Bottom Line: KC Star closing bureaus? PLUS: The first DAILY BRIEFS COLLECTIBLE MINIATURE

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We all know that The Kansas City Star will be going through a fourth round of layoffs soon (I’ve heard early March), but we don’t know who or what they’ll be cutting. Until maybe yesterday.

On his Bottom Line Communications blog, John Landsberg wrote that

Chris here. I told Justin I was going to interrupt his next blog post in mid-sentence with a whole Daily Briefs post, and he said, “No you’re not,” and I said, “Yes I am,” and before he could say “No you’re not” again, I was all, like, “copy-paste-publish-submit.” Seriously, this guy? Always strutting around like he’s the king of boners and Christmas presents. Well, this is the first of a new collectible series of Daily Briefs Miniatures, which are like little novelty replicas of actual Daily Briefs posts, by the fine people at The Franklin Mint. This one is about the Kansas City Star’s Website.

Nick at willnotbetelevised points out that the poor old Kansas City Star‘s Website isn’t among the top 30 online newspaper sites that have managed to increase the average time a reader stays on their site. Chris at Daily Briefs points out the Nate Silver-ish stats-geekery represented by compiling unbelievably esoteric lists like that, seriously, it’s like baseball nuts who actually give a nacho-scented beer shit about the BQR number, which baseballprospectus.com defines as “bequeathed runs prevented from scoring,” measuring “how many more or fewer of the bequeathed baserunners subsequent relievers allowed to score than would be expected from league average performance in those situations.” (Ahem.) Excuse me for a moment.

But the point is well taken: The Kansas City Star Website is an unfun, ugly and unnavigable construct made out of the kinds of content you find in FYI and Mom2Mom. E. Thomas McClanahan is inside there, too, like a digital right-wing Lawnmower Man whose birth cry will be the sound of EVERY TELEPHONE IN RUSH LIMBAUGH’S MANSION RINGING AT THE SAME TIME!!!!!

Nick is also correct about the building at 18th and Grand, which I understand has been “shaken to its foundations” this week, being wuh-HAY too large for the offices of The Pitch, which are actually housed inside a shoebox, where we sleep in little match boxes and wash our little faces in sinks made out of nutshells. Back to you, Justin.

the “Star will likely eliminate its KCK, Northland and Eastern Jackson County bureaus” but not Johnson County (of course). Landsberg cited “an anonymous source close to the situation.”

This would be really bad news for the metro’s outlying areas and the overworked reporters covering them. The bureaus have already been cut to the bone, leaving good reporters struggling to cover large portions of the city. Coverage is already suffering. I can only imagine how bad it’ll be if the bureaus close.