Small world…
Just as the Kansas City Star‘s weekly Sunday magazine was blowing taps, another newspaper weekly was soaring to new heights, says former Star editor and reporter Jim Fitzpatrick…
“That same day the New York Times redid their magazine,” Fitzpatrick says. “”It’s about three times thicker, completely redesigned and loaded with advertising. You ought to see that thing; I mean, they went all out.”
Star Magazine went to its grave with a measly 24 pages and barely four of those ads.
“The first 30 pages of the New York Times magazine were all ads,” Fitzpatrick says. “And this was the most advertising they’ve had in eight years.”
Fitzpatrick’s take on the death of Star Mag?
“Well you know it’s been irrelevant for the last 10 years,” he says. “It’s just a testament to everything that’s going on at the Star.”
Did Star Magazine ever really matter?
“You know, I never paid much attention to it in recent years. I just put it aside.”
I’m surprised that today I can buy McClatchy stock at $2.43. It’s worthless.
Jim, you know that’s why there’s chocolate and vanilla ice cream –different people like different things. To call the mag irrelevant is an insult to the people who contributed to it. (Cindy, keep on keepin’ on!)
As I can testify from first-hand experience, the NY Times magazine has been a real handful the past couple of weeks. It’s a good thing no one is out at 4 in the morning on a Sunday because if they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and got hit with the NY paper when the driver threw it, it’d damn near kill ’em. But I digress. I am saddened by the departure of the Star magazine, even if it had too many same-sex couples featured in the weekly love story. My preference would be for the Star to drastically reduce the size of the sports section/staff and devote more time to covering compelling human interest stories outside the world of sports. With the passing of the magazine, there went our “topper” for the Sunday issue. What’s a guy to do?
Cindy Hoedel is, indeed, an outstanding writer. A few years ago, she had fantastic profiles, within a couple of months of each other, on political kingmaker James B. Nutter Sr. and civic activist extraordinaire Anita Gorman. (Now, however, Hoedel has moved, literally, out into the sticks and left the urban scene, which is what MATTERS to the vast majority of readers.)
If the magazine would have focused on news-related, relevant subjects, or at least high-profile people, it might have been able to hang on. But, to me, it made the mistake of doing what the rest of the paper tried to do for so many years — chase whatever ephemeral subjects editors thought might grab the attention of prospective readers. That’s when newspapers end up chasing their tails.