McClatchy's Star Leads In Digital Kansas City

“It’s the same story, day after day,” said Frank Morris, news director at KCUR, Kansas City’s National Public Radio affiliate. “I can barely stand that story anymore.”

Morris expressed sympathy for the missing child but said there are too many important stories to allow one tragedy, affecting one family, to take over the news. So, KCUR and its Web site, KCUR.org, remained diligent in their reporting on public affairs, even as cable news networks devoted what Morris called “a shitload of resources” to the Irwin case.

Other local media — each to its own degree — did the same, and digital tools helped maintain the balance. KCTV5.com, for instance, featured live, streaming video of the FBI’s search of the Irwin home on Oct. 19, giving visitors a continuous level of coverage the station could not provide on the air. The same week, the site continued to report on efforts to rebuild tornado-ravaged Joplin, Mo., and boldly posted video of Libyan rebels roughing up captured dictator Moammar Gadhafi, as well as an image of Gadhafi lying dead on the ground.

In addition to its role as a breaking news source, KCTV5.com, the website of Meredith-owned CBS affiliate KCTV, serves as an online repository of the station’s notable investigative reports. A five-part series about local homeless children, called “Big Problem, Low Priority,” won a 2011 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism. On its own site, The Journalism Center on Children and Families, which awards the medals, praised KCTV’s sober treatment of the subject: “There was nothing gimmicky about the reporting or the production values. Today, that fact alone qualifies as a ‘fresh take’ [on story presentation].”

At KansasCity.com, the website of The Kansas City Star, recent stories have focused on such unsavory topics as sexual abuse and medical malpractice. The latter was highlighted by the newspaper’s revelation that state medical boards in Missouri and Kansas often fail to discipline doctors with extensive malpractice histories. Though there was nothing remarkable about the paper’s use of digital media to present the story — no videos, graphics or slideshows — its use of digital tools to gather information for the story was exemplary.

“It was a great example of how you can use a database to report on a story that affects everyone,” said David Herzog, a professor of print and digital news at the University of Missouri and an expert in computer-assisted reporting.

Digital media are just as valuable to journalists on the back end of reporting as they are to news consumers on the front end, Herzog said. So, while a lot of industry chatter revolves around social media, mobile devices, and the ways in which they can help deliver content, it’s worth exploring how similar innovations can aid reporters in the research phase. In Herzog’s view, there’s already “a healthy amount of computer-assisted reporting going on out here in the Midwest.”

He adds a word of caution: “All data are dirty, [which means] you really have to take your time to understand your data and second-guess your assumptions.”

The “dirty data” in the Star investigation came from National Practitioner Data Bank records which, the newspaper noted in a sidebar, “are designed to make identification of individual doctors difficult, if not impossible.”

Thus, it took careful interpretation of the data for the paper to name with certainty Dr. Robert Tenny as a neurosurgeon who has been sued at least 16 times for malpractice.

The Kansas City Star spinoff sites

In similar fashion, The Pitch, KC’s weekly alternative newspaper, complements its main site, Pitch.com, with blogs that feature frequent — often obscure — postings every day. A recent entry on Wayward Blog, devoted to music, described a future event called Aged to Perfection, at which “the attractive, cougar-ish women of Haute Flash Burlesque will be flaunting their assets … to spotlight how incredibly awesome older adoptable pets are.”

“I have a small staff, and we write about what genuinely interests and moves us,” Pitch’s editor Scott Wilson explained. “I make assignments and I edit with that in mind. Simply put, everything we do has to pass an overall ‘Would I/you read this?’ test.”

Wilson’s standard invites a broad swath of story subjects, some much more serious than burlesque dancing and pet adoption. In October, Pitch reported that teachers in the Kansas City, Mo., School District average almost 10 sick days per school year, and that the district is oblivious to the educators’ truancy.

Tone distinguishes a Pitch article — even a watchdog piece — from one in a mainstream publication. After quoting a school district official who claimed teachers actually average less than one sick day per year, writer Matt Pearce followed the official’s statement with his own, unmasked skepticism: “Wait — one? Just one day? That’s a remarkable claim.”