"Joe In Japan"

Check this out: http://www.kansascity.com/744/story/334162.html

The KC Star sent Joe Posnanski out to Japan, where he'll be following around new Royals manager Trey Hillman. How cool is this? The Star already has a staff member at the World Series, and continues to send its writers everywhere.

This coming at a time when most papers can't afford to send its writers to a game that's on the other end of the state.

 

The KC Star and Chicago Tribune remain my "dream papers." Stuff like this makes me even more sure I want to work there.

 

Pos is really good.

To the Star's credit, they let him be really good.

I don't imagine they often tell him, "You've only got 18 inches today."

 

No doubt they economize somewhere else and someone in that newsroom is bitching that they won't let him put in for the OT he wants to report a story he thinks is important.

I once worked on a paper that really cut back on space all year and blew it out on a couple major projects each year -- huge sections with no ads, just fantastic reporting with great display by that era's standards. And I can't really say people got a truly sucky paper 363 days a year so we could win contests; it was a very good staff that placed a premium on tight editing and ruthless news judgment so every inch of the usually tight news hole was put to good use. And the kind of journalism contained in those blowout products had some impact on life in that state; changes were made as a result of that reporting. It wasn't all vanity. But, I mean, I laid out some 18-column sports sections Mondays for Tuesdays in a decent-size, two-newspaper city. I really had to wonder if people looked at an 18-column sports section and understood they'd be thanking us in a few months when they saw that massive investigation of the state prison system, or if we pissed them off so bad with that 18-column sports section that we'd already lost them by the time we printed that massive investigation. Because did they really see the care and skill it took to deliver a fairly comprehensive product in 18 columns, or did they think, "Why is this paper so freaking thin every day?"

Something else always gets squished when you do something expensive, and someone's gonna be pissed.

 

I say six inches. They moan and groan. Bump it to eight inches.
They're happy, and I saved 10 inches.

 

Is this sort of like when the football team gets new jerseys, a state-of-the-art locker room and stadium upgrades ... while the women's track team is still using old, rusted equipment and playing at the nearby high school?

 

Used to read the Star all the time when I lived in the region in the late 90s. Back then, space certainly wasn't an issue. In fact, they often left huge chunks of white space on their inside sports pages for early editions. Don't know what their space is like now. I haven't seen a hard copy in years.

 

Wasn't talking space specifically, just resources in general. In the case I cited, it was space. At another paper I worked on, it was sending writers overseas once in a while while we failed to cover shit in our own town. Now personally, I think it was good for the paper to stretch and send a writer to Israel or India to get something interesting, but people are always gonna say, huh, you can cover this but you don't cover that.

 

Star has cut back big time in recent years, downsizing correspondent spots, to name at least one major change. They've also taken their time with a few hires and done the standard biz ho-hums.
That said, they're willing to open up the check book when they feel they need to. In this case, JoePa is going to be the only KC media person there. Everyone else will be getting bunk.