Melinda Henneberger, Mará Rose Williams promoted to new roles on Star editorial board
The Kansas City Star has promoted Pulitzer Prize finalist Melinda Henneberger to lead opinion coverage as the newspaper’s vice president and editorial page editor.
Henneberger, an editorial writer and columnist on The Star’s opinion staff since 2017, replaces Colleen McCain Nelson, who recently left Kansas City to become executive editor at The Sacramento Bee.
Along with Henneberger’s promotion, The Star announced that veteran education reporter Mará Rose Williams will move to the newspaper’s opinion staff.
“Melinda’s deeply reported and superbly written columns have established her as one of the most important voices in our community. We are thrilled to see her step into a leadership role working with our highly accomplished editorial board,” said Star Editor and President Mike Fannin. “We’re also delighted with Mará’s well-deserved promotion after a distinguished career on the news side.”
Williams, who has worked at The Star since 1998, conceived the newspaper’s 2020 series investigating its own history of how it covered — and failed to cover — Black Kansas Citians. Fannin launched the project with an apology, saying The Star had “robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition.”
Henneberger was a Pulitzer finalist for editorial writing in 2020 and for commentary in 2019. Last year, Pulitzer judges recognized her “fierce and unflinching defense of the women of Missouri on issues of abortion access, sexual assault and domestic violence.”
“Melinda consistently shows in her columns and editorials what opinion journalism can and should be — locally reported, urgent and compelling,” said Peter St. Onge, opinion editor for The Star’s parent company, McClatchy. “I’m so excited to see her build on the successes of the Kansas City Opinion team.”
Before coming to The Star, Henneberger worked for a number of news organizations, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, where she worked for 10 years, as a Metro reporter in New York, a Washington correspondent and Rome bureau chief.
“Under Colleen Nelson’s leadership, we on the opinion side have broken a lot of news over the last four years, and told a lot of important stories that wouldn’t have been told otherwise, and that’s what I want us to continue to do,” Henneberger said.
Henneberger pointed to a letter she recently received from a reader in response to one of her columns. It said in part: “Before closing, I want to acknowledge that the issue is really not whether I agree with what you write but that you are bringing to light facts and happenings we readers may not know about except for you. That is really the basis of my gratitude, especially now that our civic conversation seems to become increasingly belligerent.”
“That meant a lot to me, because that’s our goal,” Henneberger said. “I love our team, am thrilled that the wonderful Mará Williams will be joining us, and am eager to get to work in this new role.”
Williams has covered education in Kansas and Missouri for more than 20 years. But she said writing editorials has been a long time career goal. She grew up in Long Island New York reading Les Payne, a renowned columnist and editorial writer at Newsday.
“He was the only Black columnist I knew and I wanted to do what he did,” she said. “It’s why I became a journalist.”
Before coming to The Star, Williams worked at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Newsday as well as newspapers in West Virginia and Connecticut.
“This is a dream come true, really. I am over the moon and so honored,” she said. “To get to do this job at The Kansas City Star, a paper I have loved working for, for more than 20 years in a city I love makes it even more sweet.”
