In Kansas City, something rarely seen in modern times: A newspaper war

A stack of fresh newspapers under his arm, Eric Wesson hopped off the curb and bounded out into the intersection of 12th Street and Brooklyn Avenue in Kansas City’s East Side. He approached the driver of a silver truck waiting on the northbound stoplight.

“How you doin’? This is my new newspaper, The Next Page KC,” Wesson said, passing the gentleman a free copy through the window. He pointed to a storefront across the street. “That’s my office — you can find copies there.” Then he pointed down the way toward the Family Mini Market. “Miss Toni sells them in her store also.”

The light turned green, and Wesson wished the driver a good day. Then he shuffled over to a car idling in the eastbound lane and did it all over again.

Wesson’s been hustling out on this East Side street corner every Friday morning for the last month, motivated by a business circumstance rarely seen in these modern times: a newspaper war.

Wesson is the former editor and publisher of The Call, the 103-year-old weekly newspaper covering Kansas City’s Black community. After 21 years, he left in June and rented an office in Gates Plaza from which he has launched The Next Page KC, a broadsheet whose coverage bears more than a passing resemblance to his former publication. He brought along a few Call employees and advertisers as well.

His departure has disrupted operations at The Call, a cherished paper with a rich legacy of reporting on civil rights on the East Side. It has also raised questions about just how many local Black publications — there is also The Globe, which is distributed mostly in Black churches, and the new media upstart the KC Defender — the Kansas City market can support circa 2023.

“I wish them well,” Wesson said last week of his former employer.

Wesson’s version of the split is this: He is the only publisher in The Call’s history who did not own the paper. After two decades of service, he made an offer to buy it and was told that the Joseph family, which owns The Call, was in the midst of an audit to see how much the paper was worth.

“And they said they may get back to me about it,” Wesson said. “Something about that may kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I said, ‘I can do this on my own, sink or swim.’ My wife said, go start your own legacy. You got the contacts, you got the resources, you got the support from the community, you should be OK. So, that’s what I’m doing here.”

“Eric’s offer just wasn’t a very good offer,” Jason Joseph, operations manager for The Call, told The Star. “That’s why it wasn’t accepted.”

Joseph, 46, is the son of Gloria Joseph, who owns The Call. The paper was founded in 1919 by Chester Arthur Franklin to serve the city’s Black population. The journalist and civil rights activist Lucile Bluford became editor when Franklin died in 1955. After Bluford’s death, in 2003, longtime reporter and editor Donna Stewart became its owner. When Stewart died in 2020, she left The Call to her sister, Gloria Joseph, who currently lives in a retirement home.

The Josephs have been exploring a sale of the paper, Jason Joseph told The Star.

“It’s a possibility we’ve looked into,” said Joseph, who acknowledged that Wesson’s departure had “caused some havoc and problems” at The Call. “But right now we’re in the process of trying to build up the paper among younger audiences and keep it the strong community asset that it’s been for 103 years.”

After Wesson announced he was leaving, the Josephs hired Tracy Allen, a reporter at The Call from 1998 to 2017, to serve as interim editor. Allen told The Star that one of her primary goals is to update The Call’s digital presence, something she said “should have been done well over a decade ago.”

“We will continue to be a print publication, but we will likely go bi-weekly sometime in 2024,” she said. “We respect the older community of readers who appreciate print, but there is also a younger African American audience out there with different needs, a different vibe, living in a different culture than what their parents grew up in. And we want to focus a lot more on that audience.”

Wesson said he hopes to eventually get a website up and running, but his focus is the print product.

“There’s a niche audience in the Black community that wants a hard-copy newspaper to read while eating breakfast or drinking coffee, and tapping into that niche audience will be our success,” Wesson, who is 63, said. “A lot of people over here don’t use the internet. But they are loyal readers that have disposable income and they still want news and information. And that’s what we plan on getting them at The Next Page.”

Wesson’s first issue was strategically timed to hit the streets the week before Juneteenth and Kansas City’s municipal elections. He has put out four issues of The Next Page KC so far. As at The Call, it is a mix of local stories Wesson writes himself and national stories relevant to the Black community that he pulls from wire services.

In addition to a section called “Across The Bridge,” which covers Black issues in Kansas, Wesson said he intends to include more opinion and point of view in The Next Page KC. There is a travel column (“One thing I’m learning is that Black women really like traveling”) and a column by longtime local entertainment writer Shawn Edwards. “Letting a variety of people express their views in columns is a way to get more community involvement,” Wesson said.

He has notched some small victories, on both the editorial side (a post-election interview with Mayor Quinton Lucas) and the business side (a full-page ad from the powerful lobbying group the Heavy Constructors Association of Greater Kansas City, aka the “Heavies”). The paper is available at 33 locations and counting: grocery stores (Sun Fresh, Price Chopper), gas stations (Cenex, BP, Fast Stop) and restaurants (Niecie’s, PeachTree Cafeteria). Most are on the East Side.

“It is true that we have the same target market as The Call,” Wesson acknowledged. “The newspaper business is about relationships, especially in the Black community. You need that to get the public’s trust and also to gather information. People around here know me. I’m in the community. I go to church in the community, my kids are active in the community. People say, ‘I know Eric. I don’t know you.’”

Here he was referring to Joseph and Allen, who both live in Johnson County and who Wesson characterized as insufficiently embedded in the community their paper serves. Asked about that, Allen noted that Wesson lives in Independence, “in a subdivision in a very nice neighborhood.”

Also, she added, “I grew up at 57th and Agnes and spent 20 years writing about this community. So, I don’t think he’s right about that at all. I think he feels slighted that he wasn’t able to buy the paper. Well, that’s just business. That’s all it is. I don’t think anyone here has negative feelings toward Eric. We’re just moving forward.”

In his office last week, surrounded by framed portraits of Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks and James Baldwin, Wesson said the decision to leave The Call had been “tremendously difficult.”

“My mindset was, Mr. Franklin taught Mrs. Bluford, and Mrs. Bluford taught Donna, and Donna taught me,” Wesson said. “I wanted to carry on that legacy at The Call and pass it on to the next generation. But now with me leaving, that legacy goes with me. It’s here now.”