I stole that line — the part not in parentheses — from the inimitable Michael Barbaro, host of the New York Times’ wildly popular podcast The Daily.
That’s how he ends each day’s show, capsulizing for listeners the top stories in the news.
So, today, here’s the JimmyC version of the news roundup…
:: Ellen DeGeneres has announced her show will be ending at the end of 2022. I don’t watch her show, but I saw her 2018 Netflix special, Relatable, and it was hilarious. An article in the print edition of today’s Times, recounted her start on national TV, when she first appeared on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson in 1986.
She began with this joke…
Setup: “My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was 60.”
Punchline: She’s 97 today and we don’t know where the hell she is.
And then the kicker: “I’m kidding. We know where she is. She’s in prison.”
:: The Missouri House and Senate have both approved a bill, by wide margins, eliminating the requirement that Kansas City police officers live within the city limits. After Gov. Mike Parson signs the bill into law, officers will be allowed to live anywhere within 30 miles of the city limits, but not across the state line in Kansas. The Senate passed the measure 31-2 on Wednesday, and the House did so Thursday on a 140-4 vote.
Passage of the measure angered Mayor Quinton Lucas, who said the residency-requirement rollback was “based on animosity to Kansas City.” The bill does, however, have several advantageous elements, including that it bans police chokeholds, for the most part, and requires police departments to look into officers’ history with other agencies before hiring them.
As recently as five or 10 years ago, I would have strongly objected to lifting the residency requirement, but now I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. For decades, a majority of KC police officers have lived in the Northland, so we might as well let them live in Lee’s Summit, Independence, Raytown and other Missouri suburbs.
:: At long last, the General Assembly has approved an increase in the state’s 17-cents-a-gallon gas tax, one of the lowest rates in the nation. Starting Oct. 1, the tax will increase by 2.5 cents a year until it hits 29.5 cents a gallon in 2025. The hike would make Missouri’s rate closer to the national average among states.
MoDOT has estimated that the state faces a $745 million annual funding gap for roads and bridges.
“I don’t know how much longer we can keep kicking that can down the road,” said Republican Rep. Becky Ruth of Jefferson County, south of St. Louis. “We have an opportunity to invest, make an investment in our roads and bridges, help economic development, bring jobs here and make roads safer.”
It’s gratifying to see the Republicans in General Assembly finally come around on this issue and stop trying to duck a gas-tax increase. The last time the Republican-dominated assembly tried a back-door maneuver was in 2014, when they proposed a Constitutional amendment that would have imposed a 3/4-cent statewide sales tax to pay for road and bridge improvements. That, of course, would have shifted the lion’s share of the financial burden from highway users, like truckers, to the general public.
I met and teamed up with Tom Shrout, a transportation expert who then lived in St. Louis, and we came up with this slogan: “You pay, truckers don’t.” It was very effective, and Amendment 7 went down in flames, losing by about 18 percentage points.
Tom and his wife Debra moved to Los Angeles a few years ago, but we still stay in touch. He’s a regular reader of the blog and comments frequently.
:: Finally, KCUR reported Monday that about 40 editorial employees at the Kansas City Star, excluding editors and editorial board members, have begun an effort to unionize. Led by longtime reporter and columnist Mike Hendricks, the employees have presented Star management with a request for voluntary recognition as the Kansas City News Guild.
Hendricks told KCUR the initiative came in response to the bankruptcy filing by owner McClatchy last year and the subsequent takeover by Chatham Asset Management, a New Jersey-based hedge fund.
“We didn’t know what was going to happen with the paper, either with our jobs or with the direction of the newspaper,” Hendricks told reporter Carlos Moreno. “And we thought it’d be good to have a seat at the table.”
Very few people are around who remember the last time editorial employees at The Star and The Kansas City Times, then the morning paper, tried to unionize. It was in the early 1970s, and the movement was led by a friend and colleague of mine, Robert M. Dye. We were both general assignment reporters on The Times. It took a lot of guts to initiate that move because management was very strong, much stronger than it is now.
Unfortunately, the national NewsGuild sent in an ineffectual representative who was not able to rally or inspire the reporters, photographers, copy editors and other front-line employees. I remember Dye asking me if I would sign a document stating my support for the union, and I, about two years on the job, declined. I told him I’d vote for it but wouldn’t be out front.
I remember the city editor, the late Don D. “Casey” Jones, gently but firmly grilling me in the newsroom one night, asking how I felt about it and why. I told him I was for it but slipped away as quickly as possible. When it came time for a vote, it failed badly, as many of us expected.
Then came a big repercussion: Dye, one of our better reporters, was taken off reporting and consigned to the night copy desk. For reporters with high hopes, the copy desk was exile. In short order, Dye resigned and took a job at The Milwaukee Journal and Sentinel, where he later landed on the business side of the operation and made a big salary working directly for the publisher.
I admired him for taking a chance, but I was always glad I kept my head down during that period.
In this case, Hendricks doesn’t have to worry. He’s very close to retirement age and could walk out the door, head held high, at any time. In addition, it’s likely a majority of those in management sympathize with those pushing for the union. Everybody there, including Editor, President and Time-Clock Checker Mike Fannin have to be nervous about hedge-fund journalism.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
I saw a list of their demands somewhere, probably Twitter, (Hendricks has been all over Twitter with this) and unfortunately I haven’t seen one of the demands that would help quality the most, seniority. It’s a little late since that idiot Fannin has run out most of the paper’s institutional memory in favor of cheaper teeny boppers still trying to figure out where the bathroom is. Anyway, seniority is the essence of a union shop and in this case it’s also a reasonable demand if they truly are interested in a quality product.
“Seniority” is being run out of papers everywhere, John, and you know it. That isn’t any fault of Fannin or any other metro newspaper editor; it’s the stranglehold on finances being applied by managers at the big chains and the hedge funds. Senior reporters like Hendricks, Glenn Rice, Judy Thomas, Laura Bauer and Eric Adler are fortunate to be still be getting paychecks.
In the 1970s effort to unionize, the management (in defiance of NLRB rules) mailed letters to all editorial employees saying that if there were a union and it ever called a strike, management would feel no obligation to rehire anyone. That scared too many of the openly disgruntled from voting to unionize. Management even had spies who turned in the names of the employees that showed up for an organizing meeting in a Wyandotte County park. It was a dark time, just as today The Star isn’t worth a tinker’s damn.
Haven’t heard that phrase in a long time, which prompted me to wonder about its origin. Yay, Google! Very interesting.
That caught my attention, too, Gayle. I had no idea about its origin and that the “damn” came from “dam.”
Jim, Thanks for your “Daily.” I hope you’ll keep doing this. Heather Cox Richardson does this every day at the national level. It’s one of the first things I read every morning.
I have to hunt and peck around the Star every day to get an idea what happened locally the day before. A well-written, condensed summary with background like you just did is very helpful.
I hope you’ll start doing this every day.
Thanks, Dan
Every day, Dan? I’ve been retired almost 15 years now and am still working at it…I agree, however, that trying to figure out from The Star what’s going on is completely frustrating. The majority of stories placed on the homepage — repeated and repeated as you go down the page — are ridiculous.
Does anyone remember when the Star was operating as an employee owned company?
All oldtime employees remember that time. The trouble was, some employees owned a lot more of the company stock than others, and unless the management was unusually fond of you, they limited the number of shares you could buy every time there was an “offering.” One reporter had a silent partner and put in for a $5 million purchase–which the management firmly rejected. I once asked the secretary for a prospectus. She said, “There isn’t any. But I can tell you the company is solvent.”
The Star sold to Capital Cities Communications, which owned TV and radio stations as well as newspapers, for $125 million in 1977. I had started in 1969 and by 1977 had $10,000 in stock. Not many of us with small amounts of stock liked the idea of the purchase, except that the price was very inviting — $2 for every $1 of stock we owned. The $20,000 I came away with enabled me to buy my first house, at 51st and Grand.
Most of those who became overnight millionaires, mostly men who had been there many ears, were subsequently fired by a hatchet man named Gerald Garcia whom Cap Cities brought in and then quickly dispatched. It was like Mafia hit job, just bloodless.
Under Cap Cities and publisher Jim Hale, The Star and Times went from making about $5 million a year to tens of millions; profit margins exceeded 30 percent. It became a cash cow, and those were the glory years for the paper. Yet, Cap Cities’ takeover foreshadowed what we have today — journalism gone to hell in many markets because of corporate (including hedge fund) ownership.
Point of clarification. The union effort at The Star is “led” by a broad organizing committee of many staffers. It is not “led” by me. I am merely a member of the committee and volunteered to be one of the public faces at our launch. Thanks.
Mike, I wish you and the rest the best of luck in this long-overdue endeavor.
Interesting overviews of the 1970s unionization move. How it would have impacted today’s newspaper, only the Butterfly Effect knows.
My footnote to history: I was a 1970s, KC bureau, AP copyboy at the time of the BIG union election. As you may recall, the paper was continually tormented by the pressman’s union; walking out, going on strike, and picketing. (That is when they put security at the entrances, and reqired ID. Fear of the presses being sabotaged.) The old timers had a legitimate fear that another union, lead by people “new” to the journalism business, would cause more chaos.
Anyway, Dick Olive, our AP shop steward made sure I joined The Newspaper Guild. JW Scott, editorial page editor and my father, was NOT in favor of the union. We were a house divided. Occasionally, I would taunt him with my membership card, which would make him smile and he’d call me an ignorant Wobbly.