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

[Matt Stephens]

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

There are a lot of bad takes on this board. This one belongs in the hall of shame.

 

[Pilot]

Smaller paper, obviously, but Lawrence was printing in KC too. Wonder what their backup options are. Topeka, I guess.

 

[Pilot]

There are a lot of bad takes on this board. This one belongs in the hall of shame.

I'm sure the staff cares. I'm sure the city cares. I don't think the ownership cares. Sorry if I didn't make that clear.

I'll edit to say, I think it's clear they don't care about next-day coverage of games at this point.

 

[FileNotFound]

To state the obvious, they don't give a shirt 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.

That's basically it, right there. A nicer way of putting it: The print product is no longer the primary focus of a local media outlet. And, truly, not that there is anything wrong with that.

 

[BTExpress]

McClatchy has made that clear over and over. You're a subscriber? You get every score and election result you could want. Just not in the place you have may seen it 10-20 years ago.

 

[apeman33]

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

As far as I know, the only other paper with a press is Hutchinson and it surely doesn't have the capacity. They also overlap quite a bit in circulation area, making them direct competitors. Even if Hutch had the capacity, I don't see Wichita making a deal to be printed by its competitor.

 

[Jesus_Muscatel]

McClatchy has made that clear over and over. You're a subscriber? You get every score and election result you could want. Just not in the place you have may seen it 10-20 years ago.

Bastards.

 

[Chef2]

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 was working a baseball tournament in KC this summer. My highway to the stadium took me right by The Star building.
Cool looking building, but felt like it was no more than about 8 feet off the highway.

 

[sgreenwell]

I was working a baseball tournament in KC this summer. My highway to the stadium took me right by The Star building.
Cool looking building, but felt like it was no more than about 8 feet off the highway.

Isn't that how most of them are? It would make sense, in that Ye Olde Days, you'd want the newspaper building to be near town hall, or failing that, near the quickest way to get everywhere. It seems like it is more of a recent development that you put the newspaper office in a bland strip mall or corporate park that's isolated from everything.

 

[BartonK]

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 heck off a lot about the economics of publishing in a post-COVID world.

Ye Gods... 20 years ago, I worked for a paper not too far from Wichita, in a county with 20% of that population, and we had 25,000 daily subscribers. If the Eagle's fallen that far, they may be below 5,000 by now.

 

[LanceyHoward]

McClatchy has made that clear over and over. You're a subscriber? You get every score and election result you could want. Just not in the place you have may seen it 10-20 years ago.

Since McClatchy went into bankruptcy they no linger file 10-q's. But in 2019 they had 185,500 digital only subscribers and 298,100 print subscribers who had activated their digital service. Over 30 newspapers, many of them in large metro areas.

Which explains why the industry is going to heck.

 

[Oggiedoggie]

I was a photo intern at the KC Star in the early 80s. They have a cool old building.

My mom lives about half-hour from Wichita. She is dropping her subscription to the Eagle after 30 years because she said the annual cost for daily delivery is nearing $1,000.