Funkhouser: textbook case on how to deal with the media

Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser’s torturous relationship with the Kansas City press is now part of an advice book for other embattled government types. In Good Press, Bad Press, De-Pressed: Governing’s Media Survival Guide for Public Officials, Funkhouser joins Eliot Spitzer and other less-infamous politicians in providing textbook examples on how to — or how not to — deal with the media.

The book was written by Governing magazine’s Jonathan Walters, who spent years covering Funkhouser’s work as city auditor. Governing named Funkhouser Public Official of the Year in 2003, and Walter makes no secret of his affection and admiration for the big lug.

If nothing else, it’s interesting to read about Funkhouser’s administration from this perspective — and a couple of the anecdotes shine some interesting light on what goes on behind the scenes at the Star. In a chapter titled “Blogging Blah, Blah, Blah: Geek Media Relations 2.0,” for example, Walters recounts a conversation with one of Funkhouser’s former colleagues in the auditing department, Michael Eglinski:

Eglinski had recently left his auditing job in Kansas City and moved to Lawrence, Kansas, and clearly there were things he didn’t miss about the Big City, including the blog run by the Kansas City Star. “The whole immediacy of the Internet is driving things to the extent where the Kansas City Star city hall reporter is almost no longer reporting on the business of government,” says Eglinski. “It’s almost gossip. It used to be as a staffer you’d talk to reporters and figure that it was all off the record. That’s completely changed. Everything is fair game.”

And “everything” includes some pretty irrelevant and silly stuff. Eglinski talks about the blog posting where Kansas City mayor (and former chief auditor) Mark Funkhouser is alleged to have encountered a political enemy in city hall. Funkhouser, according to the posting, did a double take when he saw his nemesis, “fleeing” downstairs to escape.

High drama, I suppose, blogwise, but wrong. Funkhouser, whom I know very well, stands 6 feet 10 inches (at least) and doesn’t back down from anybody. The real story, says Eglinski: The mayor was on that particular floor looking for a Diet Coke. When he saw that the machine was out, he simply hotfooted it one floor down to another machine. But the blog needed to be quenched, and Diet Coke, apparently, was not sufficiently fizzy to do the job.

%{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”57150c4289121ca96b960630″ data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%I vaguely remember hearing this story, but several different key-word searches of the Star‘s Prime Buzz blog turned up nothing in its archives. If any of you guys over at the Star — I know you’re reading this — can send me the link, I’d be much obliged. If the entry no longer exists, well, that’s interesting, too.

In the chapter slugged “Special Problems Clinic,” Walters offers “a corollary to the bad-reporter syndrome,” which is the problem of “working with ones who just don’t seem to get it, ‘it’ being the actual story.” This one involves Funkhouser Chief of Staff Kendrick Blackwood and an unnamed Star development reporter that we know is Kevin Collison.