The Kansas City Star

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kansas City Star was founded on the 18th of September 1880, priced at a paltry dime a week. That cheap subscription rate was no accident. William Rockhill Nelson, who started the paper with Samuel E. Morss after selling a newspaper in Indiana, wanted the Star to reach everyone in Kansas City, not just those who could afford it. He called for the paper to be "absolutely independent in politics, aiming to deal by all men and all parties with impartiality and fearlessness." Those were bold words in a city already served by three daily competitors. What kind of newspaper could survive that crowded field, let alone go on to win eight Pulitzer Prizes? What drew a young Ernest Hemingway to its newsroom? And how does a paper that once championed editorial independence later issue a formal apology for a century of racist coverage? The Kansas City Star carries all of those contradictions within it, and each one reveals something different about American journalism and American life.

• 2. Nelson's Founding Vision

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  Before Nelson moved to Missouri, he had been campaign manager for Samuel Tilden's unsuccessful run for president. That experience in high-stakes persuasion shaped his approach to the Star. He did not want the paper to be a mouthpiece for any faction. His formula combined low prices with aggressive expansion: he bought the Kansas City Evening Mail, along with its Associated Press evening franchise, in 1882. The paper dropped "Evening" from its name in 1885, becoming simply The Kansas City Star.

  Nelson kept building. He launched the Weekly Kansas City Star in 1890 and the Sunday edition in 1894. Then, in 1901, he acquired the morning paper The Kansas City Times, which came with its own Associated Press franchise. Nelson announced the arrival of the "24 Hour Star," a newspaper that now claimed round-the-clock coverage of the city.

  The early offices moved repeatedly as the paper grew. From its original home on the second story of a building at 407-409 Delaware, the Star shifted addresses several times before settling into a Jarvis Hunt-designed building at 18th and Grand in 1911. That address would anchor the paper's identity for more than a century.

• 3. Hemingway's Desk

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  Ernest Hemingway arrived at the Star in October 1917, just a few months out of high school. He left in April 1918, but those six months changed how he wrote for the rest of his life. He credited Star editor C.G. "Pete" Wellington with reshaping his style. Wellington pushed the young reporter toward a set of principles laid out in The Star Copy Style, the paper's famous style guide. The rules were brief and unsparing: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."

  Hemingway referred to those lines throughout his lifetime. The style guide that a Kansas City newspaper used to train its reporters became, in part, the template for one of the twentieth century's most influential literary voices. The Star may not have set out to shape world literature, but it put a wordy high-schooler in front of a demanding editor, and that encounter had consequences far beyond the newsroom.

• 4. Truman's Complicated Relationship

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  In August 1902, a future president took a temporary job in the Star's mailroom. Harry S. Truman earned $7.00 in his first week and $5.40 in his second. The work was unremarkable, but Truman remembered it. In 1950, he drafted an unmailed letter to Star editor Roy Roberts, writing with characteristic candor that if the Star was ever mentioned in history, it would be because the president of the United States had worked there for a few weeks.

  The relationship between Truman and the Star was never warm. The paper was not kind to Truman, a hometown Democrat whose early political career had been backed by machine boss Tom Pendergast. In 1953, as Truman's administration wound down, it filed antitrust charges against the Star over the paper's ownership of WDAF-TV. The Star had launched its radio station WDAF on the 16th of May 1922 and its television outlet WDAF-TV on the 19th of October 1949. The paper lost its antitrust case and signed a consent decree in 1957 that forced the sale of those broadcast properties.

  The irony was not lost on anyone: the same paper that gave a teenage Truman his first paycheck spent decades as his political adversary.

• 5. Political Reach and Roy Roberts

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  Roy A. Roberts joined the Star in 1909 and was picked by Nelson himself for the Washington bureau in 1915. He became managing editor in 1928, and over the following decades he turned the paper into a significant force in national Republican politics. He pushed Kansas Governor Alf Landon for the Republican presidential nomination in 1936. Landon won the nomination but was defeated in the general election by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Roberts had been born in 1887 and his connection to the Star spanned more than half a century. He was elevated to president of the paper in 1947, and in April 1948 both he and the Star appeared on the cover of Time magazine. He semi-retired in 1963, officially retired in 1965, and died in 1967.

  The political influence Roberts cultivated was not always celebrated within the Star's own pages. In 1954, Topeka correspondent Alvin McCoy won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles that led directly to the resignation of C. Wesley Roberts as Republican national chairman. Roy Roberts, the paper's own president, reported that Pulitzer Prize in just a four-paragraph item.

• 6. Corporate Turns and Physical Moves

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  Employee ownership of the Star ended in 1977 when Capital Cities Communications bought the paper. In 1990, the Star absorbed its sister publication the Kansas City Times, which ceased publication after the Star converted to a morning schedule. Capital Cities was acquired by Walt Disney in January 1996, but Disney sold the Star to Knight Ridder in May 1997, preferring to concentrate on broadcast holdings.

  Knight Ridder left a substantial physical mark on the paper's home. The company built a massive printing and distribution plant adjacent to the Star's landmark red brick headquarters at 1729 Grand Avenue. The plant took nearly four years to construct and contained four presses standing sixty feet high. On the 4th of June 2006, the first edition printed there appeared with a redesigned logo and a narrower broadsheet, shrunk from fifteen to twelve inches wide and from twenty-two to twenty-one inches long. The McClatchy Company bought Knight Ridder that same month.

  The paper's physical footprint kept shrinking after that. In 2017, the Star sold its historic headquarters building and moved across McGee Street. It sold the pressroom building in 2019 and leased it back for thirty years. In February 2020, McClatchy filed for bankruptcy and Chatham Asset Management bought it at auction. By March 2020, the Star had dropped its Saturday print edition, and by November of that year it announced that printing would move north to The Des Moines Register.

• 7. A Reckoning With the Past

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  On the 21st of December 2020, the Star published an apology for its long history of racist coverage. Mike Fannin, the paper's president and editor, wrote the column that opened the series. He described the paper's conduct across its early decades as including "sins of both commission and omission" that had "disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians." The column stated the paper had reinforced Jim Crow laws and redlining, and had robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice, and recognition.

  That column launched a six-part series in which reporters examined both the Star and its former sister paper the Kansas City Times. Fannin described the coverage as routinely sickening the reporters who worked on it. The apology came more than 140 years after Nelson had pledged that the paper would deal "with impartiality and fearlessness." The distance between that founding promise and what the six-part series uncovered became a story in itself, one that the paper chose to report on itself rather than leave to others.

  The Star's Pulitzer history offers another thread through its contradictions. The paper's ninth Pulitzer came in 2022, when Melinda Henneberger won for Commentary for columns demanding justice for alleged victims of a retired police detective accused of being a sexual predator. Henneberger had also been a finalist in 2019 for writing that examined institutional sexism within her hometown NFL team, her former governor's office, and the Catholic Church. A newspaper capable of publishing that kind of scrutiny while also reckoning with its own failures is a different institution from the one Nelson built in 1880.