Letter from the Editor: En Garde with the Off-Guard

Dearest reader, welcome to the September print issue of The Pitch. As summer wraps and Virgo Season is upon us—my time to shine—we at the paper continue our blitz on all things cultural, political, and personal. Everything hits all at once, and we try to be ready for it to… hit a few more times atop that.

In this mag (and online in the days and weeks to come) we have a bunch of big stories that are the result of six months to a year of reporting behind the scenes, that are finally coming together and ready to delight/upset/confuse/break you. Our Pitch team becomes slightly more unrelenting with each passing week, and at some point we don’t even need coffee/Celsius to feel like sleep is optional.

A wave of our current work and some new story beats we’re tackling has given cause for pause and reflection on a fundamental building block of our gig: Questions.

The questions that the community asks us—problems in need of solving or situations that seem baffling—are the launching point for so many of the winding adventures we find ourselves on. That communication (tips@thepitchkc.com wink wink) is the origin of wildly fulfilling stories. We enjoy cracking a code. We love to get ducks in a row and explain how things work, especially when people in positions of power are stifled by legal language, or are deliberately obfuscating the world around us. In plenty of situations, it can even boil down to finding out that folks making decisions about the community aren’t super great at figuring out where words go or what order makes the most sense, lol. Equally, we make time for the questions KC has for us, and it’s not a shock that inaccessible corporations or politicians might be avoiding those same emails and phone calls.

That brings us to the side of “Questions” that most people outside of journalism won’t get the joy of experiencing. More often than you might expect, politicians, bureaucrats, and powerful people simply do not expect that anyone will ever ask them very, very basic questions. “How did you make this decision? Where did this data come from? Did this outside group that gives you money… Do they influence your choice on the matter?” It’s a hyper-specific moment in our day-to-day, when a call ends after a guy on the other end realizes that he simply was not prepared to tell us the truth. So many of our deep dives start innocently enough as just trying to understand the world around us and go off the rails when a representative reveals that they’d hoped bluffing (or exuding deliberately boring energy) meant they’d never be prodded with even the smallest softball. “Wow guess they weren’t ready for that!” is a starter’s pistol in our newsroom.

But “Questions” aren’t just yarn-walling our way through conspiracies. They’re also at the heart of the joy and cheerleading we bring to Kansas City. More often than not, the questions we get to ask folks about why they do what they do yield an answer that will blindside us—a real journey into the best and brightest parts of humanity.

So thank you for always supporting what we do, no matter how serious or ridiculous it ends up. We love being here on your side, and we can’t thank you enough for always bringing us more questions than we could ever possibly answer.

Pitch in and we’ll make it through,