On Wright

Big stuff these days for our guy Wright Thompson, Gangrey poster, sports writer for the last four years at the Kansas City Star -- and now the latest newspaper talent to be plucked away by ESPN. Wright took a job on Monday as a senior writer for ESPN.com doing features and a contributing writer for ESPN The Magazine. He signed a three-year deal and starts July 15.

Oh, and he's getting married this weekend.

Congrats on that.

And the new gig, obviously, is a great thing, too. For him.

But it's gotta be said: Wright is another in an increasingly long line of sports section studs to go join the army assembled at the Worldwide Leader of Sports.

Pat Forde of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Buster Olney of the NYT, Gene Wojciechowski of the Chicago Tribune -- and it's not just ESPN, either: Charles Robinson was about to get big-time at the Orlando Sentinel, and Jeff Passan at Kansas City, too, and now they're both doing their good work for YahooSports.com. This seems to happen more in sports than on the news side, although maybe I'm basing that just on what I hear more often -- and the St. Pete Times lost a business reporter this month to Forbes.com.

Sports or no sports, though, and to get back to Wright, he was a reason to read a newspaper. Like Dan Barry is a reason. Like David Finkel is a reason. Dan and David are older, obviously, and more experienced, and more decorated, but Wright, who's 29, is a rising star in our business -- the business of using reported words to tell stories that make folks read to the end.

Now he'll be doing that for ESPN and not for a newspaper.

This is worth discussing.

What can newspapers do here in the early 21st century to attract and keep their top talent? Or can they? And I'm not just talking about money. I'm talking about vision and passion and purpose.

Some words from Wright:

"I got the best editing you can get at a newspaper in KC," he wrote in an e-mail Wednesday. "Mike Fannin is truly a genius, and he builds no walls or sets no rules."

Here's what he learned:

"I learned how to look through all these facts and immediately understand what the arc should be. I learned how to take the black magic out of feature writing and, through repetition, make it a real craft. I learned I had great things inside of me, because of nurturing editors who believed in me."

He said the decision to leave the Star was "bittersweet."

But ultimately ESPN offered more money and a more high-profile gig that had everything the Star did, or any newspaper, really, and then some.

"I'd be working with awesome editors at dotcom: jay lovinger, who was gary smith's first editor, and michael knisley, who was with the national and sporting news," he wrote in an e-mail earlier this month when the opportunity first came up.

And then this week?

"The sky is the limit at ESPN. My editors there are amazing. Michael Knisley, who is really great with ideas and structure and storytelling, is going to help me grow immensely. Jay Lovinger, who was Walt Harrington's editor at the Wash Post, is also going to teach me a lot about writing. ... So this is a chance for me to go to another level of storytelling. Everyone I met at the website, and the people I've met at the magazine, are pros.

"They get what we do."

Also: "There's nothing a newspaper can do that a website can't. That's scary."

Repeat: This is worth discussing.

We've posted a good deal of Wright's stuff on Gangrey over the last year, and kansascity.com makes you pay for anything older than a week, unfortunately, but if you've got Nexis ...

Read his story about Jack Trice.

Read his story about Tom Condon.

Read his story about the catfish.

Read his stuff out of Cuba .

But if you read none of that, if you read nothing else Wright Thompson wrote for the Kansas City Star, ever, read the stories he did about his dad.