You’ve Got Questions About KC; the Library and The Star Have Answers
You’ve wondered as you’ve driven I-70 east out of downtown about an overhead bridge between Benton Boulevard and Indiana Avenue that goes . . . um, where exactly? It simply connects one unpaved patch of ground to another.
If home is on that side of state line, maybe you’ve also questioned why you’re living in Kansas City rather than Missouri City. Or now that streetcars are running again, why they can’t use the old cable car tunnel beneath Eighth Street to roll into the West Bottoms.
Word has it that a whale once passed through town. Embalmed. A big draw.
Really?
A 181-year-old city rife with such quirks, curiosities and buried backstories now has a means of fleshing them out. The Kansas City Public Library and The Kansas City Star have teamed since last October on “What’s Your KCQ?,” a multi-platform project designed to serve inquiring minds — inviting and answering sometimes off-the-beaten-path questions about our town — while spotlighting the informational resources and resourcefulness of both institutions.
The Library leans on the trove of archival material in its Missouri Valley Special collections and the researchers who work there. The Star does what newspapers do, digging, gathering and informing.
Online and in print, in stories, photos and video, they’re on pace to tackle more than 30 submitted KCQ questions in the program’s first year. That’s from about five submissions a week, sometimes more.
“We still handle a lot of traditional reference requests and get similar questions . . . and our staff is putting in time to track down the answers and email them to people. So, it’s sort of already work we were doing anyway,” says Michael Wells, the Library’s special collections librarian. “It made sense that we would make that work public.”
Eric Nelson, The Star’s assistant managing editor for digital content, calls it “a great collaboration . . . the two best sources of information in Kansas City working together.
“I think we have a really good rhythm right now,” he says. “When you’re answering the questions that people want to have answered, it really interests them. We’ve had some really, really high readership and great engagement.”
The project arose from The Star’s connection with the Co/Lab at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, which is working with newsrooms to broaden public understanding and engagement in news gathering and information. The Star’s parent company, McClatchy, is a media partner. The newspaper reached out to the Library to team up.
They use a crowdsourcing tool, Hearken, that brings readers into the story-creation process, allowing them to vote on which stories they’d like to see written and published.
“We’re trying to educate people on how we do journalism, on how you find answers at the Library. But I think we learn something, as well, when we’re communicating with the public and finding out what they want us to answer,” Nelson says.
“Some of the questions are really deep, compelling and interesting. I think we find ourselves surprised by some of them — and intrigued by trying to answer them.”
Some of the published queries are decided by reader vote. Some are KCPL and Star selections. Wells, Nelson and their Library and newsroom colleagues divvy them up and assign them to researchers or reporters. Articles, featuring photos and other images pulled from the Library’s special archives, are posted and archived at kclibrary.org/kcq and kansascity.com/kcq.
It’s one of two Library and Star collaborations. Their Java With a Journalist series, which debuted earlier last year, invites KC-area residents to sit down with reporters at various KCPL locations to discuss community issues and concerns over coffee and pastries. Its spotlight has moved from Westport to the Troost corridor to the city’s Southeast side.
Libraries and news outlets and organizations are increasingly teaming up nationwide amid intersecting missions (informing and engaging communities) and financial and other challenges of the digital age (tugging particularly at newspapers). “We see it as an area where our library really can make a difference,” says Carrie Coogan, KCPL’s deputy director for public affairs and community engagement. “We’re already working closely with a number of media partners, including KCPT and other local television stations and The Star, and we’ll continue to look for creative ways to combine resources to benefit the community.”
The KCQ series is a bit more freewheeling in subject matter but no less aspiring than Java With a Journalist. Stories spell out research and reporting sources. The Star has taken individuals who’ve submitted questions along on reporting sorties. “We want to explain how we got the information — who we talked to, where we looked something up,” Nelson says. “It’s almost self-help, like ‘you can do this, too.’”
As for those earlier KCQs . . .
That bridge to nowhere over I-70 was part of an on-ramp to Benton, but a change in freeway plans rendered it moot. The ramp was removed; the bridge never was (though it will be eventually).
It’s Kansas City because it sits at the mouth of the Kansas River (and withstood alternate suggestions that it be called Kawsmouth).
Repurposing the old Eighth Street tunnel is unfeasible for a host of reasons, starting with an entrance that now sits beneath the State Street building at Eighth and Washington and an exit into the West Bottoms’ flood plain.
And yes, there was Winnie, a 42-foot, 40-ton, embalmed gray whale that spent three days in the parking lots of various Katz Drugstores as part of a nationwide tour in 1953. She rode aboard a specially designed trailer truck. Nearly 75,000 people came to pay respects.
It’s a whale of a KCQ tale.
–Steve Wieberg
