07-01-2009 KC STAR'S OMAHA VS. KANSAS CITY STORY SEVERELY FLAWED A front-page story in the Kansas City Star (7/1) seemed specifically designed to shock Kansas Citians: "Omaha's Catching Up to Us." The sub-head was even more startling: "If population trends continue, the Nebraska city will be bigger than Kansas City by 2012." Omaha bigger than Kansas City? That's kind of like saying that Chicago is bigger than New York. Or that the Star's circulation is higher than USA Today. It simply didn't seem to make sense. As it turns out, maybe there is more to the story that wasn't told. Campbell, usually a stalwart reporter, seemed to be comparing apples to oranges. The quality blog site "Blog KC" (LINK) examined Campbell's story: Star runs odd and inaccurate story about the population of KC and Omaha Today the KC Star�s Matt Campbell has an odd story that tries to whip up panic about how the population of Omaha is set to surpass that of Kansas City. He cites 2008 Census data that lists KC with 452,000 and Omaha with 439,000. But his numbers are wrong. This past February the Census Bureau acknowledged that they had significantly under-counted KC and revised our population up to 475,000. And there is evidence that our population might actually be over half a million. The Star reported this in June 2008 and February 2009, but apparently Mr. Campbell forgot to read his own newspaper. Another omission is the fact that Omaha has few suburbs. Most of the suburban-style areas are in the city limits. It would be as if Overland Park, Leawood, Lee�s Summit, and Independence weren�t independent cities but part of KCMO, easily pushing our population up towards one million. Regardless of central city size, the KC metro area is still twice the size of the Omaha metro area. And our economy is more than twice the size. It�s unfortunate that such a prominently placed story has such glaring omissions.
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