Commentary titans shaped Kansas communities for generations. They still have much to teach.
A bust of William Allen White stands beside plaques bearing his writing at Emporia's Peter Pan Park. (Photo by Clay Wirestone/Kansas Reflector)
I remember two bronze plaques in an Emporia park, each cast with the anguished writing of a father recounting the death of his 16-year-old daughter. I was only 8 years old, but the words of William Allen White in Emporia’s Peter Pan Park left a permanent impression.
I didn’t understand what a newspaper editor or columnist did back then, but I surely knew White was important. A bronze bust of the Emporia Gazette editor and publisher watches over the park from between those bronze plaques, after all.
My family only lived in Emporia a year, nearly four decades ago now, but I never forgot how one man captured a profound event of his life with indelible words. Those plaques, I’ve come to believe, represent the beginning of my lifelong fascination with commentary writing and opinion journalists. I became a writer and editor myself, and now my book on the topic has arrived in bookstores.
That fascination didn’t stop with William Allen White. When my family moved to El Dorado in the early 1990s, I frequently heard stories about longtime El Dorado Times editor Rolla Clymer. His name adorns a room at the library, a local pond and a property development. His collection of editorials about the sweeping Flint Hills landscape could be purchased across town.
In the early 2000s, I attended the University of Kansas (and the William Allen White journalism school) in Lawrence. It didn’t seem peculiar to watch Lawrence Journal-World editor and publisher Dolph Simons Jr. write weekly columns that enraged or amused locals. This was what Kansas newspaper editors were supposed to do, I reasoned.
By that time I had decided to make journalism my career, and that fact seemed self-explanatory that no one needed to voice it. The history of Kansas and its towns was defined by opinion writers and commentators, those men and women who wrote about daily life in the pages of community newspapers.
Since then, journalism has gone through tumultuous shifts. Newspapers have shrunken or closed, and local opinion writing has all but vanished from the number that remain.
Figures like White and Clymer and Simons were not just flashes in the pan. They worked for decades. They strengthened their cities and built bonds with residents. While they were not perfect — none would have claimed to be — they provided an essential civic good.
They helped Kansas know itself.
William Allen White’s hands, cast in bronze, cradle leaf debris at Emporia’s Peter Pan Park. (Photo by Clay Wirestone/Kansas Reflector)
I’ve written a book that’s coming out Tuesday called “Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters — Then and Now.” It’s published by the good folks of the University Press of Kansas.
My book isn’t just about old white men. It’s about old women, too — including the indomitable Mamie Boyd, who worked and wrote through her 97th birthday in 1973. It’s about legendary Black journalists like Lucile Bluford of Kansas City and Hollie T. Simms of Wichita.
It’s about Soviet-curious socialists like Emanuel Haldeman-Julius of Girard, whose Little Blue Books spread the classics to teenagers of America. And it’s about homemakers like Lindsborg’s Donna Burough Opat, who raised nine children while writing a column for the Salina Journal.
These people told the stories of Kansas. These people were Kansas. There was little distinction between their words and the lives they lived. For those of us devoted to local journalism, that has always been the case.
Recently, opinion writing has come to mean something else. It’s come to mean something more partisan and performative, more focused on horse races than hometowns.
As local journalism struggled, local opinion pages withered or disappeared. At the same time, a national political entertainment complex developed, treating deeply held personal beliefs as fodder for ratings. That approach trickled back down to the local level, where commentary began to be seen as destructively divisive.
For anyone who has followed the travails of local news media, this should sound familiar.
What I couldn’t forget or overlook is how popular opinion writing remains among readers. Americans may have a dim view of national talking heads, but they gobble up opinion pieces like a hungry teenager devouring chicken nuggets.
Opinion editor Clay Wirestone, right, speaks at a Sept. 27, 2026, Kansas Reflector event at Red Rocks State Historic Site in Emporia. (Photo by Jessica Tufts for Kansas Reflector)
National newspapers like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post maintain expensive editorial page staffs. Magazines including the Atlantic and Harper’s commission lengthy think pieces about current affairs. Meanwhile, digital platforms such as Substack attract millions of readers for opinionated posts.
In my five years at Kansas Reflector, I’ve seen it happen repeatedly. During our legislative session, from January through March, news stories predictably attract the most readers. But for the rest of the year, columns and opinion pieces from a diverse assortment of Kansans frequently take the top-read spot at our website.
People enjoy reading local opinion — yes, even if they disagree with it.
My favorite comment from readers? “I like your column, but I don’t agree with everything you write.”
That’s the whole point of writing opinion and running an opinion section, in White’s day or the present. Serious opinion journalists devote their careers to making people examine their preconceptions and engage in a dialogue about the future of their communities.
In the words of Iola Register editor and publisher Angelo Scott, whose 1958 speech on this subject help inspire my book:
.indent2Container { margin-left: 1em; border-left: solid 1px var(--brand_one); padding-left: 2em; }Except for their editorial pages.
Here is where a newspaper has its one chance to become different. … Here is where a newspaper may become gay or sad, frivolous or serious, inquiring or cynical, a blazing crusader or a quiet philosopher. Indeed, it may become all of these things in the same paper in the same week as the mood of the editor changes.
But in any event it will become personal if it reflects the thinking of a person who is known to its readers, who is home town flash and blood, who sits at a desk in the home town office, and who may be slapped on the back if you like what he says or cussed out over the phone if you don’t. It will have impact. It will have force and vitality. It may even have influence.
Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. His first book, “Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters — Then and Now,” comes out Sept. 29 from the University Press of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.