It has been three weeks since The Star started macrozoning its Sunday Metropolitan sections.
What is macrozoning? It means tailoring the newspaper to spotlight news, special features and advertising in certain geographic areas. Beginning on March 7, The Star began macrozoning its Sunday Metro section three ways: Missouri, Kansas and Northland.
What do you think? Have you noticed? I’d like to hear from you.
For readers, the most significant change is the addition of two extra pages of news and advertising to their Metro section each Sunday. What you’ll see depends on where you live, but readers can expect expanded coverage of their own areas, while still receiving the metrowide coverage they counted on previously.
The first published edition is the State edition, which is not zoned. Then come the zoned Metro sections with the title: More coverage from your area above the Metro flag marked either Kansas, Missouri or Northland.
(Kansas serves Leavenworth, Wyandotte and Johnson counties, Missouri serves Jackson and Cass counties, and the Northland serves Clay and Platte counties.)
The Star’s goal is to represent each area with stories on the section front each week. And if there’s some reason they can’t be on the front, you’ll find them throughout the section.
Inside, there are some interesting features that speak to your part of town, including:
The Cityscape column, which talks about the comings and goings of area businesses.
Cold Case, which brings readers up to date on unsolved crimes.
Photo Quiz, which has drawn hundreds of entries by e-mail and postcard.
A recent Sunday in the Kansas Metro section included those new features, and two front-page stories that originated from Kansas: one on the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case, and another on a federal law that could cost Overland Park millions to make its sidewalks safer to the visually impaired.
The philosophy behind zoning is twofold: To give expanded coverage of your area, and to allow advertisers to have a position in the Sunday paper for less than they would have to pay if they ran an ad in the full run.
The Star’s intention is to connect more closely with Metropolitan readers in the three areas served by macrozoning, said Michael Nelson, assistant managing editor/Zoning.
From the news side, it gives us this opportunity by adapting the news menu to areas where our readers live, he said.
Zoning isn’t new to The Star. Some readers might be familiar with zoning because it’s done in the Neighborhood News supplements. Plus, a daily zoned edition is delivered to Johnson County Monday through Saturday.
The Star has zoned news and advertisements at least since the 1890s, when special editions were delivered to towns across Wyandotte County, Nelson said. Beginning in 1989, The Kansas City Times (the old morning edition of The Kansas City Star) began zoning to Johnson County, and included a vigorous zoned advertising strategy.
Macrozoning is not just news-oriented, and certainly The Star hopes to grow advertising business through zoning. The advertisements will vary from zone to zone, spotlighting local businesses. Vice president of Advertising Steve Broas believes that zoning creates a smart environment for local news and advertising.
It allows advertisers to geographically target their advertising message in the Sunday newspaper, our best day of circulation and readership. We are excited and believe it will be a big hit with our advertising customers.
There are benefits to macrozoning, but there are challenges, too, both to readers and to staff.
The main concern I have heard from readers is the fear of missing major metro stories from outside their zone. Editors say that shouldn’t happen.
In macrozoning, some stories are rearranged for emphasis or trimmed for space, but readers shouldn’t miss out on reading a story. In some cases, information may be added to a story because it’s germane to that area. In turn, other stories might have to be trimmed to accommodate that.
Said Nelson, Occasionally stories are going to be trimmed slightly to make the puzzle work.
Many staff members, including reporters and photographers, have to work harder to make macrozoning a success but perhaps the biggest challenge is to the news desk, which on Saturday now is sending four versions of four pages in the Metro section during the course of a press run.
