Get Featured in The Kansas City Star

The Kansas City Star covers the metro area in Missouri and Kansas: local government, business, development, the Chiefs, Royals, Sporting Kansas City and the Current, plus barbecue, dining and the arts. Earned coverage usually goes to star athletes, civic leaders and major development fights. A guaranteed placement works differently: it is arranged with the publication before any writing starts, you sign off on the draft, and it goes live on kansascity.com within a window stated in writing, usually three to five days. It is a real article on the site that you can put in a proposal, a deck or a profile.

What The Kansas City Star covers

The Kansas City Star is the principal daily newspaper for the Kansas City region. It reports on Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas, on Johnson County and the suburbs around them, and on politics in both Jefferson City and Topeka. Coverage of the Chiefs and Royals is followed far beyond the metro, and the paper gives real attention to restaurants, barbecue, local business, development downtown and the arts.

The voice is neighborly and plainspoken, with pride in the city and a willingness to ask hard questions of it. The Star likes stories where a local person builds something others can visit, taste or use: a pitmaster opening a second location, a Crossroads maker selling nationally, a logistics or animal-health company adding jobs, a youth coach changing a program, or a founder who returned from the coasts.

Who reads The Kansas City Star

Star readers live across the metro, from the Northland and Midtown to Overland Park, Lee’s Summit and Olathe. They are families, professionals, small-business owners, civic volunteers and fans who plan their week around game day. They read the Star to keep up with their neighbors, their teams and their city’s growth, and they tend to support businesses they see as their own.

That loyalty is what makes a Star feature useful. For a restaurant, a contractor, a founder or an entertainer, it is a recognized local credential that customers, chambers of commerce, bankers, landlords and event bookers all know. It earns a place on the wall, in a loan or lease conversation, in a catering packet and in the introduction before a talk or a show.

The Star writes for a city that roots for its own, so a feature works when readers can see the local thread. The strongest pieces say which part of town the story lives in, show something tangible such as a new space, new jobs or a full house, and let the subject sound like a person from Kansas City, not a brochure.

Ahead of any writing, we look through the angles below for the one with the most hometown pull. Clients often skip their origin story, yet how something started here is usually what Kansas City readers enjoy most.

What weakens a pitch

• A generic Midwest story. Readers want Kansas City specifically: the neighborhood, the street, the crowd, not a region in general.
• Borrowed team glory. Mentioning the Chiefs does not make a story local, and readers see through it right away.
• Figures that cannot be confirmed. Jobs, sales and awards must hold up, because everything we write must be true.
• Everything at once. One opening, one product or one season makes a better feature than a full company timeline squeezed into a page.