the Eagle and as president and publisher of the Central Region until this month.
Mark Zieman
…For many years, The Star has not been forthcoming when writing about its own operations, but failing to report the ouster of The Star’s publisher is a new low in the “lack-of-transparency” category.
It is a terrible disservice to the readers, and it is one reason The Star has lost significant credibility with readers and civic leaders alike.
McClatchy also is guilty of not being forthcoming about personnel moves. It announced Zieman’s resignation not in a news release but very quietly in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Friday afternoon. SEC rules require publicly owned companies to report the departures of high-ranking corporate officers.
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A Kansas native, Zieman has spent the majority of his career at The Star. He began there as an editorial intern in 1982 while pursuing a journalism degree at the University of Kansas. After graduating in 1984, he joined the Houston bureau of the Wall Street Journal but returned to The Star as an investigative reporter in 1986.
He became projects editor in 1989, managing editor in 1992, editor and vice president in 1997 and president and publisher in 2008, before moving to Sacramento with McClatchy in 2011.
As projects editor, Zieman directed the paper’s examination of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.
Interestingly, McClatchy said it would not be replacing Zieman, who is either 58 or 59. That could mean Zieman was told his job was being eliminated and was offered the chance to resign. Either way, I’m sure he’ll walk away with a lavish severance package. His total compensation for 2018 was about $1.8 million.
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Fannin, 53, succeeded Zieman as The Star’s editor in 2008, after having served as sports editor and then managing editor. He joined The Star in 1997 after working as an assistant sports editor at The Dallas Morning News. Fannin is a Kentucky native who attended the University of Texas. He started his journalism career at the San Antonio Light, which closed in 1993.
The Star has won some significant journalistic prizes under Fannin, but, along with Berg, he has presided over a long period of stagnation at the paper. The editorial and advertising staffs are shadows of what they once were, and the paper’s “news hole” is much smaller than it was 10 to 15 years ago.
Editor’s note: I rewrote much of this after learning from a regular reader about The Star’s failure to report Berg’s ouster in its story about Fannin.
The only acknowledgment The Star gives to the fact that Berg is out is that in today’s (Saturday’s) paper, his name is off the masthead. How many readers would notice that??!!
This is a telling sign of a chickenshit organization.
While I would prefer a different adjective, I think there is some merit in your observation about what the Star has become. Their coverage of local and state news is becoming more and more inadequate. Examples:
1) I can’t find anything in today’s paper about Parson meeting with Lucas and 3 other mayors on gun violence in Springfield yesterday.
2) I can’t find anything in yesterday’s or today’s paper about Thursday’s tumultuous meeting of the KCMO city council. (There was a lengthy, heated discussion about Councilman Ellington’s proposed changes to the ordinance on non-discrimination requirements in awarding contracts to construction contractors.)
3) At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the Star’s news stories and editorials on the ongoing Jackson County property tax fiasco have been poor in both their quality and quantity.
I would actually have more respect for The Star had they simply not reported anything at all about this transition. Instead, they print this fawning piece about Fannin and all the awards the paper has received under his watch. Yeah. Fine. Awards are great. And I’m happy for the reporters and former colleagues who have received them. But these awards are superficial and they do not mean a goddamn thing to the community which has been ripped off by this paper for the last decade with higher subscription prices, spotty home delivery, and lesser coverage brought on by the constant downsizing and unprecedented loss of institutional memory and veteran journalists. THAT is Mike Fannin’s legacy!
I know that Fannin and Zieman will say that things are different from the way they were in the 20th century. A daily newspaper, they say, can no longer retain all the staff needed to cover every City Council, school board or election in the metro area. It doesn’t have the luxury of having its own movie critic. It can get by with just five staff photographers and less than a handful of copy editors. Suburban news bureaus? A fully-staffed business desk? Forget it. Not enough readers care. That is what they will say. And they will dismiss their critics as cranks who are stuck in the past and still bitter over being laid off or forced to retire.
However, when The Star had all these supposed luxuries, it was truly a voice of authority. It was the go-to place for information ranging from a local school board election to the score of the basketball game at your child’s high school. It was where you found out what your City Council was up to and what local play or art show was worth seeing.
Mark Peavy points out some very telling examples of The Star’s inadequate coverage (and I blame management for the lackluster coverage, definitely not the reporters). Since leaving The Star 11 years ago, I have become very involved in the local theater scene. I have written and produced two plays at the annual KC Fringe Festival. In the months preceding that event, the organizers hold a meeting about how to promote our plays. There is always an incredible amount of frustration expressed about The Star which has not had a theater reporter since Robert Trussell’s retirement. It has gotten to the point where producers don’t even bother sending press releases about their plays to The Star because they know that it will be ignored. They tell us to simply focus on social media.
Yes, I know, The Star will not receive any awards for covering local theater or the Independence City Council. Still, I wish that Fannin and Co. would realize what happens when you stop doing those little things.
Finally, I had to laugh at the comments from the McClatchy CEO about Fannin: “Mike Fannin is among the most talented editors in America today, and he leads one of the country’s greatest newsrooms. I’m delighted that he’s now able to expand his influence both at The Star and also with the community that he loves.”
Let’s be straight here: No one in a position of power at McClatchy or its newspapers give one flying rat’s ass about their community. Comments like that, as well as The Star covering up the departure of its publisher, are some of the most shameless spin jobs I have ever seen. And they are proof positive that McClatchy and The Star have lost their heart, soul and moral compass.
What impact will this have on the Master Narrative?
https://www.thepitchkc.com/yes-master/
“And it’s just a box of rain
I don’t know who put it there
Believe it if you need it
Or leave it if you dare
And it’s just a box of rain
Or a ribbon for your hair
Such a long long time to be gone
And a short time to be there”
That’s the best and truest kicker ever.
Based on this story from the Sacramento Business Journal, it looks like what’s happening with Fannin, Berg and Zieman is part of a company-wide restructuring: https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2019/10/21/mcclatchy-to-streamline-nationwide-management.html