Has anyone noticed that The Star has had some really outstanding stories lately?
Among others…
:: The five-part series on Missouri’s underfunded and beaten-down public defender system.
:: The co-opting of Independence Mayor Eileen Ware and other Independence City Council members by companies that sought, and got, multi-million-dollar contracts for projects either dubious or overpriced.
:: Missouri Auditor Nicole Galloway’s decision not to look into Sunshine Law transgressions during a more than year-long audit of former Gov. Eric Greitens.
:: Eric Adler’s Sunday story on wacko, rat-breeding Carol Dille, who has been making life miserable for her Westwood Road neighbors for almost 20 years.
The business is now being assaulted from two sides. On one is the fake-news river, with its headwaters at the White House. On the other are the hedge funds and private equity firms that are hollowing out some of the biggest publicly owned newspaper chains.
At the center of that unholy sandwich are the reporters, feature writers, photographers, graphic artists, editors and, in some cases, publishers who are trying to continue delivering good and important news coverage to a dwindling and less interested public.
It is beyond frustrating for two groups — the dwindling audience and the reporters and others who are still trying to practice responsible journalism.
Although there’s been a wave of bad news lately, including strong indications that The Star’s owner, the McClatchy Co., is headed for takeover or bankruptcy, it took a long time for journalism to get where it is today.
Let’s take a ride back to the roots of corporate journalism.
When I arrived at The Star — actually the morning paper, The Kansas City Times — in 1969, The Star was owned by the employees. Every employee could buy stock and had the option of having money taken out of his or her paycheck to go toward purchasing shares of the company. I got on board right away, even though I didn’t jump in in a big way, mostly because I’d never purchased stock and didn’t know what it was all about.
In 1977, a publicly owned company called Capital Cities Inc., which owned newspapers, TV and radio stations, came knocking at the door, wanting to buy.
The question for the employees was whether to sell. I didn’t have much say in it because I had not accumulated much stock between ’69 and ’77. But there was a lot of money to be made by those who had been accumulating stock a long time, and they jumped at the opportunity.
CapCities, as it was called, was offering $2 for every $1 worth of outstanding stock, so many people became overnight millionaires. (CapCities paid about $100 million for The Star.)
Even I, with my meager number of shares, made a nice gain: I had $10,000 worth of stock, which turned into $20,000. I used the windfall to buy my first house, on Grand, just off 51st Street. I was happy about that, of course, but deep down I knew, like all my fellow employees, that the paper would never be the same. It would no longer be a family-type operation, with excellent job security and the “partnership” the paper enjoyed with its readers and subscribers. And the profits, which had been staying in Kansas City, would be going to CapCities’ headquarters in New York.
At first, things went well. CapCities brought in good managers and maintained a strong workforce. But, over time, the corporate roller coaster took its toll. In a stunning move, CapCities bought the ABC network (and its ESPN subsidiary) in 1985 for $3.5 billion. Then, in 1995, the Walt Disney Co. bought CapCities/ABC for $19 billion.
After the sale, Disney C.E.O. Michael Eisner came to The Star’s newsroom and told employees Disney would not be selling The Star, despite Disney’s previous lack of newspaper ownership…A year later, in 1996, The Star was on the block.
In 1997, Knight Ridder Inc., then the nation’s second-largest newspaper company, bought The Star, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Belleville (IL) News-Democrat and The Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, PA, for $1.65 billion.
In a New York Times story about the sale, reporter Joseph B. Treaster wrote…
The deal solidifies Knight Ridder’s commitment to the newspaper business at a time when many rival publishing companies have been diversifying into broadcasting and other forms of communication. It also comes amid a continuing debate over how vulnerable newspapers may be to the Internet and other electronic media.
In June 2006, the month I retired, Knight Ridder, under pressure from a large, disgruntled stockholder, decided to sell all of its 32 daily papers and go out of business. Along came McClatchy, a company half the size of Knight Ridder. It paid an outrageous $4.5 billion for the Knight Ridder papers.
A New York Times story about that sale quoted Chuck Richard, an information industry analyst as saying, “McClatchy is a dolphin swallowing a small whale.”
The dolphin was never able to digest that whale, and now, to quote impeachment witness Fiona Hill, “Here we are.”
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Thanks for this sad capsule review. I am amazed and grateful The Star today does as well as it does with such limited resources. Some great reporters and writers make it required reading and contribute to the life and well-being of our town.
Credit where credit is due. The Star is breaking some very important stories, but where it is failing is that they are not covering adequately the everyday events that most people care about and so we don’t read, and celebrate, those excellent investigative pieces.
Worse yet, they miss so much by replacing the seasoned reporters with their institutional knowledge with bubblegummers who are often selectively motivated.
For example, teeny bopping crime reporter Katie Bernard wrote 2 or 3 major stories about the scandal in the US Attorneys office without mentioning Barry Grissom’s name. Only when Bryan Lowry got involved did a story mention his complete incompetence in running his office.
Then she wrote a nice piece which I can’t even remember because it happened in Lawrence. I don’t live in Lawrence and don’t care.
She then wrote a story about how Mark Dupree’s office soft peddled a case involving a sex offender. Of course he did! He soft peddles everything as a matter of policy and she missed that because it didn’t prick her feminist tentacles.
The judges of Wyandotte County are sitting on their hands doing virtually nothing because the clown act in the DA’s office is pleading cases like that and felons with guns and other major felonies down to misdemeanors because, as a matter of policy, he doesn’t want the citizens of Wyandotte County to run around with felonies on their records.
And so, because The Star sent a child to do a story an adult with institutional memory should have done (because, they’re gone), The Star reported that a case was mishandled by the DA’s office instead of reporting that every fucking case in the county is being mishandled by the DA’s office. And that is why their big investigative stories aren’t being read
Here’s a mundane example of a story missed. With all of the controversies surrounding property tax appraisals, Johnson County, KS just appointed a new county appraiser. You can get the story off their website without getting off your ass or making a phone call, but I was unable to find a story on such a significant office that affects every home owners life in Johnson County in the The Star.
https://www.jocogov.org/dept/appraiser/office-information/meet-appraiser
The Star, even in it’s glory days pretty much ignored Johnson county, there was an office on College Blvd, but very little was written about the day to day of life in JOCO, the economic engine of this region.
Altevogt wrote he did not care about a story in Lawrence, and the people in Lawrence could give a flying f*** about the DA in Wyco. To be a viable regional voice the Star has to at least give lip service to the unwashed outside the metro, difficult to do with now limited resources.
The institutional memory is of little use if the Star continues to ignore half the metro, and given the hullabaloo with home appraisals going on in Jackson County missing the changing of the guard is a typical gaff by the Star.
Good Points, Karl. My point was Lawrence has its own newspaper (until recently, a very good one) and Wyandotte no longer even rates the same quality of story from that reporter as the one done for Lawrence. So it would be nice if The Star at least paid lip service to its own bailiwick before sticking their nose (and scarce resources) into someone else’s.
I suppose the decline of the newspaper industry was inevitable. Just like so many other institutional deaths, newspaper leadership and those who silently followed have to accept partial responsibility. It seems that somewhere in the corporate consolidation of newspapers, the editors shed their self awareness of ethical middle class journalism and started basing their news judgement on virtue signaling to their closed circle of friends, and some vague, concept of wealthy corporate political correctness. One of Bill Vaughan’s “set ups” for Starbeams started with, “overheard on the bus.” Corporate journalism “stopped riding the bus.”
I miss the old Star — even when it was infuriatingly wrong.