Eric Adler
“Running a newspaper can be a rough business.”
So begins a story last week by Eric Adler in the Kansas City Star.
Understatements aside, it’s a tale of another area newspaper, not the newspaper of record in Kansas City. Hey, it’s a lot easier to pin the tail on somebody else’s donkey than the one you rode in on.
“So it happens when all five members of the editorial staff of the town’s weekly paper — The News Xpress — work to put a paper to bed and then, on that same night, collectively hand in their resignations,” Adler continues. “Then, just days later, they publish a brand new, competitive 16-page newspaper of their own, while opening an office only a few doors down from their former employer.”
You have to wonder – but not for long – what was going through Adler’s head when he sat down to write this. Given that the Star has withered in recent years from more than 2,000 staffers to 600-ish. And that it continues to decline both in substance and body count – the most recent layoffs and buyouts having come just a handful of weeks back.
However unlike the hundreds upon hundreds of Adler’s former cohorts who departed with dashed dreams and uncertain futures, the journalists who preemptively bailed in Butler, Missouri appear to have the upper hand on their handlers.
“All of our women up front, they bought a new paper and they opened one next door and they’re trying to run us out of town,” Chase Peters, the son of News Xpress owner Jon Peters, lamented this week as he and family scrambled to put out a paper with no staff.”
Former News Xpress editor C.A. Bates Photo by Donna Gregory
Think inmates overrunning the asylum.
By the way, that’s not about to happen at 18th and Grand.
Allow me to let you in on a not-very-well-kept secret:
The reporters, editors and staffers at the Star have spent the past eight years leading sad, unsettled lives on journalistic death row. In talking to a number of them before, during and/or after their untimely demises, their eventual releases came to many of them as a relief. An end to years of looking over their shoulders and expecting the worse.
Unfortunately it’s the way of the world today.
That as the once highly profitable print editions of the Star and other newspapers that made reporter’s paychecks and careers possible morphed from mainstay into anachronism, with younger audience demos going online for their news fixes. And while the Star remains far and away the leader in providing those local and area news fixes, the online profits just aren’t there. Not in anything approaching the revenues generated in print.
Thus, even economic downturns aside, it’s a sad, sure death march for most of the surviving souls still standing at 18th and Grand.
And they know it, and everybody involved knows it.
At some point, what will emerge will be a leaner, younger, more efficient staffing that can and will deliver the news at a profit for parent company McClatchy.
The $64 million question being, what kind of staffing might that involve?
Two-hundred employees? Fewer?
In any case, we won’t be reading any stories by Adler or any of the other writers or reporters at the Star about how rough the newspaper biz is in Kansas City (or Lawrence) – not while the paychecks are still rolling in.
As much as they might want to.
Not until the all but certain pink slips arrive, at which point Adler may well unleash such a tale – his specialty being stories that involve anguish, sorrow and unfortunate circumstances.
Stay tuned…
Didn’t they tell you to hit the road? What business do you have criticising them? It seems like if they cared about what you thought, they would have kept paying you. This is just bitterness and not much value for readers. I hope you can move on with your life instead of talking so horribly about everyone who passes through it.
Such a lovely comment from a Wookiee who traffics in negativity…
For what it’s worth I was laid off alongside hundreds of others and they tried to hire me back a month later at half the pay roughly.
Engaging in media news and criticism is part of what I do.
Including of the Kansas City Star.
I was doing it at the Pitch long before the Star hired me.
Sadly, Hearne missed the turmoil at another McClatchy jewel, the Missouri Democrat in Harrisonville, where the Editor and Chief was quietly whisked away, hopefully before his stock options matured. What was left, for almost two months last year was a headless, leaderless blob of paper pulp, awaiting the decision by McClatchy in how to be relevant, as the home town rag dropped behind the family owned Pleasant Hill Times in the race for circulation. It is not a rebuke of the employees, reporters, and sales personnel selling advertising. They do their job, and they do it competently. It was management and leadership that were missing, in a town half for sale because a good chunk of the real estate is or was owed by a convicted bank robber. With the decline of newsprint, falling circulation, and advertising sales, and with the standard rules of marketing, no longer applying, the papered word may be something that few see, except for those cents off coupons. For the price of three shares of McClatchy stock, one might be able to procure a subscription, for a week.
That is sad, Cowboy…
That said, some small town newspapers seem to be doing quite well. Like the Platte County Landmark that I write for.
In the Landmark’s case however, it’s owned and operated by a strong local owner named Ivan Foley who’s very involved in the community, has a nose for local news and takes an edgy approach.
My sources tell me that Peters was a hands off manager/owner that was just around for the income. The resignations were supposedly put on the publisher’s desk and didn’t open them until a week and half later. The News xPress is dead. The new paper – which I haven’t seen but heard about is called The Messenger — the owners just killed another local newspaper in Drexel that had been around for over 100 years.
I’m not sure how Bates County is going to accept a newspaper that is owned and published by two flannel-shirt lesbians — that is if the county people were to find out about the two carpet munchers.
The KC Star has been dying a slow death for years. The Sunday Star magazine last issue was yesterday. The Star would have a chance if they would back away just a little from their liberal stance.
Backing away from their liberal stance is not in the cards for the reporters and editors now running the Star.
It’s endemic.
Maybe the worm will turn when they get done weeding out the last of the Baby Boomers and bring in younger writers and reporters.
But based on my experience, print journalism tends to attract people with a certain political persuasion.
This Danny Devito speach looms large at the McClatchy’s HQ:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62kxPyNZF3Q