Star Will Stick With This Dying, Money-Losing Media Concept, Doggonit!

So Star publisher Mark Zieman — who, as you may recall, we actually kind of like — has decided to confront the talk of this blog the town: the slow but steady collapse of his once-great publication. In a wordy, defensive, tangential piece in the paper today, Zieman addresses the dire straits his paper faces in clear terms. He acknowledges the “deep and widening recession,” the staff reorganization, and the transfer of resources to the Star’s chaotic web site, where — allegedly — the advertising dollars are going. Which I guess is true, if you consider annoying pop-up and rollover-expanding ads to be a good idea. (We don’t.) But just when we thought Zieman might be offering some good ideas about the future of Kansas City media, he offered us a century-old quote from William Rockhill Nelson: “The only institution whose peculiar privilege, if not obligation, is to survey the whole field and act for the whole community is the free, progressive, vigilant, vigorous newspaper.” So… I guess we know how things stood in 1908? It only gets worse from there, alas.

As expected, we suppose, Zieman strays into familiar critical territory by taking a shot at the usual suspects: those pesky blogs.

Bloggers, talk radio hosts, TV pundits and ideologues on both ends of the spectrum all can entertain and inform. But only the local newspaper has the staff, responsibility and ethics policies to carefully gather the facts and present them in an objective format so that citizens, working together, can tackle the problems that threaten our communities or endanger our democracy.

Well.

We certainly disagree that only a newspaper has the staff, responsibility, and ethics to “carefully gather facts and present them in an objective format.” Bloggers all over the country are doing this, and it’s silly to cling to the notion that only these venerated and established publications can, solely by the virtue of their having been around so long, present information appropriately. Reducing the blog uprising to mere “entertainment” reveals just how poor Zieman’s (and, by extension, the Star’s) understanding of modern media is.

There’s also this:

In fact, our news and advertising content has never been more popular. Our print edition attracts 1 million local readers a week, a number which has dropped only 2 percent in the last eight years. That gives The Star a market penetration in the top five among large papers in the country.

Online, The Star is reaching even more readers. A wealth of local content, including video and more breaking news than any other source, has made KansasCity.com far and away the region’s top Web site. More than 4 million visitors locally, nationally and internationally visited us in October alone, and online readership continues to grow at double-digit pace.

Okay, the 1 million reader thing: all the readers in the world are inconsequential if you’re not offering them anything to read. Sure, you can boast of 1 million readers a week, but what are they reading? A paper that’s 85 percent ads? A paper that serves as little more than a repository of wire stories? A paper with huge pictures and captions and three paragraphs of text? There’s a difference, Mr. Zieman, between providing a paper and providing a paper with content — and right now you are missing the latter by a wide mark.

Second, the web site. It’s universally agreed that the Star’s web site is terrible. Just terrible. Poorly organized and with a laughably bad search feature, the site is almost impossible to navigate. And simply throwing up some local blogs doesn’t mean you’ve mastered local coverage. What, exactly, is Walter Winch providing that’s contributing to local discussion? And when boasting of being the top site in the region, isn’t it appropriate to note that you’re pretty much the only site in the region?

All in all, an admirable attempt to defend the paper he loves — but Mr. Zieman, in his stubborn insistence on thinking in old ways and operating in even older ways, has shown that the Star is still at least a decade behind in realizing what everyone else discovered long ago.