Dylan Daugherty

Kansas City Star editor Hannah Wise talks to students during a Q&A session, which was held following the initial presentation. The Q&A lasted for around an hour and a half and allowed student journalist to ask further questions about audience engagement and reporting.

This story was written as part of a timed reporting competition where it received an Honorable Mention for Scholastic Journalism Day hosted by MIJA at the University of Missouri on March 27th, 2024.

The Missouri Interscholastic Journalism Association invited Hannah Wise, an Assistant Managing Editor of Engagement and Experimentation at the Kansas City Star, to be the keynote speaker at the events. Wise graduated from the University of Kansas with a B.S. in Journalism, before going to the University of North Texas for her Master’s later on. 

Wise’s presentation was focused predominantly on Audience Engagement, focusing on how the Kansas City Star covered the Taylor Swift Eras tour. 

“Ten years ago, if I was like ‘We’re gonna cover the Taylor Swift show like the super-bowl’, I would’ve gotten so many weird looks,” Wise said, “But now, like, there’s a cumulative mass of people that are like ‘Oh, ok.’”

The Kansas City Star’s coverage helped bring up subscriptions and increase interest, which inspired McClatchy (who owns the KC Star and other major newspapers, such as the Wichita Eagle, for example) to use the same format in coverage at every Eras Tour Concert. 

“Even if they’re not super into Taylor Swift, or don’t get it, they understand the business reasons for it,” Wise said.

The coverage continued to inspire newspaper coverage of the Eras tour, while also being adapted in a day-to-day newsroom, proving that the Audience engagement method learned can serve as a way to successfully get people – especially Gen Z – into news for years to come.