Repercussions from The Kansas City Star’s and owner McClatchy’s ongoing diminishment continue to unfold.
On Tuesday, The Star reported that it would, at last, have a new physical home: it will be leasing space in a Crown Center building at 2405 Grand Blvd.
That means the paper will be giving up its spacious “suite” on the Plaza.
If you’ll recall, I sniffed out the “Plaza Suite” story in January after The Star sent subscribers an email about carrier shortages. The paper listed its address as “4741 Central Street, Ste. 541, Kansas City, MO 64112.”
The suite turned out to be this mail box in the UPS store on Central.
In Tuesday’s story, reporter Kevin Hardy said The Star anticipated moving into its new space in June or July. He said terms of the lease were not disclosed, and he quoted Star president, editor and suite supervisor Mike Fannin as saying…
“We’re pleased to establish new headquarters in a terrific, central location in the city. Our journalists will continue to work from — and cover — communities across the metro area, as they have done so well throughout two long years of the pandemic. We look forward to working together again in-person, and this will be a great new place to call home.”
I hope The Star finds some level of stability at Crown Center, partly because in its wake the paper is leaving behind two properties that seem lifeless.
First, McClatchy, which bought the newspaper back in 2006, sold the longtime headquarters at 1729 Grand Blvd. to businessman Vince Bryant, who said he planned to redevelop the building into retail, residential and commercial space. Before Covid, significant activity was taking place at the site, but it seems to have ground to a halt. I’m dubious about Bryant’s plan coming to fruition. He’ll have to show me a lot more than what I see to make me a believer.
The second step in The Star’s real-estate meanderings goes back to about 2003, when Knight Ridder, which owned the paper at the time, gave the go-ahead to construction of a $199 million printing plant. The stunning green-glass building, which soars above I-670, opened in 2006, the year McClatchy bought The Star and the other Knight Ridder papers as that firm was folding up its tent.
McClatchy took on more than $1 billion in debt to buy the K-R papers, and the print plant was part of that debt.
A few years ago, before it filed for bankruptcy and was subsequently bought by a hedge fund, McClatchy decided to sell the print plant with the idea of leasing it back from the new owner. Up stepped a company called Ambassador Hospitality, which is an arm of Mark One Electric, owned and operated by the Privitera family.
Ambassador/Mark One did, indeed, lease the plant back to The Star, but only for a couple of years because The Star decided to abandon the plant and start printing what was left of the paper at the Des Moines Register and truck the papers back to KC in the early-morning hours. The result, to break it down to its essence, is why when the Royals play on a Thursday night, print subscribers don’t get the game story until Saturday morning.
Meanwhile, Mark One sold or trashed the not-very-old printing presses and began looking for a way to unload the building. Last year, when talk of a downtown baseball stadium bubbled back to the surface, the Priviteras eagerly threw out the prospect of selling the building to make way for the stadium, if it came about.
The downtown-stadium flirtation, fueled largely by sports talk radio, quickly went cold — who’s going to pay for it? — and the Priviteras’ big building is looking less green and more white elephant by the day.
**
The Star hasn’t said how much square footage it is renting. My guess is it will be significantly larger than its Plaza Suite and significantly smaller than its previous two homes.
However much space it turns out to be, I doubt that The Star will have its name on the outside of the building. For all intents and purposes, The Star’s future presence will mostly be in cyberspace.
Correction, per Wiley Coyote comment: The Star hasn’t published a Saturday print product in a few years.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
It’s sad.
The Royals will be playing downtown.
“Mark One sold or trashed the not-very-old printing presses”
The presses and other equipment were still for sale as recently as December at https://presscity.com/en/machines/kba/238940-244050/kba-commander.html. But that link is now dead, and I can’t find the equipment anywhere else on the dealer’s site, so someone apparently bought it. It would be interesting to know where it wound up.
Two errors and one question. Error 1: the Thursday game reports won’t be printed in Saturday paper because there is no Saturday paper, only an online edition. Error 2: It is not the first The Star will be renting newsroom space. As you reported a couple of paragraphs earlier, the Star was renting from Ambassador. Question: are the printing presses really gone?
Right you are, Wiley…I picked the wrong day for the example, and they certainly did rent from Ambassador. I will correct on the fly…Love the way these digital errors can be corrected.
Regarding the presses, see Tim Kridel’s comment above.
The Star has morphed into the Cheshire Cat. The rest of us aren’t grinning.
I just heard from a good source (but haven’t been able to verify) that Melinda Henneberger, editorial page editor, will be leaving The Star to join The Sacramento Bee. My source said she will be rejoining former editorial page editor Colleen McCain Nelson, who left The Star early last year to become executive editor of The Bee and McClatchy’s California region editor. (California is where McClatchy had its beginnings and where it owns several papers.)
Henneberger has done some good columns on corruption in various entities in Wyandotte County, and the Star’s editorial focus on the efforts to free wrongly-convicted prisoners has also been praiseworthy. But I won’t be sorry to see her leave. The level of snark in her columns distracts from whatever point she is trying to make. Plus, a new face on the editorial board might produce more consistency in the quality of the editorials and columns.
I walked through the Crossroads about a week ago and took a long, hard look through the green glass of the print production building at 16th and McGee. It looked to me as if the printing equipment and accompanying infrastructure are still in place and have not been disturbed.