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

It’s time once again for a journalism news round-up — all the news that Fitz can print.

Let’s start with The Star and a couple of significant developments there.

** First, the big, white letters identifying The Star’s home on McGee Street came down last week.

A friend passed along this photo from Twitter.

Even though this was not a surprise, it still took the wind out of me. It was hard enough when the paper sold its longtime headquarters at 1729 Grand several years ago, but now it is losing its last significant downtown foothold.

The Star announced back in November that it would leave the green glass building its former owner, Knight Ridder, commissioned in the early 2000s, just before the internet started taking big bites out of the traditional newspaper business.

The Star is now being printed in Des Moines, and the editorial staff is being relocated to who knows where.

The Privitera family, which owns Mark One Electric, now owns the building, built at a cost of $200 million, but has not said what they plan to do with it.

I sure hope it doesn’t fall into disuse and become known, down the line, as “the green monster.”

** The Star last week lost another good journalist — City Hall Reporter Allison Kite, who joined up with the Missouri Independent and the Kansas Reflector, two free, nonprofit, online operations that have quickly found niches with people looking for substantive coverage of state government. She’ll be based in Kansas City and focusing on environmental coverage.

Allison Kite

Kite, who had been with The Star three years, bowed out graciously, saying on Twitter…

“I loved every minute here, even the ones I hated. This industry can be rough, but The Star is a really special place with ambitious journalists. It constantly punches above its weight, and I’m proud to have worked with the wonderful staff here.”

It’s a hell of a thing to have to say The Star is punching above its weight when, a few decades ago, it was making a profit of 30 or 40 cents on the dollar and setting the civic and governmental agenda in Kansas City.

Kite’s departure marks the second loss of a key reporter in recent weeks, with The Star having promoted education reporter Mara Rose Williams to the editorial board.

I said then that I wondered what the paper would do about an education reporter, and now they’ve also got to find a City Hall reporter. My guess is they’ll promote one or more of the young people they hired not too long ago to cover gun violence.

The shuffle and the scramble goes on at 1601 McG….Check that. Wherever they call home now, or will call home.

** On the national level, Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that is far and away the king of cost-cutting journalism, is poised to take over Tribune Publishing, which has been on a long slide since 2007, when former radio executive Sam Zell bought the chain for $8.2 billion and promptly ran it into the ground.

(A good friend, Ernie Torriero, a former colleague of mine at The Star, resigned from the Chicago Tribune several years ago, before things got really bad. He later touched down safely and securely at Voice of America in D.C. and now has a nice salary, regular hours and the prospect of a satisfying retirement.)

Some of Tribune’s other papers, besides the Tribune, are the Orlando Sentinel, the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale and the Hartford Courant and Baltimore Sun, both of which were formerly run by former KC Star editor Mike Waller, who is now retired in Hilton Head, SC.

Alden has a deal to buy Tribune Publishing for about $630 million. The deal is supposed to close within the next three months, but Alden might be selling one of the papers, the Baltimore Sun, to a hotel magnate named Stewart Bainum Jr. for about $65 million.

Alden already owns 60 dailies through its MediaNews Group, which was founded by the original journalistic shyster, William Dean Singleton, who earned the nickname “Lean Dean” for his penurious operations.

William Dean Singleton

Wikipedia says, “His tight-fisted methods were later adopted as the preferred model by Alden Global Capital and other hedge funds that took over near-bankrupt newspaper companies.”

**

It’s a tough time to be a journalist working for any company owned by a hedge fund, including The Star, which is owned by Chatham Asset Management, out of New Jersey.

I’d say Allison Kite made a damn good move.