Kansas City Star to sell building, move printing to Des Moines

The Kansas City Star to move from downtown building, shift printing operations

Pretty solid decision, to move deadlines up and print a couple of hours away. No one will care about the Chiefs' prime time games and playoff/Super Bowl results anyway.

Can catch up with that in print on Tuesday, or deliver it on Monday afternoon.

 

I google Des Moines to be 187 miles away from Kansas City. So three hours by truck.

One of two things has to happen.

1. Kansas City just goes to afternoon delivery. Because besides sports scores how are they going to report on events like Presidential elections with morning delivery?

2. Or they just go to Sunday only in print. I think I read Kansas City daily circulation was down to about 80,000 and it will plummet some more. Advertising was down for Gannett and Tribune by about 29% in the last quarter so are there enough ads left to justify six days a week publication?

Also, Wichita is part of the ex-McClatchy chain. I thought the Wichita paper printed in Kansas City. Am I mistaken or will the Eagle be printed in Des Moines, approximately 380 miles away.

And this answers the question of whether Chatham, the post-bankruptcy owner, believes there is a future in the newspaper publishing or they are just attempting to pull as much cash as possible out of the business.

 

The newspaper industry cannot save itself by killing itself.

 

You are correct in that the Wichita Eagle is currently printed in Kansas City.

They'd have to shift the Eagle to, I dunno, Oklahoma City? Because if the Eagle is going to be printed six hours away, you might as well just stop printing it at all and go to web only.

Amazingly, it wasn't all that long ago the Star opened that huge building downtown with one of the selling points being, "Look at our press!"

 

I am 99% sure Oklahoma City prints in Tulsa. So maybe Tulsa works. Otherwise who knows? I can't think of anywhere they would have the press capacity.

 

Unlike the way things used to be --- when a pressroom by and large dictated deadlines --- most of McClatchy's papers print FAR EARLIER than the pressrooms demand, simply because of the demands on the publishing center, which basically runs like a train schedule, with each paper's deadline (starting with Myrtle Beach at 5:30ET) running 10-20 minutes later than the one preceding it, all the way to Fort Worth at 10:20ET.

Deadline for State College, for example, is 8:20. But pressroom doesn't demand pages until three hours later. That early deadline is just to get it out of the way to make room for the remaining papers (Wichita, Fresno, Boise, Charlotte, Kansas City, Lexington, Sacramento, Fort Worth), all done by the publishing center.

If State College's press moved 2 hours away, for example, it likely wouldn't affect deadlines at all. Because they're already three hours earlier than they need to be --- for delivery purposes. Kansas City's deadline is 9:30ET, but its pressroom doesn't demand pages until almost 11:30. So a three-hour move to Des Moines likely would only push deadlines up perhaps an hour.

"Sports scores" (from night events) haven't been part of the equation on a regular basis since this all went into effect last Jan. 6. The latest "local" deadline among the 28 papers is 9:20, with a "content" deadline of 6:30. Kansas City and Fort Worth do ask for extended deadlines for NFL night games, but Charlotte and Sacramento don't.

 

Per the story, Star will be printed in Des Moines.

Along with prime time Chiefs, why bother with Royals' night games? West Coast games?

Salt Lake City pulling the plug on print save for Sunday looks wiser and wiser.

 

Surely there will never be any issues with trucking the papers back to Kansas City during the dead of winter in Iowa.

 

Do you have any idea what will happen to Wichita?

According to the McClatchy 10-k for 2019 Wichita had 32,000 daily subscribers and 71,000 on Sunday. Sedgwick County has a population of over 500,000 and as far as I know the town does OK economically. If Chatham really does not care about maintaining a paper in that community it will say a hell off a lot about the economics of publishing in a post-COVID world.

 

Is Des Moines the El Segundo of Iowa?

 

I have no idea. Tulsa would seem the logical place to print it. What other place is even possible?

 

To state the obvious, they don’t give a shit about covering the Chiefs or the Royals or presidential elections.

So far as I can tell most newspapers at this point exist only to squeeze every last dime possible out of people like my parents, who subscribe out of habit and won’t stop no matter how diminished the product is.

The days of the print newspaper being the official record of what happens and matters in a city or region is long gone.