KC Confidential

photo by mark webb

Longtime readers of may recall the early days of KC Confidential…

Including the occasions I turned flipped the spotlight around and pointed it at the denizens of our fledgling comments section. It was an exercise in alternately saluting and grimacing at the heights to which they soared and the depths to which they sank.

Because sometimes it’s hard to do them justice given the limitations of the medium.

Take yesterday, when the newbaum turk wrote, The biggest loss is Charly Arnault moving back to Indy. She was the hottest girl on local news here.”

Not being a local television news kinda guy I was curious. Continue reading →

Think of it as the nice guys finish last syndrome…

By most accounts former KMBC TV “weatherman” Joel Nichols truly is a really nice guy.  Yet after a quarter century at Channel 9 doing the weather and oddball, odd hour celebrity interviews, the baby-faced newsie is o-u-t.

As for a rumor started New Year’s Day by former KC media blogger John Landsberg that Nichols may rejoin his old boss at Channel 41… mere speculation. Landsberg confessed as much in the comments section following his scoop that caught the rest of Kansas City media (me included) snoozing.

The concept of Nichols doing weather at KSHB seems a reach.

For starters, “He doesn’t really know weather,” says one television news source. “And he owned that – he said that he didn’t.”

Nichols comes from the era of smiling, chatty weathermen and women who were ubiquitous in the 1970s and 1980s. However those days have mostly faded to gray. Today’s ultra competitive TV weather-scape all but requires a degree in meteorology. Continue reading →

Time flies whether you’re having fun or not…

That said, I was definitely having fun in the summer of 1992 when Kansas City Star publisher Jim Hale and spanking new editor Art Brisbane sent me down to the minors for a chance to try out for a column in big leagues.

The back story: both the Pitch and rival alt weekly The New Times were struggling mightily – kinda like now except The New Times is long gone – and having run both, I had this genius stroke that the newspaper could buy one or both, let me run the show and turn all the red ink into black… just like that.

However after spending a couple months trying to put a deal together, Hale looked at me one afternoon and in his best Texas drawl said, “Do you want a job?”

The rest is history, but it wasn’t quite that simple. Continue reading →

Lauren Euston

What a way to go, death by text…

That’s how a Florida father bit the dust – on “Senior Monday” at a Cobb  movie-plex in Tampa. Retired cop  Curtis Reeves shot and killed 43 year-old Chad Oulson after complaining to him about Oulson texting his 31/2 year-old daughter. The shooting went down during the previews prior to an afternoon screening of the movie “Lone Survivor.”

“Well, it had to happen,” says fierce anti-text movie critic Jack Poessiger. “Yes, I am down on texting but obviously it’s over-the-top to shoot somebody over it.”

In Poessiger’s world – and other dead serious movie critics and fanatics like Alamo Drafthouse owner Tim League – there are no valid excuses for texting or looking at texts on your phone during movies.

Not even for people with young children, seriously ailing relatives or pending personal issues? Continue reading →