Category Archives: News_and_Views
Today: New Local Radio Ratings Champ & The July 2011 Top 20
Buckle up radio ratings junkies, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride…
The July digits are in, so let’s take a quick look and we can make some closer examinations later. To that end, here are the Top 20 KC Radio Stations for July in adults 25 to 54, Monday through Friday from 6 a.m. to midnight.
I know, I know, they don’t include the high dollar infomercials, Royals games and weekend filler. But this is where 90 percent of station’s revenues come from and where they suit up their best and their brightest, the personalities you love and/or love to hate.
So here we go….
Today: Saturday Night Youth Dustup on Plaza Incites Mayor, Tear Gas?
The long hot summer in Kansas City appears to have gotten hotter…
"I just got back in town and I heard from friends that there was a mini riot on the Plaza Saturday night," says Shawnee sparkplug Tracy Thomas. "But it involved college kids and white kids, not just black high school youths."
How bad was it?
"I heard that tear gas was used," Thomas says.
Hearne: Plaza & P&L District Late Night Kiddie Gang Bang Update
The aftermath of this morning’s KC Police confirmation several weeks of kid problems on the Plaza…
KC Strip trolly point man Bill Nigro said earlier today that he didn’t see or hear anything, but after poking around, he now says that "several hundred kids were gathered in front of the Cinemark movie theaters again Saturday night."
Other sources indicated that pepper spray was used to break up part of the action, but Nigro’s guy "didn’t see the kids running around all over the place like they have in the past," he says.
As for the Power & Light District‘s urban youth gatherings that seem to have provoked a credit card only cover charge to get into the entertainment zone, "It really didn’t seem too bad this past weekend," Nigro says. "Maybe because it was so hot out."
How about the "boycott" of the P&L over what some call a racist cover charge policy?
Today: Does The Pitch Still Ask Tough Questions? Not Where Farm Aid’s Concerned
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One has to wonder after reading a story in the current Pitch under the headline, "Does Farm Aid Still Matter?"
After breezing through the David Martin puff piece I still can’t find the answer to the local alt rag’s question.It must be yes though, since nowhere does Martin come close to dropping the hammer on the "charity" concert schmooze.
Not a single tough question was asked. Not how much money is raised, how much goes to actual charity, etc.
Nope, just a brief history of the event which can largely be found on Wikipedia. And that "a representitive from the Farm Aid…recently went to the White House" and "The Missouri Rural Crisis Center continues to receive grants."
Pretty thin. So allow me to do Martin’s work for him.
Joe Miller: Famous Last Words
Hearne’s been sending me ideas all week for things to write about.
He wants me to write about Gloria again. But I can’t upload vomit.
He wants me to write about Tony’s Kansas City. But it’s the same thing with diarrhea.
He wants the “top reasons why Kansas City will never truly make it to the Big Time.” But that would be pretty stupid coming from me because there are a lot more reasons why I won’t.
He wants me to write a “road map for KC to mend its small town mentality ways.” But I don’t really think KC has a “small town” mentality. I think it has a suburban mentality, which is worse. So my road map is this: Remember that Kansas City is a fucking city.
But that’s not really enough for a column. And not just any column. My last column.
Today: Major Renovations @ Downtown Marriott Send 12th Street Jump to Jardine’s
Time to do some reading ‘tween the lines…
Word that theater and jazz guy Mark Edelman‘s 12th Street Jump, old time jazz radio show is on the move again was an eyebrow raiser. The show will move this fall from the Downtown Marriott lounge to Jardine‘s jazz club, just north of the Plaza.
The show launched two years ago as the 12 O’Clock Jump and broadcast live at midnight on KCUR-FM from KC’s historic Mutual Musicians Foundation. That was then. A year later Edelman and the MMF parted company over – what else? – money and the show migrated to the hotel on12th.
But while a move to Jardine’s may also be money-motivated, this time there’s no bad blood. Sources say the Marriott is embarking upon a major redo of it’s dated lobby and lounge areas.
In the hope of staving off a 1,000 room convention hotel that’s been on the drawing boards for years?
Joe Miller: The Writing Life
I’ve been writing professionally for about 17 years.
I’ve got boxes and boxes of clips and a whole wall of awards. I’ve written a book that was published by a top publisher and got great reviews and won a couple of awards. Yet I’m getting paid less now for articles than I did when I first started out.
For this 10-post series I’m writing for Hearne I’m receiving $500. And I had to fight to get that much.
I’m also working on a story for the Lawrence Journal-World about the Kansas Book Festival for which I’ll earn $50.
In the late 90s, when I was a largely inexperienced hack, I got paid $100 for the same kind of article.
By contrast, I sold my book for $150,000.
Joe Miller: Central High Debate a Thing of the Past
In 2003, a debate team from Central High School finished tenth in the nation – an unlikely accomplishment, considering the school had been declared “academically deficient” by the state of Missouri a year earlier.
Five years later, debaters from Central won the National Association of Urban Debate Leagues’ national championship.
Central has won the city championship more times than any other school, even Lincoln College Prep, a school students have to score high on tests to get into.
And dozens and dozens of Central debaters have gone on to college, many of them with full-ride scholarships, while more than half of their classmates have wound up being drop outs.
Now the Central High debate program is a thing of the past.
Joe Miller: Knocking One Out of the Park; The Highs and Lows of Politics
I’ve done a lot of drugs in my life, but I’ve rarely been as high as I was on Election Night in late March 2007.
I had volunteered for a campaign on a whim, and I wound up my masterminding an impossible upset of a popular politician who was the odds on favorite at the beginning of the race. I got a little help from the Star, of course, but they can’t take credit for it, so the victory was mine as much as any other’s.
So when the results came in and we learned that we’d won by the narrowest of margins, I felt a rush beyond compare.
Joe Miller: Democracy, Inc. in Kansas City
One of the most disturbing moments in my short run in politics came right at the end, when I was working on the campaign for light rail in fall 2008.
I was the Mayor’s Office rep on the campaign committee, which was chaired by C. Patrick McLarney, a lawyer who worked for a long time at Shook Hardy & Bacon and who is involved with all kinds of civic stuff. Anyway, we had just finished a meeting with the committee and a few of us were lingering in the conference room at Shook’s headquarters when McLarney declared that he had an idea for how we’d get voters’ attention.
“We’ll just have Tracy stand out by the highway with her shirt off,” he said.
Joe Miller: What’s Black and White and White All Over?
A year or so after I moved to Kansas City, the Star offered an opportunity for select readers to come and tour their newsroom and printing plant, and to attend an editorial meeting. I signed up for it without disclosing that I was a reporter for the Pitch.
I was in my early 30s then and I was the youngest person on the tour. All of us were white. When we met with the Star’s editorial board, one of the older members of our touring party, a man from a suburb on the far edge of the metropolitan area, told how he basked in the paper everyday, reading the sports page first, then the front section, then local and business, and finally the lifestyle section, and the comics.
Joe Miller: Star Gazing @ 18th and Grand
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.
Joe Miller: Confessions of a Corporate Journalism Hit Man, Part II
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.”
Joe Miller: Hell Hath No Fury Like Christine Brennan, Exec Managing Editor of Village Voice Media
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.
Today: The Awful Truth About Trader Joe’s; It’s a Poor Man’s Whole Foods
First White Castle, then Starbucks, now Trader Joe’s...
Allow me to let you in on a little secret about the business reporting in the Kansas City Star. If they can find a way to make things larger-than-life, they will. I remember the newspaper’s mid-’80s hype about Kansas Citians flying in White Castle burgers from St. Louis the demand was so great.
Fifteen lackluster years later, White Castle beat it out of town, its tail between its legs.
In 1998 Starbucks came to KC. Much to the chagrin of next-door neighbor, Westport’s locally-owned Broadway Cafe. Broadway didn’t stand a chance. Ten years later, Starbucks moved on while Broadway is stronger than ever.
Which brings us to the much-ballyhooed grocer Trader Joe’s…
Joe Miller: Confessions of a Corporate Journalism Hit Man, Part I
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.
Joe Miller: City of Broken Dreams
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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.
Today: Case Closed; Fitzpatrick Slams Gavel on Zach Myers Mystery
"The tears flowed on both sides of the aisle yesterday as 16-year-old Joshua Pena pleaded guilty in Johnson County District Court to involuntary manslaughter in the vehicular death last year of a close friend, 16-year-old Zach Myers."
So begins former Star reporter Jim Fitzpatrick’s final installment on the traffic death last December of the Olathe teen.
"As a result of a plea agreement, Pena was sentenced to 60 days in the Juvenile Detention Center and two years of supervised probation," Fitzpatrick continues. "If he fails to abide by the terms of the probation, he could be sentenced to a detention term of 18 months to three years. Also, his driving privileges were suspended for a year."
Today: Knuckleheads Saloon and Isle of Capri Hope to Dodge Flood Bullet
A story in yesterday’s newspaper warned that "nervous businesses" were braced for flooding…
Complete with an ominous disclaimer from one high profile potential victim located on the banks of the Missouri River.
"There was no word from the Isle of Capri about its Kansas City casino," the story said.
Well, hang onto your sandbags cuz all it took was a single call to get that elusive "word" on the casino’s flood status.
Today: Kansas City’s Hottest Outdoor Pickup Patio to Return!
The outdoor deck atop The Well in Waldo is the place to be on a breezy summer night at this stage of the game…
It’s Chill Chamber delivers the frostiest brewskies in town. The busses have gone to bed. And the odds of your getting drugged, mugged or bugged are slim to none.
You’re high in the sky and all is Well.
Which brings us to the mack daddy of outdoor party places past, Baja 600’s gone-but-not-forgotten patio overlooking Brush Creek.
