What Would/Will We Do Without the Star to Kick Around?

Bloggers have a bit of a love/hate thing with the professional press. Most of us love to criticize the lapses in accuracy, judgment, and ethics we find in the Star, and the Star certainly keeps us well-supplied with targets. Some bloggers even act as though they are competing with the real journalists, claiming "scoop" status when they rush to post a rumor, fabrication, or red herring.

The thing is, bloggers can be decent pundits, but they are terrible reporters.

Real reporters get sources on the record, confirm facts, and publish carefully. A mistake counts as a black mark on a reporter's record, and a series of mistakes results in termination.

Mistakes aren't a big deal in the blog world - in fact, if they drive traffic, they are desirable. Reporting that very well-informed sources say one thing and then reporting something totally different on the same afternoon is all in a day's blogging for so-called "citizen journalists", while a real journalist would call it "termination day". If I publish a headline today claiming that Gloria Squitiro is leaving City Hall to work for Jeff Roe, I'll get a few thousand extra hits, and maybe even force them to spend their time correcting my fabrication. While I might fear that regular reporting of falsehoods would damage my credibility to such an extent that smart readers would begin to avoid my site, we all know that it's okay to be consistently wrong as long as we're sensationalistic, and, if we happen to be correct once in a great while, we can even be viewed as credible sources, garnering more attention still.

Truthfully, bloggers, even more than more news-aware Kansas Citians, depend on the KC Star for the vast majority of raw material. No blogger has the time, money or dedication to consistently attend simultaneous meetings at the County Courthouse, City Hall, and Jefferson City, while working on a multi-page feature story. Instead, we sit back and wait for the Star to publish the facts, and then we jump in to put things into our preferred context.

I recently had a friend tell me he doesn't bother subscribing to the Star anymore, because he gets all the local news he needs online. He meant it as a statement of support for the importance of the blogosphere, but it bothered me to hear his decision to opt out of supporting the real reporting we all need to function as citizens.

As a blogger, I'm frightened to see the cutbacks at the Star. If the Star disappears, we all will be more ignorant. Already, as the Star diminishes with cutbacks, we are missing out on stories that deserve our attention. Have you seen any robust reporting on the Jackson County legislature's tampering with the Ethics Code? There was a time when it would be on the lips of all concerned citizens, but now it's a footnote that hardly raises an eyebrow.

It's true that we can live without the Star. I can publish more stories about beer and local restaurants, and maybe even pass on a bit of political information I pick up over lunch or at a cocktail party. I already publish better political analysis than Helling or Kraske, so that would be no loss.

But if you think you can do without the Star because you get all the local news you need from the blogs, you're horribly mistaken. You're still getting your local news from the Star - it's just getting filtered by bloggers, or you're dependent on the Star's website.

While you might think you're kind of clever because you're not having to paying for it, you're going to wind up paying for it if the Star's fortunes do not turn around. The difference is, your payment will go to support graft and corruption in our government and industries, rather than to a stable of good investigative journalists, who pay attention to credibility and accuracy. And don't count on the blogs to take care of you then.