KC Confidential

They’re dropping like flies at the Kansas City Star…

As expected, Hunger Games victim Dawn Bormann is takings a layoff bullet, in deference to fellow reporter Karen Dillon, who, with seniority opted to remain at the newspaper. Bormann is telling co-workers that she’s looking forward to spending more time with her family.

Also last week, religion editor Helen Gray announced that she would retire, as did one of my favorite editors Bill Dalton (more on those later).

The latest: House + Home section editor Stacy Downs will join former Star editor Anne Spenner, the Vice Chancellor of Marketing and Communications at UMKC. Continue reading →

Retailers, restaurateurs and nightclub owners love it…

Bring on the fair weather and the fair weather customers, they say. For many the warm winter climes are a welcome respite from the gloomy, cold temps we’re used to at this time of year.

White Christmas? Bring it. Freezing cold weather, snow and sleet – fuggedaboutit!

However there’s a price to pay for all this balminess. Continue reading →

“I finally sold it,” says The News Room owner Kevin McGraw…

And just like that one of Midtown’s most venerable watering holes faded into the history books a week ago today.

“I was told Ernest Hemingway used to go there,” McGraw says. “And Wes Lyle, the famous Kansas City Star photographer used to come in after I bought it in 2000. He’d been coming in there for 40 years and he gave me photos of Harry Truman and one of Tony Orlando doing the bump with Betty Ford when she was hammered. I hung them all in the bar as an ode to him.” Continue reading →

This just in from Ground Zero at 18th and Grand…

Kansas City Star publisher Mi-Ai Parrish‘s” memo to co-workers re widespread reports and commentary on the controversial decision to make two reporters – Karen Dillon and Dawn Bormann – duke it out or hug it out to decide which of them takes a layoff bullet.

“Some of you have seen online reports regarding the recent layoffs at The Star,” Parrish begins. “We want to be clear that we did not ask our employees to work out any decisions amongst themselves.

“As most of you know, The Star has tried to make voluntary options available on many occasions when it has been necessary to make reductions in our workforce, in order to lessen the impact of involuntary eliminations. In fact, the feedback we’ve received from employees has been overwhelmingly in favor of making the voluntary option available. For this particular severance program, for any group of two or more employees in which a reduction is to occur we did offer a voluntary option. However, if there are no volunteers, as is our past practice, the employee with the least tenure will be included in the reduction. This information was clearly indicated to those employees affected by the severance program.”

Hold it right there. Continue reading →

As to be expected, the preholiday forecast is dour to partly gloomy…

The morale at the Kansas City Star in the wake of Monday’s layoffs debacle:

“Morale? If the staff had any morale, it’d probably be lower, I’m sure,” says a staffer. “But there is no morale left after five years of this. How could there be?”

Let’s see, heads rolling. Unpaid job furloughs. Star stores shutting down. Practically the entire country’s media focused on the uncaring, unwise way two woman reporters were pitted against one another to see which gets to keep her job.

Toss in the so-called “fiscal cliff” and the downward spiral of print newspapers and it’s difficult to be buoyant.

And now news staffers at the Star are playing out “Hunger Games” scenarios among themselves. As in, “What would we do if it happened to us?” Continue reading →