Mark Zieman
Ready for some head scratching?
It wasn’t all that long ago that big shots at the Kansas City Star – like former editor / publisher Mark Zieman – would light their cigars with the kind of chump change it took the newspaper more than a month to raise after running countless ads online and in print, begging readers to choke out $25 or more to try and keep the bankrupt newspaper afloat.
Now let’s flash back 10 years to when Zieman bagged subscribers for an extra buck or so for the Star’s Thanksgiving newspaper with all the Black Friday ads. The rationale being that because the Star sold so many ads it cost more to print and deliver the paper.
However instead of just reveling in the bountiful ad harvest, the Star decided to levy something like an additional charge on subscribers to cover the printing cost.
Think about it…
In one fell swoop, the Star of old bagged readers for an easy 200 grand.
That was then…
Today’s newspaper that was barely able to raise $26,000 after more than a month of heavy advertising, promotion and pleading with readers to try raise at least $200 grand via a tiny Michigan not-for-profit that was questionably laundering the contributions to give donors a tax write off.
Perhaps we’ll see what the IRS says about that somewhere down the road.
Seriously though, raising $200,000 was a drop in the bucket for the Star of old.
Whereas struggling to raise not much more than 10 cents on the dollar of of the newspaper’s stated goal wasn’t just embarrassing, it was pathetically kinda sad.
The kind of loser maneuver one might expect from a struggling small publication like the Pitch, not the vaunted Kansas City Star.
It’s come to that…
