The Pandemonium in the Pandemic

This is what ex-publishers do when they’re bored during pandemics. 

Accolades

 

The Luminary Online

Our partners at Naked Pixel helped The Luminary create one of the more handsome community newspaper websites ever known to mankind. It was featured in Design magazine at the time of its launch and did garner serious acclaim from our industry peers. 

The Second Coming

For a brief moment, The Luminary was the first and only weekly newspaper on Second Life, a...very weird place...beating every major media source on the planet to the punch (Reuters would open a bureau in the coming months). With the help of some very creative visual artists, we created a digital newsroom and posted our front page in the virtual newspaper office's window display. After spending about 7000 hours coding we all asked ourselves "why are we doing this?", logged off, forgot our password and became a footnote in Internet history.

A Sporting View

A Sporting View - King Features Syndicate

From 2004 until 2017, it was my pleasure to pen "A Sporting View," a general sports column about whatever the hell I was thinking about that week when it came to the world of sports as long as it was 500 words, coherent and most importantly, on time.

I had covered the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Falcons for The Vinings Gazette and the Kansas City Royals for The Landmark and The Luminary but in no way, shape or form did I ever consider myself a sports expert. In fact, I know there were/are tons of kids out there who can outstat me, quote every arcane measurement known to God and man but it didn't matter to the good folks at Hearst and King Features. I made deadline and on occasion, I could spin a good yarn.

I wrote more than 700 columns for King Features and I'm finally putting a "best of" collection together in order to sell it on iTunes and Amazon, all proceeds to go to the St. Catherine Corps. Here's a few links in the meantime...and yes, I'm huge in Spokane and Chippewa.

Rice, Not Nice

Cortez the Killer

Pack it in Pete

Trying to pick my favorite columns is like being asked to pick your favorite child. Those weren't my best, but they came up first on Google so I'm alright with them. When the book is finished, check back in this space for great Justice!

The Industrial Luminary and Col. George S. Park

Parkville's original Luminary

I had been "publishing" newspapers since I was a little boy. Maybe it was because my father bore a striking resemblance to George Reeves, aka Clark Kent aka Superman and maybe it was because I watched the Spiderman cartoons growing up. Also, could be that my father brought home a copy of the New York Post every night. Whatever the spark was, I've been writing all my life.

For Parkville, I was interested in knowing their history. Clearly, the town was named for this guy Park...he had a huge grave monument at the town graveyard. What was their first newspaper? What did he read? To find the answer, I went to Park University and met one of the greatest individuals in the world, their archivist Carolyn McElwess.

She told me the story of the Industrial Luminary. Col. Park was the publisher. Was he a Colonel? Probably not. But he escaped Santa Anna's firing line. He was a schoolteacher looking for adventure and was trying to get to the Alamo but Santa Anna got to his crew first and decided to shoot them all. Park dropped to the ground the moment Santa Anna's hand dropped, when he signaled his troops to fire. Decidedly not shot, Park popped up and hightailed it across the Great Plains until he came to Missouri and founded a town. You could do that in those days.

Every town needed a newspaper and Park's Luminary was phenomenal. In fact, it was too good: his anti-slavery stance put him at odds with David Rice Atchison, the Dick Cheney of the day and answer to a trivia question (he was president for a couple hours). Atchison made Park an offer for his printing press. Park said, sure...just give me a few weeks so I can get another one to keep printing the paper. Atchison went all Moe Green on him and said, om, no...you're not getting it...I'm buying you
out. Park replied, "There is not money enough to suppress the Luminary!"

Days later, a group of thugs from the hills of Platte County called "the Regulators" stormed into Parkville, took his press and tossed it in the Missouri River, scattered his type all over Main Street. They had planned to literally tar and feather him and ride him out on a rail. We hear that and we think it's funny like in the Bugs Bunny cartoons but it's not. It's brutal. It's a bunch of guys holding you down, ripping off your clothes in the middle of a public thoughfare, then pouring boiling hot pine tar over your body. It instantly scars you and burns off your first few layers of skin. The feathers stick to the tar and good luck getting them off after your lifted on a fence post and paraded out of town and tossed in the gutter.

But Park wasn't there that day, he survived, he appealed to President Polk and he got $10k to go away. He used the money to start Park University, but he always vowed that the Luminary would return someday. So I returned it. We picked it up at volume 3, since he did two volumes, we printed corrections from his last paper from the 1800s and printed letters to the editor that were still in the kitty. Not lost on me was the fact that the publishers of the Weston Chronicle and Platte County Landmark (who I worked for...more on that later), owners of newspapers that have been printing since the Civil War without ever missing a week,  hated my guts. Game on. Good thing we we were better.

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.

(From l to r: Mandy Hay, Mark Vasto, Bill Grigsby, Nancy Jack)

The Luminary was small but mighty. We hired the best graphic artist
in America, Tom Sunshine, to assist in the design. 

Hello, World!

(Luminary Photograph)

I like to think I rocked it over the years for the entities I've written for. This blog will show a bunch of what I think are a few of the greatest hits. I've been lucky in that I've had the opportunity to work with genuinely talented and creative individuals and I owe it all to them...from my elementary school teachers all the way to Nancy Jack. Thanks for the visit and have a good one, people.