The mood at The Kansas City Star is sour and grim. The future is both certain and uncertain for the unlucky ones whose numbers were called. The names of the laid-off reporters continue to trickle out -- telling friends or posting status updates on Facebook. Gone are City Hall reporter DeAnn Smith, books editor John Mark Eberhart and the hardworking Ward Triplett. Chopped to part time are movie critic Robert Butler and deputy features editor Carol Powers. Columnist Mike Hendricks lost a third of his salary but kept his job. Columnist Steve Penn was rumored to be in a similar situation. There's more. More we haven't yet heard about -- Star publisher Mark Zieman pegged the figure at 150 in a memo to staff. So we wait and worry about our friends and colleagues a couple of blocks away. We've heard that there's an afternoon staff meeting, and we wonder about an earlier meeting in which an insensitive man likened working at the newspaper to being trapped in a collapsed mineshaft. Unfortunately, some people didn't make it today. Who else?
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Penn should have been paying the paper all these years. His tripe would need a decade's worth of improvement to reach "sophomoric."
Powers was essentially worthless.
Ward was indeed hardworking and Hendricks was the closest thing that newspaper had to an actual news columnist.
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