TKC EXCLUSIVE!!! KANSAS CITY NEWSPAPERS ARE SLIMMING DOWN AND FRIGHTENINGLY THIN LIKE A HIPSTER WEARING SKINNY JEANS!!!

The death of print media is coming quicker than anyone thinks in Kansas City.

Last year, BlogKC chronicled cutbacks at suburban papers and his post piqued my interest . . . In my relentless pursuit of the scoop, I actually had to talk to people which is pretty rare because, as a blogger, I have a natural aversion to any form of research.

Anyhoo . . . I knew that I wasn't going to get anywhere talking to people at The Star because most of them hate me and they don't like the fact that I've been able to gain a modicum of noteriety by poaching their hard work and adding my own spin, silliness, misspellings and grammatical errors. Soooooooo . . . I called a few people at McClatchy. Guess what? They were REALLY friendly and nice which might have something to do with the fact that the company is almost a penny stock.

Off the record, they chatted for much longer than I expected and even gave me a hint at which writers are about to hit the bricks . . . Rest assured Jeneé Osterheldt can't keep writing about Facebook for much longer now that she's quickly approaching 30 - It's just not cute anymore that a grown woman is writing a "column" that reads more like a crappy blog and could have been thrown together by a bored college sophomore.

It gets better . . .

Just like their smaller dead tree counterparts:

SOMETIME LATER THIS YEAR THE STAR WILL STOP PUBLISHING AS MANY AS THREE OF THEIR DAILY EDITIONS!!!

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but it's not my fault that circulation is going to start to suffer because few people want to pay or an ad in the "paper of record" that's only read by senior citizens and homeless people examining their makeshift blanket.

Printing the news on sheets of paper and then hiring an army of trucks to take the news across the City in the middle of the night is just a bad idea. Sadly, there just isn't as much money in Internet publishing to support the hundreds of employees it currently requires to produce and distribute Kansas City's paper-of-record. The current recession/depression isn't helping things either . . . Online, The Star barely makes enough revenue to pay Jason Whitlock and marketers just don't trust banner ads despite better data on customer behavior.

If online news is the future (it is) then it's worth noting that The Star has roughly the same page views of a site like Gawker.com HOWEVER, Gawker has a staff of less than a dozen . . . Do the math.

Niche publications have it just a little bit better but not by much.

A KICKASS TKC TIPSER AND EXPERT LOCAL BIZ PERSON RECENTLY TOOK NOTICE OF THE DRASTICALLY DIMINISHED PAGE COUNT OF THE PITCH!!!

The ads are smaller and The Pitch is falling behind Ink in terms of page count. That's right, on paper and to advertisers - Ink is beating The Pitch. Sorry.

It's really just a numbers game:

THE PAGE COUNT OF THE PITCH THIS YEAR HAS GONE DOWN FROM MORE THAN 64 TO 48 IN THE PAST TWO ISSUES!!!

Already they've laid off or restructured the jobs of some of their very best talent. If they have to cut any deeper I imagine the newsroom will be nothing more than Nadia "I'm still thinking about Tony hitting on my 2 years ago" Pflaum, C.J. Janovy and Justin "Hack" Kendall huddled together looking for story ideas from their text messages.

There's no denying that it's important to consider this sudden reduction in staff, page count and now printed editions for local dead tree media. The news landscape is changing and it's not for the better. TV stations are much better at making the Internet work to their advantage than newspapers. TV news coverage isn't as in-depth but it's far more timely and captivating. Remember that Newspapers once had huge overseas bureaus reporting on International events but the average news consumer doesn't really misses that coverage . . . We'd rather read about the social lives of the ladies who write Ink (ugh) . . . So there is a precedent for the absence of news coverage that people once thought was crucial.

Again, I'm just reporting what so many people are afraid to make public . . . For now. But if there was somebody to blame in all of this it might be Mike Hendricks, Mary Sanchez and so many other elitist reporters, editors and pundits who pushed their agenda all over the so-called paper of record.

Objectivity is a myth but the newspaper once did a better job of pretending to uphold this standard. The actions of the rag in the Stadium Tax vote, the election of Mayor Funky and the light rail fiasco have shown that the pages of the Star are nothing more than another political platform . . . Objective information or even insightful opinion is a rarity and Internet denizens are now realizing that a few exclusive details coupled with an agenda isn't really the 4th estate . . . It's something that any blogger can provide.