When I heard the scuttlebutt around the second floor (that's where the newsroom is) that we were thinking of hiring former KCTV-5 reporter-anchor Dave Helling to lead our multimedia efforts, I couldn't believe our good fortune. Today the hire was announced.
Shortly after I arrived in Kansas City in 1997, I was listening to Mike Shanin's old afternoon talk show on KPHN-AM. He was asking his guest to explain, as briefly as possible, the city's complicated tax increment financing program that, among other things, was helping put up a supermarket in my neighborhood. In two minutes, this guest -- Helling, then at WDAF-TV -- broke down TIF in terms that I, a newcomer, could understand. In time I discovered that he was a rarity: a broadcast journalist very good at his craft, yet able to command respect from his peers in print.
At age 50, Helling had had enough of "live, late-breaking, investigative" TV news and we were looking for someone to help ramp up our multimedia efforts. The technology may be new, but what's needed are seasoned journalists to upgrade their toolkit to bring content to all the channels people now use to be informed and entertained. Any fool reading TV Barn recognizes I'm doing different stories online than I would do in print. Well, multiply that times 300 journalists and you've got real potential to deliver something of value to all the cellphones, iPods, feed aggregators and whatever other buckets are being pulled through the bitstream.
Helling, whose knowledge of local politics and history is so deep that he can hold forth on nearly any topic (he's practically a weekly panelist on KCPT's public affairs show), will bring a lot to our paper's multimedia efforts, of which TV Barn is just the beginning. TV's loss is certainly our gain at the Star.
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