KC Star sports editor Jeff Rosen constantly shifting in the digital age

It was late Tuesday night, into the early hours of Wednesday morning, and Kansas City Star sports editor Jeff Rosen was still working. A former University of Missouri tutor said she completed classes, took tests and answered questions for students, and the Star had broken the news.

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When Rosen started working in sports journalism, it was a time when it could have waited until morning.

But now, at the Star, there isn’t time where he’s truly off the clock.

“My day starts at midnight and it ends around 11:59,” Rosen said. “And that is seven days a week, and I’m only half kidding… That’s just the nature of the business these days.”

His job is constantly changing, simply because it has to. The consequence of that is the difficulties of his job being ramped up. Now, he’s not just managing writers and keeping them creative and happy to be at the Star, but he’s managing the web, how the stories are shared, where they are shared, and tracking all of that with the Star’s trends methods — they have three of those now, Rosen said. 

“It was really hard the last few years to give appropriate attention to our writing staff,” Rosen said. “Because we were trying to handle all aspects of the print operation and handle stuff that we had to digitally.”

So, to handle the all of the tasks a sports editor has in 2016, Rosen and the Star had to make a shift in staff. Overall, the staff has fired over 20 people on the editorial side in the last year, but many of those positions have been filled — two on the sports staff — with web-based staffers to help track those trends and boost web traffic.

“We hired — not necessarily a better team of people — just a different strategy of our workforce,” Rosen said. “We're asking more and more of our reporters, and I'm there to kind of be a buffer, and that's hard. It's not something I don't like doing, it just takes up a lot of my attention, to make sure people feel rewarded and valuable still.”

Rachel Crader is one of those hires. She’s now officially the digital sports editor for the Star, but in the past she has been a print reporter at different outlets. But at the Star, her job — along with some others on the digital side and Rosen himself — is to bring clicks to the work other reporters are doing.

Facebook has been a great source for that. Rosen said the Star's Facebook brings in about 80 percent of the Star’s total hits, while 20 percent comes from everything else. That’s why Crader has created Facebook pages for the Star’s Kansas basketball and Kansas City Chiefs sections.

“Facebook, at this point, is like a free space for us to get our content out there, and it's so effective,” Rosen said. “We're closely watching that, and I think most news organizations are these days.”

Then there’s a spot where the two biggest aspects of Rosen’s job — managing content and working with his writers — collide. That’s in how those writers use social media to share their own work — which is the most effective way for those articles to be shared.

“Quite a bit falls onto them, because they're the ones that are the face of the coverage that the readership is reading,” Rosen said. “It's a combination of promoting your content and connecting with people by having fun and being informative. And people like that. If you're uncomfortable in that space, it's advisable to find a comfort level with it soon, because I don't think that's going away.”