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

Will the Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory save The Star?

That’s what a friend and blog reader asked me jokingly the other day, referring to The Star’s big spike in sales of special sections and some daily editions leading up to and following the Super Bowl.

We both laughed, and he answered the question with this: “They’re going to come up a few million short.”

Were it an independent newspaper fighting on its own, The Star might be able to come through this newspaper carnage in decent shape. Unfortunately, it’s caught in the tentacles of parent company McClatchy’s plunge toward takeover or bankruptcy.

McClatchy is still carrying a $700 million debt from its 2006, $4.5 billion buyout of Knight Ridder. In addition, McClatchy has already announced it will not be able to make a required pension-plan payment of $120 million, due this year.

This is not to say The Star doesn’t have plenty of trouble on its own. Circulation figures are always the best gauge of a newspaper’s viability, and figures for The Star between 2016 and 2019 tell a frightening story.

For purposes of this comparison, I used “total average individual paid circulation” figures The Star reported to the Alliance for Audited Media, a trade organization. That category includes home delivery, mail and single-copy sales.

The key statistic: Between December 2016 and December 2019, The Star’s print-edition circulation has dropped a full 50 percent.

Sunday print circulation, which was 283,000 a decade ago, is now down to less than 79,000.

Weekday circulation is now below 50,000, which was about the circulation of the small, first paper I worked for in Covington, KY, in 1968-69.

Here are the stats:

December 31, 2016

Sunday print — 157,971
Monday to Friday (average) print — 88,417

December 31, 2017

Sunday print — 118,203
Monday to Friday print — 76,853

December 31, 2018

Sunday print — 97,376
Monday to Friday print — 64,718

December 31, 2019

Sunday print — 78,627
Monday to Friday print — 49,320

…Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that during that same period, the number of digital subscriptions appears to be only about 12,000 — nothing close to what it needs to be to make a successful “digital transformation.”

So, I hope president/publisher/secretary Mike Fannin and the rest of the group down at 16th and McGee enjoy the current bump in sales because later this year, in all likelihood, The Star and the 28 other McClatchy papers are going to be plunged into chaos.

**

On a happier note, I was thrilled to read in today’s paper that a young man whom Patty and I watched grow up played the biggest role in stopping The Great Chase at the Super Bowl parade Wednesday.

When we lived at 56th and Main streets in Brookside, J.T. Hand lived two doors down with his family. He was a good kid, but he had a bit of an edge about him, and occasionally some hijinks on the block would be traced back to him.

His father, Mike Hand, was working his way up the ranks of the Kansas City Police Department (eventually he became deputy chief), and his mother, Nancy Hand, was the principal at St. Teresa’s Academy, at the top of 56th Street.

Patty always contended that J.T. wanted to become a police officer. I don’t know whether J.T. told her that, or Nancy told her that, or it was pure supposition…but she was right. The only surprise was he joined the Independence Police Department instead of KCPD.

…Now on to Wednesday. After this idiot Addae J. Doyle, 41, of Kansas City, KS, drove through a fence at the north end of Grand Boulevard and started speeding south along the parade route, J.T., who was working the parade, apparently on foot, jumped into an unoccupied but running KC police car and began following Doyle.

He followed him all the way to the intersection of Grand and Pershing Road, where Doyle made a right turn and headed toward the mob of people assembled around Union Station.

Other police cars were involved in the chase, too, but shortly after Doyle made the turn, J.T. angled his car into the rear of Doyle’s Ford Taurus and spun it around. On video, it looks like a slow-motion, stock-car collision.

Almost immediately, KCPD Major Scott Caron came along and rammed the front of the Taurus with his police car, ending the ordeal.

Yesterday, J.T. was among the officers who got to take a star turn at a news conference where Chief Rick Smith gave a full explanation of what had happened.

J.T. said…

“We got him boxed in and slowed down. When we took that turn onto Pershing and saw all of those people that were basically standing in the middle of the road, we knew we had to end it, and luckily we had an opening.”

Bravo, J.T.! You’re a credit to the uniform, and past and present residents of 56th Street are very proud of you!