After a string of storms tore through Kansas and Missouri last Sunday, dozens of readers who contacted me were shocked to find the paper’s report on Monday’s Page B-1 instead of the cover.
“I really can’t believe what I’m seeing here,” said a caller who identified herself as Marcie. “At first I thought my delivery person must have made a flub-up, like he put the FYI section on the outside. But no, it’s really a thing about parents giving their kids hormones to make them taller on your front. What were you thinking? Then I saw this little thing at the bottom, calling all this destruction ‘local weather,’ like it’s no big deal. I just dont get it.”
Subscriber Dalene Bradford e-mailed me about an acquaintance who had been out of town until late Sunday night.
“With no mention of the storms on the Monday front page, she was surprised when a friend from Las Vegas called to check in on her worried, after having seen coverage on their paper’s front page,” she wrote.
Ouch. It’s not good when local news arrives from Nevada faster than it does from The Kansas City Star.
In general, editors often shy away from weather stories and photos on the cover, partially in reaction to what many considered over-reliance on this type of feature in the past. But news of violent storms is vastly different from pretty pictures of an unexpected balmy day.
The machinations of what happened in the newsroom Sunday night are not particularly important in this case. When the paper went to the presses, authorities were aware of two deaths from the storms. By Monday, that number had risen to nine. The story noted widespread damage in Lawrence, where much of the city and the University of Kansas campus were without electricity.
Damage to buildings, cars and other structures throughout the metropolitan area was evident, as in the photograph on Monday’s Page B-1 showing a collapsed wall at the Carter-Waters Distribution Center in the Northeast Bottoms. The building blocks to create a Page One centerpiece certainly existed.
Another reader used Monday’s cover to make a larger philosophical point about how The Star uses its A-1 real estate:
“Since the front page instead contained two feature articles & a hard news story about your paper’s possible sale (which I consider to be an ‘inside baseball’ story of interest at this stage only to insiders) this was clearly not a judgment of the relative news value of stories about yesterdays weather, but a continuation of the Star’s strategy of mixing hard news and feature articles on the front page. I urge you and the front-page editors to keep the feature articles off of the front page when the news calls for it, as it did today.”
I get that sort of complaint from loyal readers often, and I understand the sentiments. Many who follow the news closely tell me they aren’t terribly interested in features, especially on A-1.
But I also often hear very grateful words from people touched by exactly this sort of story.
“Im the dad of a kid who’s shorter than the rest of his class,” said one caller Monday. “I just read this article by Eric Adler about kids who are getting hormone therapy to [grow] taller. Those drugs are not for us, I don’t think, but I’ve felt I was the only parent out there who worried about it. This really touched my wife and me.”
Every day it’s a balancing act. Once again I think the readers made the right judgment call here overall. The storms deserved bigger billing.
