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The New York Times and a young Sulzberger stake a claim in Kansas City

September 20, 2010 by jimmycsays

Ten days ago, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger began turning out stories in his new job as Midwest correspondent for The New York Times.

Sulzberger, a fifth-generation member of the Ochs-Sulzberger dynasty that has controlled and managed The Times since 1896, was named a Midwest correspondent, based in Kansas City, in June. He moved to Kansas City within the past few weeks and alives near downtown. His grandmother, Annie Gregg, lives in Topeka.   

Sulzberger, who uses the byline A.G. Sulzberger, has had three midwestern stories since Sept. 10. The first was a provocative piece about a video war game that allows the user to become aTaliban fighter and attack American troops. The Army, Navy and Air Force have prohibited the game from being sold on their bases. The Marines had not decided whether to make it available on their bases.

The second story, which was published last Thursday, was about a Mulvane, Kan., man who built a replica of the Golden Gate Bridge over a creek on his property.

The third one, published Friday, was very special. It was a front-page feature on a 103-year-old federal judge in Wichita. Yes, Judge Wesley E. Brown is still hearing cases at a century plus three.

Sulzberger opened the story like this:

“Judge Wesley E. Brown’s mere presence in his courtroom is seen as something of a daily miracle. His diminished frame is nearly lost behind the bench. A tube under his nose feeds him oxygen during hearings. And he warns lawyers preparing for lengthy court battles that he may not live to see the cases to completion, adding the old saying, ‘At this age, I’m not even buying green bananas.’ ”

It might be an old saying, but it sure made me laugh.

As lively and polished as Sulzberger’s writing was, it was a photo that The Times used that elevated the story to a remarkably high level. The photo showed a smiling Judge Brown virtually swallowed by his big office chair and appearing to be sliding down under his big, wide desk. It’s a hilarious picture, and to use another old saying, it’s a picture that’s worth a thousand words.

Wisely, The Kansas City Star picked up the story and also ran it on the front page. Unwisely, The Star chose not to run the tell-tale photo, opting instead for a mug shot.

Before moving to Kansas City, the 29-year-old Sulzberger was covering U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. He joined The Times’ staff early last year, after reporting stints at The Oregonian and The Providence (Rhode Island) Journal.

He is the son of Times’ chairman and publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. He got his middle name from his mother, Gail Gregg. Young Sulzberger has a sister, Annie Sulzberger, who is not in the newspaper business.

I had the pleasure of meeting Arthur earlier this summer, and he struck me as genuine, unassuming and enthusiastic about his Kansas City-based assignment.

This is the first time that The Times has had a Kansas City-based correspondent in nearly 20 years. In my opinion, this is a great move by The Times, which, like the Wall Street Journal, is spreading its reach as a “national” newspaper. Unfortunately, while The Times and the Wall Street Journal are extending their tentacles, the nation’s second-tier papers, like The Star, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Chicago Tribune, are pulling in their horns because of financial problems, and they’re losing their foothold with many readers.

For more than a year now I’ve subscribed to The Times, along with The Star. I understand that the vast majority of people either can’t afford two newspapers or they’re just not interested enough to take both (or maybe either). I would urge all of you, however, to at least try to follow Arthur Sulzberger’s writing out of Kansas City on The Times’ web site, www.nyt.com. If you just check the site every once in a while, you can put “A.G. Sulzberger” in the search box, and his stories will pop up. 

We’re lucky to have him among us. For one thing, it could elevate our profile in the eyes of the nation. So, welcome, Arthur, we hope you enjoy your time in our great city!

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 4 Comments »

On stabbing story, KC Star leaves competitors in the dust

September 16, 2010 by jimmycsays

I frequently hear people say they’ve stopped taking The Kansas City Star because “there’s nothing in it” or “there’s nothing to it anymore.”

But once again, on Thursday, The Star showed why it’s the most indispensable news-gathering organization in our region. The shocking headline atop Page 1 said it all — “Sources: Nixon was target.”

The intended target of the whacked-out, psychologically ill 22-year-old man who stabbed a dean on Tuesday at Penn Valley Community College was none other than Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon.

The story was reported and written by police reporter Christine Vendel and higher-education reporter Mara Rose Williams. 

The scariest thing — the reason this is such a huge story — is that if Casey Brezik, the attacker, had been smarter and better organized, he just might have been able to get to Nixon. Nixon travels with Missouri Highway Patrol officers, but who would have been suspecting an attack at a junior college, where the governor was going to be talking about the benign subject of a state expansion of high-speed Internet services?    

It seems to me that Brezik easily could have caught everybody napping…long enough, anyway, to get in one thrust at the governor.

He was able to make his thrust, but it got dean of instruction Al Dimmit Jr. instead of Nixon, whose plane had just landed at Wheeler Downtown Airport. (Dimmit is in the hospital, recovering from a neck wound.) 

Nixon immediately canceled the Penn Valley visit and went on to Springfield, his next planned stop.

The Star posted its big scoop on its web site, kansascity.com, at 10:15 p.m. Wednesday, just after the 10 o’clock newscasts concluded their news reports and had moved on to weather and sports.

At that point, even if they were monitoring The Star’s web site, the TV stations would only have been able to report what The Star was reporting. They would have had to say something like, “The Kansas City Star is reporting on its web site that Gov. Jay Nixon was the intended target of an attack Tuesday that injured a Penn Valley dean.”

But pride would have stopped the TV stations from doing that; they hate to give credit to The Star, just as The Star hates to credit any other local news organization with breaking a big story. 

As of 10:30 a.m. Thursday, three of the four local TV stations, KMBC, WDAF and KSHB, were reporting the Nixon-the-intended-victim story on their web sites. Two of the stations, KSHB and WDAF, were crediting The Star. KMBC, meanwhile, had done some original reporting and was quoting police spokesman Darrin Snapp as saying that Nixon had been the intended target.

As for KCTV5 ( known for its “live, late-breaking, investigative” self-promotions a few years ago), it was carrying as its “top story” a bomb threat from Wednesday morning that forced the evacuation of a building at 23rd and Main. 

As early as Wednesday morning, The Star intimated the deeper implications of the Penn Valley incident. Its front-page account of the attack included a sub-head that read, “Man described as anarchist is charged in attack that occurred before governor’s arrival.”

Another tipoff that Brezik had bigger things in mind came in the third paragraph of Wednesday’s story, which said that Brezik was “wearing black clothes and a bullet-resistant vest.” In other words, he was prepared for a big encounter.

Fortunately — very, very fortunately — Brezik’s hoped-for, big encounter with the governor didn’t happen.   

So, while The Star is “skinnier” than it used to be, while it is lighter in the hand (except on Sunday) and contains far fewer column inches of news than it used to, it’s still the heaviest and most substantive news source around. If you want the inside information on the biggest local stories, there’s only one place to turn to. 

Hats off, then, to The Star. It truly was a banner day at 18th and Grand.

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 5 Comments »

The town takes on some air

September 14, 2010 by jimmycsays

Now there’s a game that was worth losing some sleep over!

Chiefs 21, Chargers 14. Finish time: about 12:15 a.m.

It might go down in the annals of local sports as the game that put Kansas City back on the NFL map.

Isn’t it amazing how one game can lift the spirits of a town that has seen so many years of frustrating losses for its two primary major-league franchises?  

All that losing, combined with the Chiefs’ relatively poor pre-season play, had a lot of people on edge and gloomy about the team’s prospects. Why, just a few weeks ago, The Star’s Adam Teicher and Chiefs’ head coach Todd Haley had a testy exchange at a news conference, and it looked like bitterness was going to be the season-long tone out at Arrowhead.

I was one of those people who was gloomy about the team’s prospects.  On July 22, I wrote, accurately, in this space that the sun was setting on Jason Whitlock’s career at The Star. (He resigned last month.) I went on to write, terribly inaccurately, it appears, that one of the reasons Whitlock was verging on irrelevance in Kansas City was that “the Chiefs are in a sorry state.”

I went on to say: “…they have a hot-headed, yet dull-as-dirt coach in Todd Haley; they have an egocentric president, Scott Pioli, who hides in his office; and they have a sub-par group of players. So, really, what does it matter what Whitlock might write about this year’s Chiefs?”

Now, clearly, there’s a guy who didn’t know what he was talking about! There’s a blogger — the kind I like to complain about — who was just standing on a soap box and making noise. I could have, and should have, qualified it, as I learned to do in my many years at The Star, and said, “It appears that the Chiefs are in a sorry state.” That would have given me some cover.

At least, however, I was swimming in a crowded pool. And now all of us who were in that pool want out; we want out of the pool of despair and into the waters of rejuvenation because football is back in Kansas City. Once again, the Chiefs own the town…Well, I guess I better say it appears that the Chiefs own the town.

And what about Whitlock? How do you think he feels today? Wherever he’s writing now — Twitter or Foxsports.com — look for him to try to minimize this thrilling victory, to write it off as an aberration. But deep down, where his little heart is beating, I’ll bet he’s sorry that he’s not here writing about this team, with its talented, enthusiastic young players and its new, deeply experienced offensive and defensive coordinators.

If he were here, I’ll bet he’d be calling today on Chiefs’ fans everywhere to “Get on the bandwagon…This team might go undefeated!”

Posted in journalism, sports, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 3 Comments »

The Sultan says….

September 10, 2010 by jimmycsays

Hello, all you JimmyCsays fans. I hope I’m not barging in here, but Jimmy is just back from his vacation in Turkey, and he’s too tired to file today. So, he’s authorized me, Sultan Salami, to fill in. 

I was privileged to host Jimmy during his 12-day Turkey trot, and I’d like to share with you a slide show featuring some of the people and places we saw.

So, if you’ll just grab a chair and look up at the screen, we’ll get started.

Click, click….

There now, that’s the country that stretches under my robes from Georgia and Iran on the east to the Aegean Sea on the west. It straddles two continents — Europe and Asia, with Africa to the south. 

Click, click…

 Oh, that Jimmy…what a card! There he is playing Sultan. I had to smack him for that. Nobody, and I mean nobody, impersonates the Sultan.

Click, click…

That’s my carriage. Jimmy wasn’t too impressed, but, like I told him, “It beats a camel!” (He got a chuckle out of that, but when we stalled in rush-hour Istanbul traffic, he really got ticked.)

Click, click…

Here’s one of our carpet delivery guys. They’ll bring them to you anytime, anyplace, even drop ’em in your window…provided you fork over the lira.

Click, click…

Speaking of carpet…Would you buy a carpet from the little guy in the blue shirt? Hah! JimmyC did, and, I have to tell you (although I certainly wouldn’t tell JimmyC this) that he fleeced Jimmy right out of his camel-hair Jockey shorts. 

Celal Belli — aka Jelly Belly, aka Reasonable Charlie — is one of our most outstanding carpet merchants. Once Jelly got JimmyC in his showroom just outside Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar and got some hot tea in him and the missus, it was pretty clear that Jimmy was going down. For my part, I stayed out of the negotiations. I’ve seen a lot of you “walking wallets” from the West try to match wits with our carpet croupiers, and it’s usually pretty pathetic. 

The turning point, if there ever was one, came when Jelly looked at Jimmy and said, “Money comes and goes; this (the carpet) is forever.” Jimmy’s eyes kind of glazed over, and he looked at the missus, and the missus looked at the carpet, and, bingo, out came the Citi card. 

Oh, yes, there’s an addendum to this story. Jimmy sent me an e-mail today, saying that his Pomeranian, uh, “broke in” the carpet with a few Istanbul-inspired turds. Guess the little guy just didn’t appreciate hand-woven wool!

Click, click…

There’s Jimmy’s missus, Patty, with one of our foremost foreign-trade emissaries. I didn’t catch the emissary’s name, but, I’ve gotta say, Jimmy doesn’t learn very fast. Once again, Jimmy looked like a character in my favorite W.C. Fields movie, “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.” 

On a rainy day, this guy latched on to Jimmy along Sultanahmet street, the main tourist drag in Istanbul, and directed him and Patty to an overpriced restaurant. After lunch, our trade emissary took Jimmy and Patty to a few souvenir shops, where they dropped a few more lira. And, then, wouldn’t you know it, Jimmy tipped the emissary! Did I tell you how much we love you Americans?

Click, click…

The rainy day was not at all disappointing, however. For one thing, at the restaurant, Jimmy and Patty got the services of one of the finest, most gracious waiters in Istanbul. His name is Mevlut Balek. Jimmy was really struck by the fact that Mevlut (pronounced Mev-lute) looked a lot like Frank Sinatra and had a hat like the one JimmyC always wears.

Click, click…

Oh, yeah, our kids are just like yours…always cutting up and mugging for the camera. 

Click, click…

I was pretty sure Jimmy was going to like our Aegean coast (this near Bodrum), and I was right. In fact, Jimmy thought it was white hot.

Click, click…

Fortunately, the glass-clear, turquoise-looking water is cool to the touch, and Jimmy was able to collect himself.

Click, click…

Not everybody gets excited at the beach, though. Sometimes it’s just nice to close your eyes and let your cares melt away. 

Click, click…

What’s that? Wait a minute…I’ve got to consult my Arabic-English dictionary. Oh, here it is…

Thanks for dropping by. Sultan says don’t be a stranger now!

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

August 28, 2010 by jimmycsays

Well, Jason Whitlock needed a vacation, and now it’s my turn.

Unlike Jason, however, I will return. As The Happenings put it so achingly hopefully in 1966…”See You in September.”

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

A new hero in town?

August 27, 2010 by jimmycsays

From the avalanche of criticism that greeted last week’s announcement about Polsinelli Shughart’s plan to build a high-rise on the Plaza, one published comment struck a chord with a lot of people. 

A woman said the law firm’s leaders would have been “heroes” if they had committed the firm to resurrecting the West Edge project on the southwest part of the Plaza.  

Well, Polsinelli Shughart bypassed its chance to be the hero, and in the process it may have tarnished its reputation forever. 

On Thursday, however, a new prospective hero stepped forward. And it’s none other than AMC Entertainment, one of the nation’s largest movie theater companies. 

Kansas City-based AMC emerged as the primary tenant after a group associated with RED Development submitted the apparent high bid of $10 million for the long-stalled office and hotel project, according to The Kansas City Star. 

To me, it is fitting that AMC become the hero because the man who took AMC big-time, the late Stan Durwood, probably would have wanted to help clean up the West Edge mess that advertising mogul Bob Bernstein and snake-oil salesman Ray Braswell left us. 

In a way, Durwood, who died at age 78 in 1999, saved downtown, where AMC company currently has its offices. It was Durwood who conceived of, pushed for, and named the Power & Light District. It took his former girlfriend — a woman by the name of Kay Barnes — and a Baltimore outfit — Cordish Companies — to make it happen. But it’s still very much a part of Durwood’s legacy. 

Durwood

His main legacy, in case you didn’t know it, is the multiplex theater. He opened the first one, side-by-side theaters at the Ward Parkway Shopping Center, on July 12, 1963. 

In a 1999 article about Durwood’s death, the Associated Press wrote: “It was clear he didn’t have the multiplex figured out yet: Both screens played the same movie — “The Great Escape,” starring Steve McQueen and James Garner. But the idea was born, and according to AMC, Durwood coined the multiplex name at that time, too.” 

Durwood never sought the limelight and didn’t promote himself; he just stuck to business and pushed the ideas he thought would work. It was in the same low-key vein that AMC spokesman Justin Scott commented in The Star on AMC’s possible interest in the West Edge: 

“Currently, we are making some preliminary inquiries into some locations in Kansas City, yet no decisions are being made at this time.” 

To me, it’s playing out as a picture of two companies. The picture I have of one — Polsinelli, Shughart — is of a brash, boastful and back-slapping group congratulating each other on their initial Plaza plan, which they thought was a done deal…before the public weighed in. 

The picture I have of the other is of a group of no-nonsense folks who keep their heads down and try to figure out what is best for their company and the city in which they operate. 

And when those folks get together in the boardroom, I have no doubt that they talk business below a portrait of Stanley H. Durwood.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

This series is a big, big winner

August 25, 2010 by jimmycsays

I’ve been whacking away at the KC Star the last several days for various journalistic offenses, including running an untimely letters to the editor page and failing to include in a front-page story the governmental-approval process needed for construction of a controversial office tower on the Plaza.

But today I’m taking off my straw hat (see “About Me” page) to you, KC Star.

A group of editors, reporters, photographers and graphic artists has put together what — halfway into it, at least — is an amazing series on the Kansas City School District.

The six-part series, which began Sunday, is beautifully written, carefully and thoroughly reported, and strikingly presented, with great photos, graphics and sidebars. Each of the three parts that appeared Sunday, Monday and Tuesday started out front and then “jumped” inside to take up two full inside, facing pages. 

For any reporter, getting a story that starts on the front and covers two full inside pages is a rarity and a thrill. I was involved in two or three such stories during my 25-plus years as a reporter at The Star.   

Paralleling “Special Report — Saving 17,000 kids” is a six-part series about the end of the line for Pinkerton Elementary School, one of 24 district schools that closed for good last May. That series was written by Eric Adler of the features desk.

To tell you the truth, I haven’t yet made the time to read Adler’s stories carefully, but from a quick scan, they look equally impressive. Tuesday’s installment, for example, profiled the school’s dynamic principal, Derald Davis. (My only beef is that Adler didn’t tell the readers whether Davis has a job in the district this year. Maybe Adler is holding that bit of information until later in the series, however.)  

Day 1 of  “Saving 17,000 kids” was largely about the failures of the past, but it pointed toward the future. “…Granted, in this pivotal year to come, success for the children could be as elusive as ever…” reporter Rick Montgomery wrote. “But at least now everyone seems to be on the same page: It is about the children.”

Day 2 featured a searing profile of Superintendent John Covington, who came to Kansas City from Pueblo, Colo., a year ago. Covington granted long-time school district reporter Joe Robertson full access to his comings and goings, his thoughts and philosophy, and it paid off for them and the readers. 

One of the highlights of the piece is Robertson’s recounting of a day that Covington went home from work exhausted, went straight to bed and woke up at 7:30, worried about being late to work. After taking a shower, he found out it was 7:30 p.m. He’d had a nap, not a full night’s sleep.

Day 3 of the series (Tuesday), featured business writer Mark Davis’ microscopic examination of the district’s financial problems, abuses and, now, vigorous attempts to set things straight. (For example, the district has pared its vendor list from 6,200 to 985.)

Davis quoted Covington, who seemingly is on a crusade to root out insider deals and employment, as saying: “We are going to make sure, under my watch, that the days for making decisions based on the best interest of adults, and this patronage and cronyism that has been so long known to have had a negative effect on how we operate public schools in Kansas City — please know that while I sit in this chair, those days are gone.”

And do you know why I believe him? Why, in one respect, I think he’s got this district moving in the right direction? 

There has not been a single mention of perennial school district sycophant Clinton Adams Jr. If Clinton has left the scene, or has been removed from it, the outlook is much more promising.

Congratulations, then, to John Covington for starting the turn-around of the Kansas City School District and to The Kansas City Star for devoting the time, space and, yes, money to tell this very important story.

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 2 Comments »

Electronic subscriptions….elevator up?

August 24, 2010 by jimmycsays

Electronic subscriptions now make up more than 10 percent of the total number of paid subscriptions to The Kansas City Star.

A “consolidated media report” (CMR) generated by the Audit Bureau of Circulations shows that slightly more than 10 percent of Sunday subscriptions are of the electronic variety.

The proportion is higher during Monday-Friday, when about 13 percent of subscribers take the electronic rather than the printed edition.

The advertised price of an electronic subscription is $4.95 a month, which is about one-third the cost of the print-subscription rate.

As of March 31, the total number of Sunday subscribers was 314,449, with 31,755 of those being electronic. The number of print-edition subscriptions was 282,694.

Print-edition subscriptions to the Sunday Star have fallen by more than 100,000 since 2004, when Sunday circulation was 388,425. 

During Monday-Friday, print-edition subscriptions are below 200,000 every day except Friday. 

In the late 1990s, weekday subscriptions to the printed edition stood at about 250,000, and The Star waged a marketing campaign aimed at getting to “300,000 by 2000.” The goal (again, referring to weekday circulation) was never reached. 

On its Web site, kansascity.com, The Star advertises “E-Star” as “a clickable replica of our newspaper.” 

“The electronic edition contains all the news, photos, ads, box scores, and special sections in the printed The Kansas City Star,” the company says.

In 2008, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, an industry-funded group that is paid by publishers to audit their circulation, approved the testing and creation of a consolidated media report for member newspapers. The Star has participated in the consolidated reports from early on.

ABC says: “The report allows newspapers to provide advertisers with a comprehensive view of the newspapers ‘total media footprint’ across multiple products and channels by reporting total gross distribution data.”

While helping newspaper companies market themselves to advertisers, consolidated reports also serve another purpose: They make print-circulation losses less conspicuous than they were before the days of the “CMR.”

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized | Tagged , , |

Oops…Did we fail to say this needs City Council approval?

August 21, 2010 by jimmycsays

I love to see Kansas City area residents rise up en masse against flim-flammy plans to encroach on cornerstones of Kansas City history.

And so it was with great satisfaction that I watched the tidal wave of opposition swell all day Friday against the Highwoods Properties-Polsinelli Shughart office tower-and-money grab that would destroy the integrity of perhaps the Plaza’s most important intersection, 47th and Broadway.

The proposal to build an eight-story, $57 million office building for the Polsinelli Shughart law firm has unleashed such a fusillade that the plan probably is D.O.A. However, where the power of money is involved, you never know, so it’s probably going to take a Phil Spector-like “wall of sound” to keep this plan from going forward.  

Having covered City Hall between 1985 and 1995, I can tell you that the one sure thing that councils respond to is a roomful of people. If big crowds  show up in opposition to the proposal, the council almost certainly will kill the plan, if it gets that far.  

Here’s another thing I know about this mushroom cloud: The hysteria would not have reached such proportions (hundreds of calls, e-mails and Web comments to The Kansas City Star) and the outrage would have been more clearly focused if The Star, in its Friday morning report, had laid out the government and regulatory approvals that are needed to proceed with the project.

The project will be reviewed first, on Oct. 5, by the City Plan Commission, an appointed group, which makes recommendations to the City Council. The City Council would have the final say, regardless of what the Plan Commission did. 

Unbelievably, Collison’s story didn’t have one mention of the regulatory process or the approvals that the project requires to move ahead. Collison has been with The Star for at least a decade and is an excellent development reporter. I don’t know what happened in this case; it was just a terrible omission. When I wrote to Collison on Friday, asking about the regulatory process, he wrote back, saying, “I’ve been up to my eyeballs with the outrage over this today.”

At least two editors — probably three or four, including a managing editor — read the story, and someone should have said, “Hey, this story doesn’t say if City Council approval is needed.” That’s all it would have taken to put the situation in proper perspective and help readers channel their anger. 

As it was, the story made it look like the building was a done deal. The story had Highwoods’ and the law firm’s  chief executives exchanging oratorical high fives. I could almost smell the smoke from the victory cigar in the statement of W. Russell Welsh, Polsinelli’s chief executive, who said, “We could not be more pleased to have our own building in the center of the Plaza, where our firm began nearly 40 years ago.”  

On Saturday, Collison and The Star moved to undo the damage from Friday’s confusing story. The first paragraph of today’s story, the lead story in the paper, said: “Plans for an office development in the Country Club Plaza that includes demolishing a vintage building have ignited outrage among Plaza devotees — and they will have their day at City Hall.”

Appropriately, the story was as much a correction as it was a report of the outrage.

To me, this episode reflects a couple of things: First, we love our Plaza, with its graceful, Spanish architecture and distinctive feel, and, second, The Star has to be very, very careful — and thorough — in reporting about proposed changes to venerable Kansas City institutions like the Plaza.

The reporting and editing lapse that occurred in Collison’s Friday story is, unfortunately, happening more and more. That is almost inevitable with a diminished staff, and it demonstrates once again how The Star’s status as the area’s most powerful and authoritative news-gathering operation has slipped.

It’s still the biggest and the best, but not as big or good as it used to be.

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

KC Star letters to the editor…snail mail

August 20, 2010 by jimmycsays

I don’t know if you share my opinion about this — of if you’ve even noticed — but it seems to me that the letters to the editor page of The Kansas City Star has gotten kind of moldy.

There’s too much lag time between the articles that triggered the letters and publication of the letters. As a result, the letters page has become increasingly dull over the last several months. 

I’ve been thinking about this lately, and on Thursday I decided to run a little test on the timeliness of letters that ran Wednesday and Thursday.

Here’s what I found: On those two days, a total of seven letters included parenthetical references to articles that generated the letters. (Some letters are about ongoing stories or situations and not pegged to specific stories.)

Of the seven, five referred to articles that had been published at least two weeks ago.  

To me, that’s pretty bad. 

I decided to compare that with the letters that appeared Wednesday and Thursday in The New York Times. On those two days, The Times published a total of 10 letters containing parenthetical references to articles that prompted the letters.

Of the 10, nine were published within eight days of the published articles.

To me, that’s pretty good.  

What is the upshot for readers? In my opinion, The Star’s letters page has a dated, heavy feel to it, where The Times’ page is lively and topical. 

Hate to say it, but that applies to the two papers in their entirety, too. Of course, The Star, like almost all second-tier dailies, has suffered terribly from contraction and readership loss, while the top-tier, national publications — The Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today — have held up somewhat better.

I must confess that one of the reasons I decided to run the test is that I submitted a letter to the editor on Sunday (Aug. 15) about a column that day by E. Thomas McClanahan of the editorial staff. McClanahan wrote eloquently and insightfully, in my opinion, about his opposition to the proposed mosque to be built two blocks from Ground Zero. (For the record, I’m against it, too.)

Lewis Diuguid, an editorial writer who calls letter writers to verify that they, indeed, penned the letters, called me on Monday and said he’d try to get the letter in.

Now, really, it makes no difference to me if the letter gets in. But I really would like to know what the public feedback is on McClanahan’s piece, and I don’t want to have to wait two weeks to get that feedback.

What really galled me was that yesterday a letter ran under the headline “Mosque at ground zero.” I eagerly went to the text, thinking it would be about McClanahan’s column. But, no, it was a letter from Chris Anderson of Basehor, who was writing about an Aug. 4 article titled “Mosque plans advance.” Anderson’s first line was “Where is the outrage over the project mosque by the World Trade Center?”

Well, the outrage certainly escalated between Aug. 4 and Aug. 18, didn’t it?  

I guess the letters pertaining to McClanahan’s column are waiting in a queue…waiting like tax returns stacked up for processing by the IRS.

Yesterday, I e-mailed Miriam Pepper, vice president and editorial page editor of  The Star, and told her about the results of my test and that I intended to write a blog entry on the subject. 

Miriam, one of the most solid and respected editors at The Star, declined to comment, and I can appreciate that. She has nothing to gain by defending the status quo, and feelings could get ruffled in house if she said the page needs improvement. 

Here’s the gist, though. The letters to the editor page is one of the most important parts of the paper. It’s where members of the public get to weigh in, in black and white, on issues that are of importance to them. It’s a garden of ideas, and it’s fun and informative to see what seeds are being planted and to try to figure out which might take root.

It’s important, then, that the letters be timely. In the computer era, people can get plenty of feedback on just about any issue, but millions of people still look to the letters page of their daily papers every day to gauge the ebb and flow of public opinion on current issues.

For the vast majority of serious current-events followers, I dare say, a letter published on the letters page of a daily paper, signed with a person’s real name and disclosing their city of residence, carries far more weight in the court of public opinion than an anonymous comment (or, for that matter, a signed comment) on any blog or Web site.

So, let’s get cracking down there, KC Star!

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