Author Archives: admin

A little more than 10 years ago, when I still bought into the notion of the honorable American newspaper, and there wasn’t yet a lot of talk about its eminent death, I traveled to Omaha for a journalism conference where I heard a reporter from the Kansas City Star named Mike McGraw say, “I love documents,” and my career instantly came into focus.

 “I love studying them, skimming them, sifting through them,” he said, leaning comfortably against a podium in a hotel ballroom, in a voice of sincerity and wonder and ease. And I understood, finally. 

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OK, so this is some serious inside-baseball shit that will only appeal to current and former New Times / Village Voice Media Gossip Whores.

But it must be told. 

Christine Brennan is VVM’s editorial second in command, the person who oversees thew chain’s flagship paper, the Village Voice, and it’s a mystery how she got there. As far as I know, she’s only written and published one story in her career and it was unequivocally libelous.

Seriously. Just read it.

Anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of libel law should be able to see the burning red flags that wave all through it.

Anyway, the story is about Brennan’s ex-husband, a former Westword staff writer, with whom I once worked at an alt weekly in Boulder.

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Long before I had any idea that Mark Funkhouser would become mayor, much less that I would work in the Mayor’s Office, he pulled me aside at a City Council meeting and said that a recent story I’d written was “wretched, absolute drivel.”

He was right.

The story in question was a fictional piece about Kansas City set in the far future, a total slam on then-Mayor Kay Barnes. The upshot was that the city had become a living hell, with pot holes the size of Midtown and sidewalks in such disrepair that people needed dune buggies just to get around.

And it was horribly mean. What I remember most is its reference to the factoid that Barnes had been a sex therapist in the 1970s.

I wrote: “It must’ve been aversion therapy.” 

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When I came to Kansas City to work for the Pitch in 2000, I was an enemy invader.

A few months before I arrived for my first day of work, the paper had been bought by a corporation, New Times, and there was a lot of tension between the new ownership and the old staff. For years, The Pitch (then Pitch Weekly) had been your classic alternative weekly staffed by underpaid, bleeding-heart, left wing writers who were free to write about whatever the hell they wanted to write, and who, truth be told, weren’t that good at it. New Times, on the other hand, owned a dozen or so papers around the country that all looked exactly the same, with formulaic stories that were beholden to no ideology, left-wing, right-wing or other-wing, and they’d won a shitload of journalism awards. 

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Every once in a while, a stranger will tell me they appreciated the way I handled the whole Funkhouser situation, the way I went from being the former mayor’s top lackey to being all over the newspaper and TV news spilling all the secrets of the administration. The kind words bring little comfort, though, because I know from experience that in Kansas City no one ever criticizes anyone to their face, and that for every compliment I’ve received, there are likely dozens and hundreds of people who think I’m a schmuck, even people I’ve never met.

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