Kansas City Star hires Pulitzer winner Michael Lindenberger to lead editorial board

The Kansas City Star has hired Michael Lindenberger, a Pulitzer-winning journalist at the Houston Chronicle, to become the newspaper’s vice president and editorial page editor.

Lindenberger, 51, replaces former opinion editor Melinda Henneberger, who recently became a columnist at The Sacramento Bee, a sister paper of The Star. This year she won a Pulitzer prize, journalism’s highest honor, for commentary on former Kansas City, Kansas, detective Roger Golubski.

“We are delighted that Michael will be leading our award-winning opinion team,” said Mike Fannin, president and editor of The Star. “Michael believes in well-reported, incisive commentary and editorial writing that serves local communities. He has a long track record of distinguished journalism to back that up.”

Since 2018, Lindenberger has worked at the Houston Chronicle, where he most recently served as deputy opinion editor and oversaw the daily operations of the newspaper’s eight-member editorial board.

He previously worked in several roles over 14 years at The Dallas Morning News. Those included work as a columnist and editorial writer, city hall reporter, transportation writer, and the paper’s Washington correspondent for business.

“I am excited about the opportunity to continue to do work that makes a difference in readers’ lives, a high bar that has already been set at The Star,” Lindenberger said.

Earlier this year, Lindenberger and three colleagues won a Pulitzer for editorial writing that judges said “revealed voter suppression tactics, rejected the myth of widespread voter fraud and argued for sensible voting reforms.” Those editorials exposed how Texas leaders used false claims to justify voter suppression and called on Sen. Ted Cruz to resign for his role in sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

“My job will be to come and listen and learn about Kansas City,” he said. “I’m not coming in to preach any particular points or points of view. I want to learn about what’s most important to readers.”

Lindenberger said he wants The Star’s opinion writing to surprise and inform readers by infusing original reporting with well-reasoned arguments.

“As I say often, we want to surprise our readers with the facts as much as we want to surprise them with our fresh thinking or original way of looking at a problem,” he said.

“It’s a challenging time for opinion journalism, but I believe that by anchoring our editorials in facts, by showing our work, by addressing the problems that most concern our readers, and by using language in a way that draws those readers in, even when they don’t agree with us, we can make life in Kansas City easier to navigate.”

A Kentucky native and cocktail connoisseur, Lindenberger founded BourbonStory.com, a blog about the worldwide bourbon boom. He’s also a college teacher, public speaker and graduate of the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville and spent the 2012-13 academic year at Stanford University as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow.

Lindenberger will begin working at The Star next month.

“We’re so excited that Michael is joining our team and leading a talented team of opinion editors and writers in Kansas City,” said Peter St. Onge, opinion editor for McClatchy, The Star’s parent company. “Michael is a thoughtful editor and writer, and he’s shown with his exemplary work in Houston that he shares our values of providing urgent, deeply reported opinion content.”