Ink KC

Ink KC seems like a competent free newspaper to me. Their reporting seems decent and has concert postings which I appreciate and articles which I can get into. Not bad at all.

Ink is the me-​too sister of the Pitch, and I think is better in many ways, most importantly in sponsoring more local and small get togethers where you can meet more people. Otherwise, I have the same praise for it that I do for the Pitch: relevant local coverage that is better than anything else provided, in print or online, for the 20 – 40 demo.

Well, sometimes squirrels cannot quite make it up the tree. Sometimes they don’t even have enough nuts for a decent harvest, and well, we don’t see them again.
Ink magazine seems to have a bunch of squirrels working hard to develop decent alternative press, but cannot seem to find the nuts needed to edit things. A friend and graduate student in english has even gone so far as to weigh its «dowdy» content and grammatical negligence with toilet paper. I am trying to avoid politics here, and will just say I now read it rarely. My deduction is that this is a new-​fangled endeavor trying extremely hard to hurriedly puke out something to compete with some other media platform out there. Sadly, to me, this results in droning content, middle-​of-​the-​road photography, and some editing issues left untreated and screaming on the hospital bed, «AHHHHHH FIX ME BEFORE THE ENTIRE CITY SEES ME WITHOUT A QUOTATION ON MY ASS». In all fairness, I see the entertainment of Ink improving when the city gives people something more interesting to write about. Overall, for me this is just another weekly press fiending to document some truly loud local shit.
–I am not an editor, thus do not take my word for it.–

Ergh.
I’ll paraphrase what a friend of mine (who works in the newspaper biz) had to say about Ink, which summed up my feelings exactly:
-«Ink is really a half baked idea… its just trying to position itself as a classier, hipper version of the Pitch but the result is this vanilla product.»
-«Ya gotta have enough talent to deliver a big proposition like that and their editorial comes up short.»
I’m no copy editor (though I am a former English major) but the first couple times I gave Ink a try, I was astounded by the amount of simple grammatical errors littered throughout the whole publication. Perhaps their editing has stepped it up a notch but… I wouldn’t know. I don’t feel the need to pick it up anymore.
*edit*
Now that I think about it, I know they messed up quotations a friend of mine gave about a fashion show he styled AND Ink staff took credit for the photo he took and submitted for the article. No thanks.

I think that Ink is superior to the Pitch in almost every way. Yes, like the Pitch they do have a pretty good amount of ads and classifieds, but they also do a great job of balancing it out with actual interesting and funny content.
I get Ink every Wednesday when it comes out and I often even look forward to getting it. I am familiar with all the writers and what columns they do. There is a sports section, crafts/​do-​it-​yourself, music, and other interesting columns about events and happenings that are going on here in Kansas City.
Ink also does a great job of marketing themselves– they sponsor a lot of events and parties (like KC Wizards soccer team) and they also have advanced film screenings.
All in all, I would recommend Ink as a great free newspaper.

Ink KC is a weekly press that seems on the heels of competing with the Pitch for KC’s alternative press audience.
I’m going to leave the politics out of this because we all know that mixing media and criticism can be a dangerous game. So this review is really to bring about attention to the folks who are behind Ink. So far I’m pretty pleased with their offering and even feel like their story generation and content is a departure from local competing media. For me to actually sit and read papers like this takes a focus on content, not spam ads on every other page. I like to actually see local news and community insiders or professionals giving insights on various topics. Ink has done a pretty good job so far in my opinion with bringing some locality to their stories and steering clear of just being a reviews paper.
Right now, their headlining stories have been great and their event picks are always fun to glance out, especially the design of the weeklong layout in the center of the paper. Love that.