Getting the shaft at the Star

Came across this post about the upcoming Kansas City Star layoffs from a former writer at the daily. The Wednesday Weekly recalled a 2007 all-newsroom meeting with then-executive editor Mark Zieman (now the paper’s publisher) who likened working at the Star to “working in a collapsed mineshaft where we were all stuck and could potentially die.”

A collapsed mineshaft? That might have been a clue to get the hell out, but apparently Zieman was trying to be reassuring with his dry erase marker and stick figures. Zieman supposedly told the Star‘s reporters that a “rescue crew” was coming.

The “rescue crew,” which was a metaphor or euphemism or something for the Internet, was going to save us all! Huzzah! But, in the meantime, we will just need to hold our breaths a little longer until they arrive and endure some cuts, oxygen poisoning and possibly dysentery.

He made references to the fact that people won’t make it and would not survive the coming stick-figure Internet rescue squad, but eventually we would all persevere.

Additionally he added that “We need to be as concerned about reader penetration as McDonald’s is about hamburger penetration.”

There’s a lot more. Former Star reporter Mike Ekey, the guy behind the blog, recapped the meeting in 2007. I’d guess the canary died about the same time.