I AM MARK VASTO.(Hello! How are you?): The Luminary

About Mark Vasto

Mark Vasto is a writer, journalist, restaurateur and charity director.

Mark Vasto studied journalism, computer studies, speech communication and Kappa Delta sorority at the University of Maryland, where he was a contributer to The Diamondback.

Post college, Mark Vasto made the wise decision to work for IBM as an Internet Specialist rather than work for his college roommate's little startup t-shirt company now known as "Under Armour."

After becoming the Pete Best of the sporting apparel industry, Mark Vasto switched careers and worked as a sportswriter covering the Atlanta Braves and Falcons, and worked as a special projects manager for Turner Broadcasting, the Barbara Pyle Foundation and famed chimp scientist Jane Goodall. He crooned at the world famous Supper Club in Times Square, NYC before settling down in Kansas City, MO for some barbecue, a wife and a great kid.

There, Mark Vasto toiled as a city beat reporter for various newspapers in the Kansas City metropolitan area. After buying a Chrysler, he published the highly acclaimed and successful weekly newspaper, The Parkville Luminary and its lowly regarded and unsuccessful spinoff, The Kansas City Luminary.

His syndicated column for Hearst's King Features, "A Sporting View," appeared in more than 230 newspapers from 2005 until 2018--a span in which he wrote nearly 750 columns and more than half a million words (yes, we're counting the small ones like "a" and "it").

A former staff writer for Wines and Restaurant Startup & Growth magazines, Mark Vasto toiled as the front house manager for world famous chef Gordon Ramsay at his Pub and Grill in Atlantic City, New Jersey and now works as a copywriter, restaurant consultant and digital marketing strategist for digMarketing. He is the director of The St. Catherine Corps, an emergency relief organization dedicated to helping the homeless and displaced on Atlantic City's world famous Boardwalk, where he also reigns as Skeeball champ.

He's always up for adventure and / or a writing gig, he comes on the cheap and can be reached in the convenient form below. Holla!

Thursday

The Luminary

I published The Parkville Luminary from 2004 to 2012. The newspaper was healthy--I wasn't. The shear amount of time and the apocalyptic deadlines finally got to me and we had to put her down. It's a proven fact that publishers have shorter life spans. Still, I was proud of what we accomplished, namely a real newspaper that didn't bore you to tears with pictures of somebody getting a plaque at a chicken dinner on page one every week.

Our philosophy was simple: get interest. We did that by going old school: big headlines that you could read from your car if you drove past one of our boxes and news that mattered to you, the reader, the stakeholder in town. We didn't do any "advertorials," you weren't going to read about how to sell your home from the local realtor or some lame restaurant review from some diva who barely knew how to hold a fork. We started at your wallet and worked our way out and we pegged our circulation at the number of owner occupied homes. We sold out nearly every week and I maintain it was because we gave people the answers. It was a very prosperous town and people were busy. They missed a lot of things that were going down in their hometown.

This was kind of instilled in me when I was a kid. I remember we were all in the car and my father, who was an extremely successful businessman, shook his head in disgust at a new building going up on a corner. "Why would they do that?" I remember him asking. That's when we realized we didn't know who "they" were. We couldn't tell you who the mayor was. We didn't know what ward we lived in. We didn't know who our state rep was. We knew all about New York and Washington D.C. but we were clueless when it came time to build a new Ben & Jerry's on the corner. Meanwhile, "they" were planning and zoning and raising your taxes while you were out there commuting to work or doing whatever it is that you do.

I'll pick up the story in subsequent posts. But here's the gist: I chose Parkville, Missouri because they had all the right ingredients. As I mentioned before, they were prosperous and they had real civic pride. They had a strong commercial base, a top-tier college, and plenty of news to report on and plenty of readers. Even better was the fact that I was able to hire two real veteran journalism legends that lived there--Bill Grigsby, the original voice of the Kansas City Chiefs, and Nancy Jack, the octogenarian who was the first full-time female journalist in Kansas City (more on her in a bit). My favorite editor Mandy Hay, who worked for McClatchey and used to slice and dice my articles up at the Olathe Daily News, agreed to moonlight for us and that was it...we were airborne.