Thumbing through Wednesday’s Arizona Republic I found myself a bit stunned…
For starters, the Republic is based in Phoenix which is five times the size of Tucson and more than double Greater Kansas City.
And that kinda math matters.
That said, the once mighty Kansas City Star was once one of the country’s most profitable newspapers – prior to McClatchy taking it over and failed leaders like Mark Zieman and Mike Fannin ran it into the ground.
Make no mistake, they aren’t the only newspaper dudes to suffer the harsh realities of going from being wildly successful to becoming red ink machines. Then again, it’s not like they did a killer job of bucking those downward trends. Quite the opposite.
Take a haunting trip down memory lane with me on this fairly fat print Republic.
It has four reasonably large sections.
An A section has the expected gaggle of headlines like, “Trump enters not guilty plea;” along with “Book tells of water’s power over people;” “Two Valley restaurants cited for numerous health violations;” “Body found in remote area near Saguaro Lake;” “Utility found liable in Oregon Wildfires;” and “Actor Treat Williams dies after motorcycle crash”
Twelve pages and not too bad.
The Valley & State section has only six pages, but is still respectable with stories ranging from a hotel in Mesa that looks pretty average, but for three years has been doubling as a refuge for “people experiencing homelessness.” It also houses an “Opinion Section” with stories like, “Headlines wrong on Ariz. water future” and “Fuzzy math is just one problem for school vouchers.” And the killer headline, “What made politics so toxic? Blame this little-known divide”
Not too shabby.
The Sports section is halfway interesting with stories about how rehab is “changing the perception” of Arizona Cardinals star quarterback Kyler Murray. And how, “Airport harassment (is) ’embarrassing’ for WNBA”
With just six of its 12 pages dedicated to sports, including a gigantic front page header touting “Pride Night + Bag June 17th” for the Arizona Diamondbacks ” baseball team, it’s respectable in terms of size and content. Toss in the standard issue one page comics and puzzles page that every newspaper worth its salt can’t seem to pull the plug on.
Finally, a six page “Food & Dining” section outlines some of Phoenix’s top steakhouses, “Three new restaurants to add to your June must try list” and a Dear Abby column about a “Former classmate in affair hopes for a future together.”
Speaking of which, the original Dear Abby is long gone, but the byline soldiers on. Speaking of which, Ann Landers kinda tried to do the same stunt but ran out of gas when she died in 2002.
All of which mirrors the type of stuff one used to expect and find in the Star…long ago
Fold it all back together and you have a fairly beefy-feeling newspaper that more than halfway resembles the Star’s of old…like 10 years ago old.
Sure the politics lean left – what media today doesn’t? – but Phoenix huge oldster population combined with the Republic’s conservative roots, make it far more readable and arguably useful than the Star.
The bottom line: the Arizona Republic is faring far better than the Star and seems to be doing a decent job of striking a balance between being an MSNBC in print or the embarrassing remnant of the better days our Star seems to only be.
The far larger (and older) population undoubtedly helps, but at the very least, they seem to have found a way to still matter.
I don’t think many people would describe the Star of today that way.
Too bad, kinda sad…
When did just reporting the news and facts equally stop taking place and news becoming more like reading an editorial? A lot of the issues in today’s world hinge from media pushing how people should think and act.
Leave the thoughts and opinions for the editorial section and out of the news as a whole and I think some readers might return to the Star but then I doubt even that would repair the damage that has been done.
I would say it was a gradual shift, but really started to take off in 2016…
But well before that I remember a young African American columnist whop wrote for the Star prior to my departure at the end of 2008. She was really young and went from intern to lowly paid, super-nice-guy type. she hung with a young columnist at the Pitch and she gradually began to radicalize herself.
She totally crossed over when that young black punk in St. Louis was killed and pop culture began to perpetuate the myth that he had said to the cop that shot and killed him, “Hands up, don’t shoot.”
That was disproved in the subsequent investigation but that mythical line that was never uttered to this day remains.
And after it was disproved, she wrote an entire column denouncing the racist cop and using that line.
And none of the formerly strict Star editors called her out or corrected the factual error…unlike it had been for my entire 16 year run there.
Pretty much from that point on in the Obama era, all bets were off when it came to racism and truth.
Oh You’re talking about Hoops. She was racist’s no doubt. Have no idea where she is now and don’t care.
Yeah, well…
Not so you’d notice when she got there for a few years until I left at the end of 2008.
She started hanging out the Pitch’s Nadia Pflaum and she kinda turned hipper and maybe a tad angrier from there. She and Nadia became running mates and they went around soaking up free drinks and whatever – totally against The Star’s policies – and the rest is history
Isn’t talking about the newspaper industry akin to discussing the pay phone industry or the indoor mall construction industry these days?
Not while it is still a viable – less so, for sure – industry…
The news staff at the Star used to dwarf local tv news departments…and I suspect still does.
Pay phones? Nice tryout get real.
Mall construction? Hey, it’s still happening. Even here inn Tucson the Foothills Mall project is huge. They’re actively demolishing 65 percent of the buildings and planning to have it completed by 2025.
Stores that remain open now include, AMC Theatres
-Applebee’s
-AT&T
-Barnes & Noble
-Bath & Body Works
-Destination Tan
-FedEx Store
-GameStop
-Outback Steakhouse
-Pappoule’s
-Uniform Destination
-Whiskey Roads
Why didn’t you throw in stables for horses and horse drawn vehicles if you really wanted to make a point?
Did I mention that it’s a $500 million project in a fairly upscale part of Tucson?
The Star has been so deficient for so long now that the inevitable happened. Kansas City has pretty much forgotten they exist. The sadder part is that they failed without even having a primary local competitor. It was death by 1000 cuts, most of them self inflicted. They had a few jugular wounds as well. When the industry shifted they shed themselves of their most important asset.. their talent. I sincerely think they felt that their editorial board drove their readership and they still do.
I contacted the new acting ed about doing two or three free lance columns after I return…
Uh, so far no response.
We’ll see.
maybe my pet sitting career is looming a little large than I suspected!