From heading on a road trip to cover the Super Bowl to posting regularly about the brilliance of Patrick Mahomes, here's how I've helped cover the champions
The Chiefs have always been a big deal in Kansas City. But they've never been as big as they are right now — Patrick Mahomes has led the team to three Super Bowls in the past five years, star tight end Travis Kelce's relationship with Taylor Swift has shined a spotlight unlike any other and KC is chasing an unprecedented third ring in a row.
The audience in Kansas City for Chiefs news, updates and coverage is always growing, and always hungry. Whether it's posting features on Instagram during off-season, alerting live updates during games, providing SEO advice to our Chiefs reporters or helping cover Super Bowl LVIII from a Chiefs bar in Las Vegas, I'm always in the thick of our coverage of the NFL's buzziest team.
As the Chiefs headed to Las Vegas to take on the San Fransisco 49ers in the 2023 Super Bowl, two of my colleagues and I also hit the road in a project we dubbed Red Kingdom Road Trip. We set off from Kansas City — life-size cutouts of Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift in tow — and drove through six states, meeting Chiefs fans along the way, on our way to the championship game.
We reported from a super fan's decked out house in small-town Kansas, then found Chiefs Kingdom in the rural panhandle of Oklahoma. We met the local artist behind the Mahomes murals around Lubbock, Texas, the quarterback's college town, and ate his favorite college cheat meal near Texas Tech. A large group of fans met us at their favorite bar in New Mexico to talk about their long-lasting love for the Chiefs. In Arizona, we found one of the most impressive Chiefs bars you can visit outside of KC. And before watching the big game, we met up with one of the original Chiefettes — the Chiefs' dance group that no longer exists — in Las Vegas, Nevada.
We wrote several stories and made TikToks and Instagram stories so younger audiences could follow our trip. The project garnered high engagement from our local audiences, and even caught on across the country.
I typically work during Chiefs games, as well — working to update our uniquely formatted homepage with new stories, helping man live updates, alerting live results and posting designed results images on Instagram, Threads, Twitter and Facebook after the games.
As we learned when shots rang out at the Chiefs Super Bowl rally in February 2024, covering this team isn't always a celebration. Sometimes, tragedy strikes. My team and I were watching the rally from the newsroom, near Union Station, when we first learned that gunfire had erupted.
Immediately, we — and our reporters and photographers on the ground — jumped into action, sending alerts, posting updates on social media and recording voiceovers of TikToks and Instagram Reels to update our audiences with information, as soon as we got it.
