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Sunday circulation at the K.C. Star dips below a critical benchmark

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 28, 2010| 2 Comments »

For the first time in the modern newspaper era, The Kansas City Star’s Sunday circulation has fallen below 300,000.

In all probability, Sunday circulation has not been below 300,000 since it crested that number, perhaps around 1950 or earlier.

According to the most recent report, issued Monday, by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, The Star’s Sunday circulation fell to 290,302 for the April-September reporting period.

That represented a 5.7 percent dip from the previous year (when Sunday circulation stood at 307,974) and a 10.6 percent drop from 2008.

The Star has been battling desperately to prop up Sunday circulation. In recent years, for example, the company has been providing Sunday papers to subscribers of The Olathe News, which The Star bought several years ago. More recently — and more surprisingly — it  began providing Sunday papers to subscribers of a competitor, The Examiner, which distributes in Independence and the fast-growing suburbs of Blue Springs and Grain Valley.

This coming Sunday, The Star is starting a special promotion — featuring 3-D images in parts of the paper. Each copy will contain special glasses. 

The Star has good company in falling circulation, of course. The Audit Bureau showed that average weekday circulation at 635 newspapers declined 5 percent compared with 2009.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch was another major paper to fall beneath a long-time Sunday benchmark — 400,000. Its Sunday circulation fell 8.9 percent, from 401,425 to 365,589.

If there’s any good news in the overall report, it’s that circulation is not falling as fast as it was a few years ago.

The “decreasing decrease” in circulation mimics the trend in advertising, which also fell off a cliff a few years ago and is still trending downward, but not as sharply. 

The Newspaper Association of America, a trade group, reported recently that newspaper advertising revenues were on track this year to hit a 25-year low of about $26.5 billion. That would be less than half the revenue ($49.4 billion) that newspaper advertising generated as recently as 2005.

The only truly hopeful sign for publishers is that online advertising has climbed almost 50 percent, to $1.5 billion, during the last five years. 

Circulation, of course, is the horse that pulls the advertising cart. When circulation falls, it puts downward pressure on ad rates.

The fact that circulation and advertising losses are diminishing — and that online advertising is increasing — offer the only light at the end of what has turned into an extremely long tunnel for newspapers. Had circulation and advertising continued to drop the way they were a few years ago, a lot more newspaper companies would not be publishing print editions at this point.  

Regarding The Star’s situation, I sent K.C. Star publisher Mark Zieman an e-mail Wednesday morning, seeking a comment, but I got no response.

A former Star executive told me a year or so ago that Zieman sees his overriding mission as saving the The Star’s print edition. If that is the case, his relative youth — he’s about 50 — could work against him. 

The Star’s weekday and Saturday circulation also fell. Daily circulation was down 4.5 percent — to 206,441 — and Saturday circulation was off a whopping 7.8 percent.

As recently as 2000, The Star mounted a marketing campaign designed to propel weekday circulation above 300,000. My, how aspirations have changed in the last decade.

The ABC figures include electronic, as well as print, subscriptions. Electronic subscriptions now comprise 12 percent of The Star’s total weekday circulation.

According to ABC, a trade group, The Wall Street Journal has the highest average daily circulation, with slightly more than 2 million papers sold daily. USA Today is second, at 1.8 million, and The New York Times is third at 876,638.

Rounding out the top five were The Los Angeles Times (600,449) and The Washington Post (545,345).

The New York Times has the highest Sunday circulation, at 1.3 million. The Wall Street Journal and USA Today do not publish on Sunday.

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Radio guys ruin Tribune Company, but newspapers hold sway when it comes to setting the civic agenda

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 13, 2010| 5 Comments »

David Carr, media reporter for The New York Times, has had two intriguing pieces within the last week — a front-page news story about the implosion of the Tribune Company and a column in which he explored the “vanishing journalistic divide.”

In the column, Carr deftly used his experience in reporting and writing the Tribune story to help make his point about the ever-hastening confluence of new media and old-school journalism.

Let’s take it from the top.

Phase one.

If you think The Kansas City Star has fallen a long way, consider the plight of The Chicago Tribune and the other papers in the Tribune chain, including The Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun and The Orlando Sentinel. As recently as about 10 years ago, The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times were considered to be among the country’s premier newspapers. 

Like other newspaper companies (it also owns TV stations and WGN America), Tribune fell on lean times and began unraveling financially. Publicly owned, it was sold in 2007 to a group headed by Sam Zell, described by Carr as “a billionaire deal maker,” for a price of $8.2 billion. Thing is, though, the way Zell structured the deal, he only put out $315 million of his own money.

Then he brought in some radio-industry executives to run the show. One of those executives, Randy Michaels, showed some of the old Tribune hands early on that it was a new day and a new game. As Carr tells it, Michaels ran into several other senior colleagues at a hotel next to the Tribune Tower in Chicago. Shortly after he sat down in the bar, Zell said “watch this” and proceeded to offer the waitress $100 to show him her breasts.

“The group sat dumfounded,” Carr wrote.

Michaels proceeded to conduct a management make-over, putting more than 20 former associates from the radio business in key positions. One of the management team’s first moves was to rewrite the employee handbook.

“Working at Tribune means accepting that you might hear a word that you, personally, might not use,” the new handbook said. “You might experience an attitude you don’t share. You might hear a joke that you don’t consider funny. That is because a loose, fun, nonlinear atmosphere is important to the creative process…

“This should be understood, should not be a surprise and not considered harassment.”

They might has well have put out a sign that said, “Let it all hang out!”

It didn’t take long for the boss himself, Zell, to throw at Chicago Tribune Editor Ann Marie Lipinski one of those words that she, personally, probably would not use.

In June 2008, while urging her to more aggressively pursue a story that he was interested in, Zell told Lipinski, “Don’t be a pussy.”

Lipinski, who had been the editor since 2001, resigned a month later.

Before 2008 was out, the company sought bankruptcy protection, listing $7.6 billion in assets and debts of $13 billion. And the financial woes continue. In the first half of this year, The Chicago Tribune’s weekday circulation was down nearly 10 percent, while The Los Angeles Times lost nearly 15 percent of its weekday circulation.

Zell remains chairman of the board but is no longer involved in day-to-day operations.

Phase two.

David Carr

In his column on Monday, Carr talked about the migration of print journalists to Web sites. His peg was the announcement that Howard Kurtz, long-time media reporter for The Washington Post, had resigned to become Washington bureau chief for The Daily Beast, which Carr described as “a two-year-old toddler of the new digital press.”

“More and more,” Carr wrote, “media outlets are becoming a federation of individual brands like Mr. Kurtz. Journalism is starting to look like sports, where a cast of role players serves as a platform and context for highly paid, high-impact players. And those who cross over, after years of pushing copy through the print apparatus, will experience the allure of knocking some copy into WordPress and sending it out into the world to fend for itself.”

And yet, despite its surging popularity, Carr said, digital journalism doesn’t generate a thimbleful of revenue, compared to newspaper companies. 

“The reason that newspapers put all the white paper out on the street is that we get a lot of green paper back in return,” he said. “Put out all the pixels you want, even ones that render scoops, and you will still receive pennies in return.”

Then, Carr proceeded to talk about the thrill involved in piecing together the Tribune story, working on it for months, and finally seeing it “land hard,” lighting up Twitter accounts and generating hundreds of online comments.

The ability to “land hard,” he went on, isn’t limited to The Times: “All over the country, daily regional newspapers in very diminished circumstances similarly still manage to set the civic agenda even as they struggle.”

In Kansas City, of course, The Star — beleaguered and buffeted, scorned and dismissed by many — continues to set the local civic agenda. Not Tony’s Kansas City, not KC Confidential and most certainly not JimmyCsays.

“Yes, you can make news working in your pajamas and running stuff past your cat and now one else,” Carr concluded. “But even in 2010, when a print product is viewed as a quaint artifact of a bygone age, there is something about that process, about all those many hands, about the permanence of print, that makes a story resonate in a way that can’t be measured in digital metrics. I love a hot newsbreak on the Web as much as the next guy, but on some days, for some stories, there is still no school like the old school.”

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On stabbing story, KC Star leaves competitors in the dust

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized, tagged , on September 16, 2010| 5 Comments »

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.

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This series is a big, big winner

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized, tagged , on August 25, 2010| 2 Comments »

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.

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Electronic subscriptions….elevator up?

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized, tagged , , on August 24, 2010|

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.”

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

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 21, 2010| 1 Comment »

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.

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Whitlock waves goodbye

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized, tagged , on August 17, 2010| 5 Comments »

Well, The Star made it official today: Jason Whitlock is leaving The Star after 16 years as a sports columnist and six weeks as an Op-Ed columnist.

After 10 weeks of being “on vacation” (the weekly explanation that The Star has been trotting out to readers), Whitlock is now free “to pursue other interests.”

I predicted here on July 22 — after his columns had been missing for six weeks — that he was finished. (By the way, my hunch has won me a lunch bet with my colleague Hearne Christopher of KCCconfidential.com.)

The latest signal, to me, that he wasn’t coming back came last Friday when he posted this message on his Twitter account at 7:33 p.m.: “I know I’m lazy, but how did Tiger’s Wood (stet) finish today?”

He was asking, in other words, for somebody out there in Twitter land to tell him what score Tiger Woods had recorded in Friday’s round of the PGA championship, held in Wisconsin.

It struck me immediately that if the guy was too lazy to go to ESPN.com, or any number of other Internet sites, and check a player’s score, he was by no means ready to return to real work. 

There really isn’t much more to say. His obit has been written (see Aug. 2 post on this site), and he’s done about all he can do at The Star. He’s made a significant contribution to Kansas City sports coverage, and he helped catapult Sports Daily into the top ranks of the nation’s sports sections. The challenge for The Star now will be to keep the sports section in the top tier, especially with Star sports editor Holly Lawton’s recent decision to resign. 

Clearly, though, the time is right for Whitlock to move on: The paper, like most other metropolitan dailies, is in flux; the Chiefs seemingly are headed for another dull season;and Whitlock obviously is sick of writing for The Star.

So, good luck, Jason. We’ll be looking for you under the arc lights.

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And the worst deal of all is….

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 16, 2010| 1 Comment »

At 6:38 p.m. on Friday, The Star’s web site, kansascity.com, posted a headline that said, “Sprint-Nextel merger among the nation’s worst, Bloomberg says.”

Well, the headline certainly piqued my interest, so I clicked on the headline to see the story. 

That’s where things got more interesting. The story, written by The Star’s Mark Davis, was about a Bloomberg evaluation of bad deals, based on a benchmark index that Bloomberg had formulated.  

As the headline suggested, Davis led his story with the Sprint-Nextel deal, saying it was the third worst deal out of 100 that Bloomberg had ranked.

But Davis waited until the fourth — and second-to-last paragraph — to unveil a surprise. Which deal do you think ranked at the top of Bloomberg’s list? What was the worst merger or acquisition among the entire 100? Give up? Well, it was none other than McClatchy’s $4.1 billion purchase of Knight Ridder in 2006.

The Star, of course, is one of the papers that McClatchy obtained in that infamous transaction.

Odd, then, isn’t it, that Davis and Star editors chose to highlight the Sprint-Nextel merger when the very worst deal was, literally, right under their noses? I’m sure that Star editors would rationalize the leapfrogging act by arguing that Sprint is locally based and has far more employees in this area than McClatchy. 

That’s true, but The Star is no small employer; has at least as high a profile locally as Sprint; and…well, No. 1 means No. 1, right? 

The Star could have gone a long way toward presenting an intellectually honest account by simply changing the headline to say, “Sprint-Nextel, McClatchy-Knight Ridder deals among the nation’s worst, Bloomberg says.” It could have kept the story exactly as it was, even while fudging on the rankings. Instead, The Star took the low road.

There’s a saying in the news business for what Davis did. It’s called “burying your lead.” What that means is that the biggest, most interesting news is down low in a story, rather than at the top, where it should be.

And that’s just what Davis and Star editors did. They took the biggest and hardest kick at Sprint — a more convenient target — and gave their parent company the equivalent of a slap on the wrist.

Here’s what Bloomberg’s Zachary R. Mider said in his initial story, which Bloomberg posted on Thursday and which spawned Davis’ story:

“McClatchy’s purchase of the Knight Ridder Inc. newspaper chain, for $4.1 billion in 2006, ranked the worst of the 100 on Bloomberg’s list, with McClatchy shares underperforming the Bloomberg Advertising Age AdMarket 50 Index by 93 percentage points. Sacramento, California-based McClatchy borrowed cash to buy the chain as newspaper real-estate advertising plunged.”

All I can say is shame on you, KC Star, shame on you for playing a journalistic shell game.

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Whitlock and The Star’s credibility

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized, tagged , , on August 5, 2010|

Some of you probably are tired of reading about the Jason Whitlock saga.

But it’s got a very important element that is worth discussing — the credibility of The Kansas City Star.

The Star’s stock in trade is its credibility. Readers rely on The Star — just as readers in other cities rely on their daily papers — to get at the truth, when the truth is obscured by lies, conflicting allegations, complicated facts and just plain clutter.

For example, The Star has been working mightily to comb through the chaff of the Karen Pletz situation at Kansas City University of Medicine and Health Sciences. Was it a case of an administrator run amok, or was it a case of a board of directors that was sound asleep? Or was it both? The Star has done an excellent job, overall, of trying to sort things out, and its stories have laid plenty of blame at the feet of both parties.

Only The Star has the resources to launch a thorough examination and be assured that most people will trust the result. No other news organization in Kansas City can come close. So, when The Star speaks on the Pletz issue, thousands of people — tens of thousands of people — listen closely.

Another example: The Star recently published a big, 40-year anniversary story on the slaying of political and civil rights leader Leon Jordan, suggesting that it might be a good idea to reopen the case. Less than two weeks later, lost evidence turned up, and police decided to reopen the case.  

Here’s another, different, example of The Star’s credibility: Why do you think Mark Funkhouser is mayor today?  Here’s why: KC Star editorial writer Yael Abouhalkah, who has “covered” City Hall for more than 20 years, got behind him early on and started pushing. Yael, in turn, convinced the editorial board to support Funkhouser, and The Star then endorsed Funkhouser, propelling him to victory.

Among the dozen candidates for mayor, Funkhouser did not stand out for his character, personality or ability to build a consensus. No, he was just another member of a weak field. But he had The Star behind him. That’s why he won; the voters trusted The Star. (Footnote: The Star, to its credit, saw the error of its ways a couple of years after Funkhouser was elected and admitted it made a mistake.)

So, The Star’s credibility is important, very important to this community. And what is it doing with this Whitlock fiasco? It is chipping away at its own credibility. For weeks, The Star has been publishing a note to readers saying Whitlock is “on vacation.” Come on, it’s a lie, and everybody knows it.

It’s something else. Maybe he’s been suspended; maybe it’s a contract dispute; maybe the editors are sick of dealing with him. It could be anything…other than a vacation. After an absence that now exceeds two months, he’s probably not coming back.   

So, The Star should stop lying. It could drop the “note to readers” and say nothing. It could change the note to say, “Jason Whitlock is on leave,” or “Jason Whitlock is off work.”

Sorry to say, this is not the first time that The Star has been less than forthcoming about Whitlock’s status. In October 1998, Whitlock was suspended for goading fans who were taunting him at a Chiefs-New England Patriots game in Foxboro, Mass. Against the press-box glass, he held up hand-scrawled signs that said, “It’s warm in here — good looking women too” and “Bledsoe gay? Pats suck.” (He was referring to Patriots’ quarterback Drew Bledsoe.)

That was on Sunday, Oct. 11. The next day, Whitlock was suspended, and the suspension turned out to be for two weeks. The Star didn’t inform the public, however, until 10 days after the suspension. On Oct. 22, then-sports editor Rick Vacek wrote a column explaining the suspension and referred to “offensive” signs that Whitlock had shown to Patriots fans. He didn’t say what the signs said.

On Nov. 1, Miriam Pepper, who was then readers representative (the position that Derek Donovan now holds), wrote a column saying that the tardy report and lack of details had been a disservice to readers. “The newspaper regularly has to ‘go with the news’ before all sides weigh in,” said Pepper, now a vice president and editorial page editor. “In this case, it could have been handled by reporting the incident immediately and explaining that management was investigating.”

That episode hurt The Star’s credibility, and that was before the bottom fell out for most metropolitan dailies. Now, here we are again with a situation that, while probably different at its core, is still a matter of public interest. Whitlock is not a journeyman reporter; he’s the highest profile columnist and personality at The Star. Readers want — and deserve — an explanation that is not bogus.

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Whitlock….The End

Posted in journalism, Uncategorized, tagged , , on August 2, 2010|

As some of you may know, I have a friendly bet with fellow blogger Hearne Christopher of KCConfidential.com over whether Jason Whitlock will return to The Kansas City Star. The stakes are lunch at The Well in Waldo.

I am so convinced that my position is correct — that Whitlock is finished at The Star — that today I am presenting Whitlock’s advance “obit” accompanied by a timeline noting the highs and lows of his 16 years at The Star. 

With no further ado, then, join me in bidding a fond adieu to Jason. (Wherever you are, Jason, I hope you enjoy the tribute.)  

*** 

Jason Whitlock, who brought big-time, hammer-pounding sports commentary to The Kansas City Star, has left the paper after 16 years as a sports columnist.

The Star announced Whitlock’s departure on (day to be determined), following the widely read columnist’s two-month absence from the pages of The Star. During that period, The Star occasionally ran a note to readers, along with Whitlock’s mug shot, saying “Jason Whitlock is on vacation.”

During his absence, even members of the sports staff did not know what was going on or if he was coming back. Sports Editor Holly Lawton recently told a reader who called her to ask about Whitlock that he was taking back-to-back vacation months. For years, Whitlock has worked for The Star on a contract basis, and the terms of the contract have not been made public. Regular employees of The Star get a maximum of about 28 days paid time off and cannot carry over unused days from one year to the next.

An indication that Whitlock was either trying to spread his wings or was dissatisfied with his role as a sports columnist at The Star surfaced on April 27, when a political opinion column written by Whitlock turned up on the page opposite The Star’s editorial page. An editor’s note accompanying the column said that the Op-Ed column would appear weekly.

The column appeared for six consecutive weeks and then disappeared just as mysteriously as Whitlock himself.

For his part, Whitlock did nothing to shed light on the situation. Last Friday, he posted this message on his Twitter account: “KC folks, do not believe anything said about me by ANYONE, even if he/she claims to have spoken to me. They are lying and/or misrepresenting.”

Whitlock, 43, also writes a weekly column for FOXSports.com. That column continued during his absence from The Star. Previously, he wrote a weekly column for ESPN.com and had worked as a radio talk-show host on local sports radio stations.

For 13 years, from 1996 to 2009, Whitlock and fellow columnist Joe Posnanski provided a powerful and intriguing one-two punch on The Star’s sports pages. Whitlock generally took the role of heavy hitter, calling out players, coaches, owners and others for sharp criticism, while Posnanski offered nuanced opinions and compelling narratives and commentaries. A year ago, Posnanski left The Star to become a senior writer at Sports Illustrated.

Whitlock and Posnanski helped transform The Star’s sports section into one of the best in the nation. Four times since 2003, the section has won sports journalism’s highest honor, being ranked by the Associated Press in the top 10 for its daily, Sunday and special sports sections. Whitlock has won top 10 honors as a columnist three times since 2005, including last year.

King Carl and Dr. B.A. Homer 

Famously and fearlessly, Whitlock took on major sports figures, such as former Kansas City Chiefs’ president and general manager Carl Peterson, whom Whitlock dubbed “King Carl,” and current president and general manager Scott Pioli, whom Whitlock often referred to as Scott Ego-li.

He also introduced Star readers to a fanciful character called Dr. B.A. Homer. Described as “Kansas City’s leading sports therapist,” Dr. Homer would engage in imaginary dialogue with Whitlock, often trying to convince Whitlock that his position on an issue – whatever it might have been – was crazy.

In a September 2006 interview with a sports blog called The Big Lead, Whitlock was asked if he intended to remain a sports columnist.

“Yeah, I’m always going to keep a hand in the sports world,” Whitlock said. “Writing about sports is a great platform to write about the rest of life. Plus, the sports world and the entertainment world are where much of the bojangling is taking place. I haven’t left The Kansas City Star because I’m treated well there, enjoy the freedom, love the city, the Internet makes the world much smaller and, most important, I have a good boss.”

At the time, his supervisor was managing editor Mike Fannin, who oversaw sports and features. Two years ago, Fannin was named editor of The Star, and since then, Whitlock has worked for Lawton, who succeeded Fannin as sports editor.

Last Friday, to the surprise of many rank and file workers at The Star, Lawton submitted her resignation as sports editor, saying she intended to leave journalism. The notice of her resignation, placed on Star bulletin boards, reportedly said that she would remain sports editor until a successor was in place.

A source at The Star said Friday that he had spoken with Lawton and that she had told him her departure had nothing to do with Whitlock’s situation. “She said she wanted out from under the job,” the source said. “She wanted a life.”

The source also said that the Whitlock situation might have been in limbo for an extended period because of the terms of his contract, such as when it was due to expire.  

Whitlock, an Indianapolis native, is a 1990 graduate of Ball State University, where he started as an offensive tackle for two years. He came to The Star from the Ann Arbor News in Michigan. He previously worked at The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina and the Bloomington Herald-Times in Indiana.

*****

Jason Whitlock timeline at The Kansas City Star

1994 – Whitlock is hired as a sports columnist

October 1998 – Whitlock is suspended for heckling fans who taunted him in the press box at a Chiefs-New England Patriots game at Foxboro, Mass. Among other things, Whitlock displayed to fans a hand-written sign that said, “Bledsoe gay? Pats suck.” He was referring to New England quarterback Drew Bledsoe.

April 2007 – Perhaps Whitlock’s most provocative column, titled “Imus isn’t the real bad guy,” is published. In the column, Whitlock argued that African-Americans should examine hip-hop music’s culture of black-on-black disrespect rather than focus on shock jock Don Imus’ description of Rutgers women’s basketball players as “ho’s” (whores).

March 2010 — The Associated Press names Whitlock one of the top 10 sports columnists in the country for 2009. It is the third time since 2005 that he has been so honored. 

April 27, 2010 – The Star launches Whitlock’s “Independent Thoughts” column on the Op-Ed page. An editor’s note says the column will appear weekly.

May 27, 2010 – Whitlock’s last sports column, about a “culture of corruption” in college sports, is published.

June 2, 2010 – Whitlock’s sixth (and last) “Independent Thoughts” column is published. The headline is “Obama owes Bush an apology.”

Aug. x, 2010 – The Star announces Whitlock’s resignation.

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