KC Buzz Blog discontinued

You can't blame a newspaper for trying to make money, but I am hoping the Kansas City Star falls flat on its face with its latest move. The newspaper discontinued its KC Buzz Blog Friday with the following announcement:

We’re discontinuing KC Buzz Blog, effective today.

We’d like to thank all who read the blog over the last year. And thanks also to those who participated by leaving comments, especially those whose comments were thoughtful and pushed the political dialogue along.

The success of KC Buzz Blog led us to experiment with creating the subscription-only political web site, Prime Buzz. Besides providing early access to news, it offers a host of other special features, from legislative calendars to e-mailed executive summaries of political news. Given limited time and resources, that’s where we need to focus our efforts for now.

If you were a fan of KC Buzz Blog, please consider a 14-day free trial of Prime Buzz. Just go to http://primebuzz.kcstar.com. (We’ll be moving our blog rolls over to Prime Buzz.)

Maybe I am wrong, but I see the whole conceit of the Prime Buzz site coming back to haunt the Star. Many articles have been held back from the newspaper and its website for days and sometimes never make it after appearing on the pay site.

One of the features of the Star's Prime Buzz, which I discovered during my trial run, was a rundown of items running in various blogs across the state, including this one. And while I have no problem with the Star (or anyone else) using information from this blog (as long as they give credit, which the Star has done), it does seem strange, that one of the selling points of this pay-for-view site is its collection of information from blogs whose writers do not charge anyone to read their content.

I also question the reach of Prime Buzz. On the occasions when an item from The Turner Report has been mentioned in Prime Buzz, it usually receives only six or seven hits.

And while the Star does offer decent political coverage, the Buzz Blog and Prime Buzz are less effective than the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Political Fix, which itself is less effective than Jason Rosenbaum's Columbia Tribune Political Blog or David Catanese's KY3 Political Blog. The collection of blog entries provided by Prime Buzz is not nearly as well done as what the Springfield News-Leader has done since its makeover.

So I will be removing the link to the Buzz Blog in a few days. It had been a shell of its original self since Prime Buzz was created anyway.