Read Martha Walls’ interview:

Wanda Cash:  Today we’re visiting with Martha Ann Walls.  It is Dec. 10, 2008, and we’re at the headquarters of Southern Newspapers, Inc. in Houston, Texas.  Ms. Walls is affectionately known as Molly.  Molly, let’s talk.

Molly Walls:  All right.  I was born in 1927 in Gadsden, Alabama, and I got into newspapering because I was working at a job I hated and I heard there was an opening at an office and I said, “I’ll take it.”

I never have worked on a newspaper, I’ve always worked for a group that owned newspapers.  And the thing I liked best about it was the people I met.  I  didn’t have any education for newspapering or journalism; didn’t have any training except I have always been organized, some say to a fault, and most important lesion I guess that I’ve learned from my 63 years in newspapers is tolerance and patience.

My best stories about newspapering are not Texas oriented.  They stem from the time that my husband was publisher in Montgomery, Alabama, and…

WC:  Your husband was Carmage Walls.

MW:  My husband was Carmage Walls and he had been in the newspaper industry since he was, I think he said 12 or 13 years old.  Then we moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in January of ’63.  My husband had bought the newspaper there, intended to send someone else in as publisher and he learned that the owner of the newspaper that was selling would only sell if Carmage Walls would come sit in his chair.

So we moved to Montgomery in January the same month that George Wallace was inaugurated and Martin Luther King and he started the war.  And again this is Alabama and not Texas, but it is journalism.

At that time they were publishing a white edition of the newspaper and a black edition and no black names were included in the white edition and they had four editions every day of each one.  My husband said this is morally wrong and fiscally stupid.  He said we’re gonna have one newspaper for everyone in the community.  Well, the whites got mad because there were black names in it — a lot of whites got mad because there were black names in the paper and a lot of the blacks got mad because there weren’t as many names of blacks as there had been.  And the KKK burned a cross on our lawn and threatened death to our children and us.  The sheriff came to our office and I was I guess you’d call co-publisher because I had an office next door to my husband’s, and the sheriff came to our office and said, “I want you all to carry guns because this white supremacist in the area said he was gonna kill you.”

So we carried guns and we had someone to watch our children all the time.  This went on for a couple of years.  That’s the most memorable thing.  Sometimes I’d like to forget it.

WC:  Did you find the atmosphere different when you moved to Texas?

MW:  Yes.  We moved to Texas in ’73 and yes, I found it different.  It was a much more open atmosphere, it was more… There was some bigotry, there always has been and there always will be.  It wasn’t as much as there was in Alabama.  And thankfully Alabama has matured and gotten over a lot of that stupidity.

WC:  Did you face much pressure from advertisers in the community when you changed the publishing cycle and incorporated the black edition into the white edition?

MW: Yes.

WC:  And was that a financial suffering for you?

MW:  Yes it was.  It didn’t last long because those advertisers needed us more than we needed them or at least as much and so that part did not last long.  And I like to think that a lot of people’s attitudes and thinking changed when they started looking around and searching their hearts.  You ask what, who had taught me the most about journalism and that would be my husband.

WC:  Tell us when Mr. Walls died and how the company went forward after that.

MW:  Well, back in the 50s, as part of our estate planning, we asked for and received permission to divide our company and I’m sure that people thought, tax people thought we were getting a divorce, but it was just forward thinking and Carmage kept a few papers but we had given or allowed our children to buy papers from the company because we wanted them to have their inheritance then instead of after we died.  So in effect we had his company and my company and each of our children had his or her own company and we, we didn’t serve on each other’s boards. We really kept it separate, separate books, separate. The only thing we shared was office space and my company owned the office space and his company paid rent for the space he used. And we maintained that until he died and he died in ’98. Wait a minute. That’s right.

WC:   November ’98.

MW:  What, one of the questions what should journalism schools be teaching.  Have I answered that? Well, journalism is hard to tell a news story, in some cases it’s hard to tell a news story that isn’t editorial and what journalism schools should be teaching is the difference. And editorials belong on the editorial page; they don’t belong with the news. I feel very strongly about that.

WC:  Are you seeing evidence of that blur on today’s front pages and inside news pages?

MW:  Yes I am and that’s disturbing. The reader should not know the writer’s politics. If it’s a news story, it’s a news story. If it’s an editorial, it’s an editorial.

WC:  Let’s talk about that a minute and how Southern Newspapers manages or guides or enables the community newspapers that they own. How involved is the central office, the central management, in the operations of the community papers?

MW: Hiring the publisher.  That’s it.  We don’t dictate editorial policy. I don’t.  Well, the few times that we replaced publishers in some cases that was the problem and others weren’t meeting expenses.  But we encourage at the outset that you’re publisher, you’re reflecting the community, you’re not dictating to the community, you’re reflecting. And the ones that we keep do that.

WC:  So how does that mirror your personal leadership style?

MW:  Hands off.  If a publisher comes to me with a question I’ll answer it, but it’s never an order.

WC:  Let’s talk a little bit about the issue of private ownership of newspapers and publicly held newspaper companies. This is last quarter of 2008.  We’ve just seen the Tribune Company file for bankruptcy. Every day brings news of more layoffs, profit-driven layoffs. So how are the privately held newspaper companies doing?  And how are you surviving when some of your colleagues in the metro areas, big papers, the publicly held papers, are struggling today?

MW:  Well, one, they answer to a different boss. The balance sheet is the prevailing force.  With our company the quality of the newspaper is the prevailing force. And now, we have to make some money but we are fortunate in that we bought at the right time and we got good tax advice and our company is out of debt. We don’t owe anybody except Cooper and his wife who sold their interest in the company.

WC:  And that’s your, one of your sons?

MW:  One of our sons. That’s the only debt this company owns so we’re financially independent and the big city newspapers that are owned by, not even individuals, but houses, brokerage houses, are not financially independent.

WC:  Is there a difference in the journalism that’s practiced at community newspapers compared to metro daily?

MW:  I think so and that’s the key, the words:  local and metro.  We are small-town newspapers and small-town newspapers well television doesn’t hurt us, local radio does, is a so-so competitor but television is not a competitor because we publish local news and television does not, generally, except for maybe an hour a day.  And I think that makes us independent.  And the important thing is, if we emphasize anything, it’s stay local because television is not going to tell you about Uncle Henry dying or Suzy’s new baby.  We deliver that kind of news, local news.

WC:  And had there been, over the years, with you and Mr. Walls, was there a deliberate decision to keep your newspaper properties at a certain circulation level, at a certain market size?

MW:  No. At one time Carmage was president, we first we got our financing from Jefferson Pilot Insurance Company and then they decided newspaper business was a good business and they’d liked being in it. And Carmage was president of the company, Jefferson Pilot Communications, I think, for some period of time but and he acquired newspapers for them, for that company.  Then he wanted to be independent and so he bought some of the newspapers from that company and set up his own company. In the beginning he had worked for his mentor Charles Marsh and he acquired newspapers for Mr. Marsh and then later Jefferson Pilot and he set out, he became an owner.

WC:  So today in 2008 you have various properties.  Would you describe what they are?  Give us a range of ideas of what sort of newspaper holdings.

MW: Well most of them are here in Texas. We have three small papers in Alabama. And my daughter who is the other owner of Southern Newspapers, Inc. owns one of the papers in her own name and we have a semi-weekly in Georgia. The rest are here in Texas and they’re, they’re all community papers.  Galveston is the largest, but it is not part of Southern.  It’s a stand-alone that the family foundation and Lissa and I own.  But the rest of them are in Southern, in the corporate Southern Newspapers.

WC:  So what was the acquisition philosophy?  Was it geographical?  Was it county seat oriented?

MW:  No, it was whatever was on, whatever was for sale that we thought was a good investment.  There was no, there was no set of rules or… And usually we bought a paper from a family and usually it was because of inheritance taxes. Someone died and the family had to sell. A few we bought just because somebody wanted to but most of the time it was death taxes. And it’s one of the things that I’ve always been proud of is that nearly all of our, the former owners, continued to live in that town and many have told me that they were glad we bought it instead of maybe somebody else.  That’s a high compliment.

WC:  So, where are newspapers heading?  I know Southern has had a strong presence on the Internet for more than 10 years.

MW:  I think that it’ll be the Internet.  I’ll never see it in my lifetime and I doubt if Lissa will in hers. I don’t think the print product will go away because, well, I just think that people like to have something in their hands that’s black and white and they can read it and re-read it and then maybe say a few cuss words and write a letter to the editor. Watching television you watch it and say a few cuss words, but you… I don’t think anybody ever responds to the television station or the…  I certainly don’t.  I think that it’s the solidity of the newspaper, the have and hold that will keep it alive.

WC:  Yet Southern is a viable presence on the web.

MW:  Well yes, but I think it’s to lead people to the newspaper, I don’t think it’s to substitute. I mean it may tie it but I can’t see it ever taking the place of the print produce.

WC:  Can you reflect a little bit about women in the business from the perspective of being the owner of the company, having a daughter who’s a co-owner and having women publishers and how, maybe you’ve seen that evolve over your career?

MW:  Well, I’ve watched it evolve from practically no females to what I call an equal playing ground. My husband was the most liberated man I know and he, early on was just appalled that women were second-class citizens in the journalism field. He encouraged me and he encouraged others to change that. And I think it…  I think it’s fair now, I think it’s come a long ways in 63 years.

WC:  Were there challenges for you as a woman?  A lack of acceptance, or perception that you were just Carmage’s wife?

MW: I don’t know.

WC:  Did you ever feel any of that?

MW:  I didn’t feel it. It may have been there but I didn’t feel it.  Maybe I chose not to feel it.  Because I do think we choose how we feel about things, many things.

WC:  We were talking earlier about what you described as your low profile. Go back and talk a little bit more about that.

MW:  Well, I don’t… Well I just don’t like being on stage, I don’t know how to explain it. I’d just rather be – not ignored – but just not noticed.

WC:  You said earlier that it was your preference that the readers, the constituents in the communities where your newspapers operate, never knew that you existed and that they didn’t know anything about Southern Newspapers office in Houston.  Do you want to talk about that as part of your hands-off style?

MW:  Well that is, that’s part of it. That’s what keeps the newspaper local. Direction is not coming from Houston, Texas to New Braunfels. The New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung is produced in New Braunfels for the people of New Braunfels by the people of New Braunfels. That’s what local is. You throw Houston in there and it’s not local any more.

WC: Have you faced some ethical dilemmas in issues that have cropped up maybe in the local communities that somehow got the Houston office involved?

MW:  Occasionally I’ve had an irate phone call, which I try to handle politely, but no decision, because as I tell the person, you need to take this up with the editor or the publisher and when they say I talked to him or her and I didn’t get anywhere I say, “Well, I’m sorry that no one could help. Thank you for calling.”

WC: Does that work?

MW:  If I hang up after I’ve said thank you for calling they don’t usually call back.

WC: Do you think there’s going to be a new business model for journalism? There’s talk out there today about non-profit journalism where readers send in a contribution much like they do to support Public Television or National Public Radio.  If they like the story and they want to see the journalist continue working they’ll send them a check, a membership donation.

MW:  Well, I can’t see that happening.  I just… One, I think if you have to pay to have something printed it probably wasn’t worth it.

WC:  So you mentioned earlier that journalism schools need to emphasize the need for objectivity and teach students to keep their personal politics, their personal biases out of their reporting.  If you could stand up in front of a journalism class and give the valedictory address and send them out to work for Southern Newspapers’ newspapers, what would you tell them?

MW:  Just what you have just said and to be honest; don’t sell your soul for money or for compliments, recognition.

WC:  Somebody once said that being a newspaper publisher was a lonely business that it was hard to know who’s your friend, who loves you for who you are instead of for what you can do for them.

MW:  Well, in a sense it is a lonely profession in that a good publisher has to be able to allow something to be said or written about a good friend or a loved one.  And I don’t think that’s…  I just think it’s part of the makeup of the profession.  You have to be apart of what’s going on while you’re being part of it.

WC: Have you had a good time?  Have you enjoyed your career?

MW: Well, I have because it’s people, it’s never boring and of course my husband and I worked together so long and I loved him so much that if he’d been a garbage collector I probably would have been happy collecting garbage.

As it turned out I was happy working with him in the newspaper profession and I’ve tried to live up to his standards, which are pretty high, for himself and for everybody else.

WC:  And now you have a daughter to carry on that legacy and a son in Alabama and a grandson and…

MW:  Well, and then our son who died, Tom’s widow owns a newspaper in Alabama and so my older daughter Jean is the only one of the children who’s not been involved in the newspaper.  The other four have been.

WC:  Let’s wrap this up with the hard question.  What lessons has your life work taught you?

MW: Patience, appreciation, a lot of patience.  That’s why I still come to the office every day after 64 years of it.  I just love being part of this profession.

Frank K. Baker, 107th president, was a second-generation newspaperman and the second member of his family to serve as Texas Press Association president. His father, George Baker, served from 1962-63.

Born in San Angelo on May 12, 1934, Baker’s parents were in the transition from Sonora to Fort Stockton at the time. His father had published the Devil’s River News in Sonora from 1931 until 1934. He later purchased The Fort Stockton Pioneer on March 1, 1934.

He grew up in Fort Stockton, graduating from high school in 1952. Baker graduated from the University of Texas in May 1956 with a bachelor of journalism.

He married Mary Lea Castleberry on Aug. 27, 1955. The Bakers had three children.

Baker was editor and advertising manager of The Llano News in June 1956.

Five months later, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and served in Germany as a radio repairman and member of the Combat Command “B” military band as a trombone player.

Following his release from active duty in November 1958, Baker was employed as advertising manager of The Fort Stockton Pioneer. He later purchased a one-fourth interest in The Pioneer in 1961, increasing that interest to one-half the capital stock in 1965.

Baker’s father was later elected to the Texas Legislature, and he subsequently bought the remaining stock from his parents on Jan. 1, 1971.

Baker served as president of West Texas Press Association in 1971-72.

Read Frank Baker’s interview:

I’m Frank Baker and I was born in San Angelo, Texas, on May 12, 1934.  Today’s date is June 26, 2008.

I’m trying to define several things.  One of them is how did I get into the newspaper work business and what drew me to it; what did you like best about it?  That’s a question that Wanda Cash, who’s making these interviews, has asked.  And that’s a good question.

When I first came to UT, like all students who come here, I took an aptitude test and I wanted to be a doctor.  I was going to major in pre-med and did for a while.  And of course the aptitude test said you’re lousy in science; don’t even think about it.  And they also said be a newspaper man or a lawyer or a preacher.  And I hadn’t felt the call from the Lord to be a preacher and I didn’t feel like being a lawyer particularly so that left newspaper.  But I didn’t follow that advice, I went ahead and tried it and beat my head against the wall for a year as a pre-med.  And then I decided that the aptitude tests were right because everything they had said was true.  I was poor in science.  The only science I was good at turned out to be physics and that turned out to be in the Army, later.

But I decided that because my father was a newspaper publisher and I had grown up in the newspaper business I decided I would major in journalism and just for something to get a degree in and then get out in the world and decide what I wanted to do.

So I entered journalism school as a sophomore and that was fine because most of the classes I wanted to take in journalism or everybody is required to, you can’t get them until you’re a sophomore; a lot of them.  So that worked out all right.

And then what do I like best about journalism?  Well what I liked best about it was advertising and that’s partly because I had, started out as a kid when I was just barely driving age, 14.  At that time my dad had me sell Christmas ads because I had had a doughnut route that worked out pretty well and I had learned all the little stores around town and we lived near the border in Fort Stockton and as a result there were a lot of Hispanic folks and they had a lot of little in-the-home type stores and I sold doughnuts to all of them so Dad got the bright idea that he could arm me with a bunch of one by fours and two by fives at the very biggest and see what I could do with that and with those people.  So I went around and sold a bunch of them.  Came back in and I’d covered the territory so I asked him if he’d give me some bigger customers.  And I had not really ever wanted to go to work for Dad.  I had not enjoyed working for him as a kid and I didn’t think I’d enjoy working for him as a man; and I didn’t for a while, but anyhow I did work for him on that occasion because he said I’ll pay you—  the rate, I think it was a flat rate, 50 cents an inch at that time and he told me he’d give me a commission on it and that—  I forget how it was gonna be but he said you can make about $200 today if you sell enough advertising.  So I went out and covered all the ground I could and then I told him I wanted to see some more customers with larger layouts so I went out; did that, came back and he said well did you get, did you make your $200?  I said, “Mister you owe me $400.” And that started me in the newspaper business in the advertising portion thereof.  And I really hadn’t decided whether I’d like being in the rest of it or not.

I know that a lot of little things happened. When I was growing up Dad took me with him sometimes and he let me— When I was a little kid, you know, six years old, he’d let me stand under the —  He had a Speed Graphic and he had a hood that he’d put on and he’d let me stand underneath that and look through the ground glass; it was neat.  You know that was this Speed Graphic where you had to move, move a whole great big plate, 4 x 5, 5 x 7?

And what did I like best about newspapering?  Well, it still was advertising but I began to broaden a little and as I got into newspapering I found out I enjoyed writing all right.  I liked sports best and column writing was okay if I had something to say.  But when you get started with a regular column, every edition for every week, you live to regret it because a lot of weeks you just don’t have anything worth telling, and at least I found it to be that way.  I’d borrow stuff from other people.  There are all kinds of things you can do but still I never — I didn’t feel like I had just a whale of a lot of good columns and I never did win an award as a columnist.  But that was neither here nor there.

But the career began after I got out of journalism school I checked with the Austin American-Statesman and they had one job in classified advertising; I didn’t think that would be much fun.  And they weren’t paying very much for it.  I think it was $40 a week.

Cash:  What year was that?

Baker: That was in 1956.  And I’d just finished UT and it was real funny about my grades, I didn’t make particularly good grades until I was a senior and had gotten married and then I felt like I owed my wife a good job and that was when I took most of my advanced advertising courses which I loved.  And that was how that worked out.  And so after having been on sco-pro at the end of the freshman year as a pre-med, I was cum laude one semester and summa cum laude the next.

And I also checked with the — A guy came to town who had thought about going to work on the Pioneer but he had come to Llano instead.  His name was John Cardwell.  And John came down and talked to Professor Sharpe, my advertising prof that I just idolized, and asked him if he had a couple of guys that could use some income doing layouts for a Centennial Edition he planned in the Llano News.  And it was gonna be published later that summer.  And he was down there in May before any of us graduated and he was — And so Mr. Sharpe said, “Well I’ve got a couple of married men that could use the income I’m sure.  One of them is Frank Baker.” And he said, “Go no further; I know his dad and I’ll talk to him.”  And so John came to see me and we made a deal after about 30 minutes that I’d do the layouts for  him on the, for the Centennial Edition of the Llano paper and while I was at it I asked him if he needed anybody to work there on a regular basis.  And he said yeah just so happens I need an editor there and he was working for the Scarbroughs in Georgetown, yeah.  And I think that’s right—

BAKER: I forget Scarbrough’s first name.  I used to know it as well as I knew my own.  But anyway, he — John was working for him and I found out later, years later that Scarbrough had been the main owner of the Llano News.  He was in the background and John was, John had a, had a hunk of it but he — I think Scarbrough had most of it and so I was really working for Scarbrough and didn’t know it.  I was working for John and I remember while the Llano News was a real eye-opener about all the other different parts of journalism that I hadn’t really gotten into wholeheartedly, one of them being reporting, one of them being photography.  I didn’t know anything about photography.  John had a little Speed Graphic, much smaller size, I think it must have been 2 x 3 or something like that; maybe it was a little bigger.  But it was smaller than the regular Speed Graphics and then I— also he had a Polaroid I could use but that was, that really wasn’t very good; didn’t work well.  So I took most of the pictures and then I— and then John didn’t have a darkroom; we didn’t have anything.  So I sent, had to make the pictures, give the pictures a pretty early deadline and send them to somewhere near Georgetown, probably was Georgetown—  No, had to send them to Austin to be processed and then the pictures were sent to John at Georgetown and he decided what ones that he wanted and I think he had them, some of them were, I guess they were cuts—  I don’t think there was any—  It’s hard to remember all that stuff now that offset has been part of my life and then everybody else’s for so long.  But John then would send me, send me the cuts and then we’d make up the front page and wherever else in the paper we needed a picture.  And that was kinda, that made for a late night on Wednesday trying to make-up because we had to wait ‘til the bus came in during the early evening for those pictures with the cuts.  He made Fairchilds I believe it was, Fairchild engravings— No, that was later on; forget that.  It was cuts.  And I don’t know where he got them etched; somewhere.

And then and it was strictly letterpress and John made the most of having me there.  He had me switch it over to shell casting because I had done a little of that working one summer for Dad and had learned how to do it that way.  And the different— I don’t know whether you know what shell casting is or not unless you’ve been in letterpress newspapering.  But what that is they used to have type high and casting and you would have bars on a casting box and you’d have mats inside it and you’d pour the hot lead in there and then, well you’d have the cuts and have to saw them out, saw them out of that great big one piece of lead.  And it was easy to get burned on that thing and very dangerous.  But everybody, everybody did it.  I know my Dad got burned on one of them.  He was wearing perforated shoes, these shoes with holes in them and he happened to not get the bars tight enough or something and he had a, he looked down and all of a sudden his shoe was filling up with lead, molten hot lead.  And he got a bad burn out of it; he couldn’t walk for a week.  And it turned out to be not too deep and so he didn’t have to, it didn’t mess him up forever, but oh, I felt sorry for him; that hot metal had gotten him.  And of course that happened to him when I was still a little kid, like about seven years old, so I wasn’t— I didn’t— I really, I was pretty careful when I started to learning to use a casting box and you got to get those bars together.  There was a bar on the bottom and a bar on each side.  And the top was left open so that you could pour the lead in.

And then about the time I went to work for the Llano News which was quite a few years later, they— Papers were adopting a process called shell casting which I had learned a little how to do in Fort Stockton.  All you did was get a set of spinner[1] bars, three of them, the bottom and two sides and then you made a center piece of molten lead.  It was probably—  I don’t know whether it was a good thing or not but they had some material, spacing material they put under the thing and you put the shell cast on top of it with double Scotch tape and anybody that was in the letterpress newspapering would know that.  But, and the only reason I’ve gone into that with such detail is I know there are a lot of journalists out there that have never done any letterpress and it’s, and I’m so glad they’re not having to do it.  Offset was the greatest that ever happened to all of us when it came along.

Well, we were in Llano for six wonderful months and learned a lot during that time and a lot of things happened but then the Army came along and said we’ve let you be deferred all the way through college, now it’s our turn to have your services, starting immediately.  So that happened in November after I’d gone to work on the Llano News in June.  And it was, I really enjoyed Llano because we, the newspaperman were, and I was the visible one there because John was over in Georgetown all time.  In fact I made John real mad one time, I — They were still running these silly little things called “Personals” where somebody went to Austin shopping one day and that was horrible, I hated running those but when someone brought it in like one of the country correspondents we probably ran it but I had to hold my nose thinking about what the local merchants were gonna think about that, shopping in Austin.  But anyway, they—  This business of personals was still very much a part of the weekly newspaper business and that was whenever somebody’s momma came to see them from another town and stayed a week they published it, had it published in the paper and the paper was filled up that way.  And my Dad and Mom had grown up in the years when that was strictly good stuff, you know, and they thought that was great deal because people would read it because their names were in it.  And maybe that was true but I thought, found it, I was in a new generation from that and I thought personals are for the birds.  So I never solicited any; I never asked for any.  I tried not to let anybody tell me any.  And of course other members of the staff— There was one lady that was kind of a, she was the Women’s Editor and she got most of those and so we had, we put them in, but I vowed if I ever was in charge of a newspaper, really in charge, I was gonna quite worrying with personals and just not run them and leave it all up to the people.

Mom and Dad used to call around and ask people what’s going on in their lives to get that information.  And that’s real nice and it definitely befriends people for the newspaper but I just couldn’t abide it because it was such boring stuff, especially if you’re living in Llano and don’t know any of the people in it.   [Laughter]  So personals were something I learned to not like there, well learned to not like them in Fort Stockton for that matter.  But Dad noticed that I didn’t have any personals in the Llano News to speak of, compared to what they had and I said yeah.  There’s another verse; I’m not going to if I don’t have to.  Oh, said he.  Well maybe.  But that wasn’t the first thing we’d ever disagreed on.

One of the things that I can’t get away from in talking about my career in the newspaper industry is the fact that I had a very interesting relationship with my father.  He, he could be very supportive and very helpful and showed how much though he was in some other stuff I’ll discuss later.  But he also was very, very hard on me.  Because when I worked for him on the Fort Stockton paper and that was, that came after the Llano News part of it.

After the Army the Llano News had sold to another owner and so my job was pretty—  it had sold out from under me and I don’t know whether they’d kept the job for me or not anyway.  The Army claimed they were supposed to, but who knows.  Anyhow, the only job that seemed to open up was my dad told me he was losing his advertising manager, actually he was letting him go because he wasn’t that great, and he wondered if I’d take that job because he’d seen what I was able to do in Llano.  And he had a different attitude toward me after my Llano experience because I did it without him and in fact we had a football contest and Dad copied that; started his football contest after it.  And then the Pioneer had the football contest a lot longer than the Llano News did, but that’s neither here nor there.

The Fort Stockton Pioneer was, seemed to be the job that I was destined to have for a while.  So Dad and I agreed that we’d try it that one year and if we were both still of a like mind to stay with it, we would.  So at the end of that year he didn’t say anything, you know.  So I asked him, “Are you satisfied with my work?”  He said, “If I wasn’t I would have told you.”  And I thought well that’s typical you isn’t it, Dad?  And I said well since you haven’t told me, I assume you are and I want a raise.  I don’t remember now whether I got it or not.  I think I did.  But of course I was very poorly paid by Dad and everybody else in the newspaper business that was an employee was very poorly paid by whoever.

Oh, yeah.  This is out of order, but I’ll whip back to the time that I had checked with the Statesman and they were gonna have, they were gonna pay $40 a week.  Well the Llano News offered— No, let’s see—  $50 maybe, no that was another.  Another weekly added, a weekly in oh, gosh, another town around here, offered 50 but the Statesman 40 and I got a job for 70 bucks a week plus a commission plan in Llano and that’s why I went to Llano.  And Llano was good and John Cardwell was all right, I thought a lot of John.  John died young somehow and he’d been out of the newspaper business a good while.  He became a bureaucrat and was working for some State agency, I don’t know what it was, but he died young.  And Scarbrough’s still around.  They one— Their daughter is publisher or co-publisher with her husband or something —

CASH: Linda.

BAKER: – of the Georgetown paper which his real good; it’s a fine semi-weekly; maybe a daily now, is it a daily?  No.  Semi-weekly; okay.  Anyhow, let’s see that—  When I went to work for Dad I had—  it was tough but I stuck with it for 12 and a half years and then and I was given an opportunity to buy into the paper and get an interest in it after a couple of years work or—  yeah, about that long.   Went to work for him in ’59 and started buying in in ’61, I think.

And then I had — Dad decided he was— He didn’t decide it but it kinda came up for him, there was an opportunity to run for the Legislature because a fellow named Gene Hendricks[2] from Alpine who had had that seat in the Legislature a good while decided he didn’t want to do that anymore; he was a radio man from Alpine.  So he called Dad and asked him if he’d like to run and he said well, had never thought about it.  So he thought about it; thought he might do it and he said I think you can handle the paper while I’m gone to Austin and I said yeah, I believe I can.  And I did and things got better all the way around; still wasn’t making enough money, never do when you’re working for somebody else in the newspaper business.  You have to love it to work in it more than anything else I think.  And the only money that’s in the newspaper business is when you finally, when you buy a paper and get it paid off and then sell it later and make a mark-up.  That’s the only money an individual really sees.  He can make a living, but as far as— you can also be fortunate enough to be in an oil and gas town and have a paper that you’ve grown into a semi-weekly and that was another deal that came later.  But Dad got in the Legislature and I handled the paper for him while he was gone there and he started working in Austin at different jobs.  He worked for other members of the Legislature.  He was only in office two terms, two two-year terms because he, he had a good friend that’d been there a lot longer named Dick Slack, Richard C. Slack from Pecos and they were good friends and worked together very harmoniously but then somebody did a redistricting job and put both of them in the same district.  So Dad didn’t run because he figured Slack had been there a lot longer and would be hard to beat and they were friends, so he just didn’t run after that second term was over.  And he worked for other members of the Legislature as assistant in different office capacities for a while and then he worked for the Railroad Commission and he was on this Tax Study Group that figured out the current system used by Texas which is, let’s see, I don’t recall what that it.

BAKER: And that may or may not be a good thing and in Dad’s defense, he had resigned from that particular organization before they actually got that bill through.  So I don’t know that he had much to do with it.  But I’d like to think he didn’t.  In a way it was good because it put all counties under the gun to charge what the property was—  To charge tax rates based on what the property was really worth.  And you can talk about that a long time and I don’t know that much about it, but there was some that followed that law better than others.  There were some that were very slow to do it but they finally all did it I guess.

That’s a long deal, newspaper careers.  I guess you will find it’s long with everybody, Wanda, that you interview.

CASH: So did you stay in Fort Stockton then and—

BAKER: Let me think a minute when it was.  Oh, in— we went offset in 1966 and then by ‘05—  ’01, not ’01, ’71, January the 1^st ’71 I bought the rest of the paper from Dad.  The reason being he finally became willing to let me— get totally out and let me buy it.  And by then I’d nearly paid for the first half and so he called up one night and said do you want to go over and see the Sul Ross football game in Alpine?  I said sure.  So we got in the car and went and he then said, about halfway over there, he said well I think we ought to— It’s time for you to buy the paper if you want to do it.  And I said yeah, I do.  And he said okay and then we had a deal made by the time we got to Alpine on how to do it, what to do and what to charge and all that.  So it worked out fine.  And then a year later I had a shopper invade Fort Stockton and Dad was still in the Legislature then but the Legislature wasn’t in session.  So he came home and did the writing and let me get out and pound the pavements on the advertising to keep that shopper from getting very much business and we ran them out in six months.  And didn’t have much problems with shoppers later.

There was one other shopper that came in run by a little old lady in tennis shoes kind of a deal and everybody liked her and so I just kinda let her alone and waited until she got tired and quit.  But— And she wasn’t that big a problem for us.

All right.  We began getting serious about growing and decided we’d like to take the paper semi-weekly, twice weekly.  But anyhow when we started going to semi-weekly, it was real tough to get it started because we started a Sunday paper and most of the papers out in West Texas printed on Saturday —  No printed on Friday—  Friday night and Saturday and, or Saturday morning, and distributed on Saturday a paper dated Sunday.  And that’s what we did and I couldn’t get people very excited about running advertising in the Sunday paper so we started doing a deal where if they ran the same ad in both editions, the second edition cost them only half as much and that began to get us a toe-hold in there but it was kinda tough.  And people even, didn’t even want to put their news in the Sunday paper they wanted it in the Thursday paper because that’s the one we’ve always had.  And I don’t know why, why was so sacred about that Thursday that it— while we had nothing but the Thursday paper I didn’t find any sacredness on the part of the readers.  But it took quite a while.  Anyhow, we started it in January and didn’t seem to have any circulation a-tall, hardly, on the Sunday paper but then we started covering football games, Friday night football games in that Saturday afternoon paper and Saturdays late in the morning sometimes, depending on how it was printed.  We had to go to Pecos to print it because we were offset, all of us, and every paper in that area was, just about by then.  We were ahead of some of them going offset but not as fast as some of the others.  And those who bought presses, and this is still the case, those that own the press have other people coming to them to print and it helps everybody concerned.  It keeps those who are taking their paper to somewhere to print, from having to buy a press.  And it helps the people that buy that very expensive press in paying for it.  So it works out, worked out real well for everybody.  The only problem was trying to get it over there in time and that was always a problem.

When we finally got to get the semi-weekly was beginning to come into its own the minute we got that football coverage in there and that helped so much.  And don’t let them tell you sports aren’t important, because they are, especially when you put it on the front page of a Sunday paper.  And it worked out real well.

As the paper strengthened we began to get more advertising when we proved that the circulation was equal on both of them then we were beginning to get more advertising in both papers and the paper grew a good deal.  It had been a good strong 16 to 20 page paper when it was a weekly and that stayed that way on the Thursday paper.  And the Sunday paper started out as a weak six or eight and then finally got to the point where Sunday was running mostly 12 and 12 to 16.  At the same time Thursday was still running the old 16 to 20 or 24, 22 sometimes.  And we— then once that was pretty established we also were beginning to add a good staff.  We had a real good editor and a real good reporter, a lady reporter who had a lot of talent and did a lot of good for the paper.  And then we had a, I had a guy I had hired when he was fresh out of high school, nearly.  He’d been out a few years, but not very many, named Phil Chamberlain and old Phil went to work on the Pioneer way back, ’72 I think.  And he, he was my right-hand person always.  He was good on the advertising and he was especially good on the picture, the darkroom work and all that sort of stuff, and make-up.  He did it all.  Phil was kinda the production director and one of the advertising manager people.   I guess you’d call him manager of advertising too.  And then I’d hire other people to help with the advertising and I never quite got all the way out of advertising; I liked it too much.  But I had a lot; it was taking, began to take more of my time just to keep everybody else going and manage the place.

And one of these questions down here is how would you describe your style of leadership?  Well, it was laid back is how I’d describe it.  I really, I tried to be real easy-going about people and not demand too much of them but kinda give them their head and let them run.  If they had initiative and wanted to do something I tried to let them do it instead of controlling their every move.  And so that’s still what I think leadership ought to be and to be, and Dad wasn’t too different.  He was kinda like that too.  But there were, let’s see—

I guess I ought to finish up about Dad.  He was a good Pop for a little kid and he was a good Pop, in a lot of ways. When I was a student in high school he stood up to a coach that was giving the team a hard time one time and I was kind of embarrassed by it in a way but I also was real tickled because he defended us and that’s one of my favorite memories of him.  And he, he was overall a very, very good father.  Then when I went to work for him he was kind of a tyrant as far as I was concerned.  I said you ask so much more of me than you do of anybody else.  And he said well that’s because I want you, I care more about how well you do than anybody else.  And I said all right, that must be the deal.  Then as he got into the Legislature and I got more and more of a foothold into the paper, we became real good friends and worked until he died in 1993.  And he, I can truthfully say he was the best friend I ever had.  Mary Lee is the best friend I ever had, but he’s close.  And so I guess you’d have to say the biggest influence on my professional life was Dad.  And closely followed by Dr. Ernest Sharp at UT and Dr. Paul J. Thompson at UT.  Dr. Sharpe was my main ad prof, advertising prof and I took most of the advanced courses from him and then I took the reporting courses I need to take to have a journalism degree from, some of them from Dr. Thompson and some of them from others.  Dr. Thompson was a great man; I just thought the world of him.  I wasn’t all that carried away by the subject that he was teaching some of the time, reporting mainly.  I guess, but I really thought a lot of him and I really was, did admire him.  And Dr. Reddick was another real fine man.  I only had one course from him one time since I was an ad major, but he and Dr. Thompson both were really fine folks.

The thing I was proudest of, and that’s one of the questions that Wanda asked of us who are being interviewed, was the fact that we won five Sweepstakes Award in a 7-year period.  And I don’t know, there may be other papers that have done that many by now, but in that short, that condensed timeframe I don’t know if anybody has.  And that really was neat.  And of course being the TPA president was something everybody’s proud of who does it but I had an extra thing to be proud of and that was that I was the first son of a past president to be president.

CASH: And tell us your father’s name.

BAKER: George Baker of course was my father’s name.  I don’t know if I ever told that to you.  All right.  But he was president of TPA in ’62-’63 I think it was.  And then I was ’84 and ’85.  So that, those are the two things I guess I’m proudest of.

And then another question is what was the biggest ethical dilemma I faced?  Well, there were two of them. One of the banks in town had a president who tended to talk a little too much perhaps like I do and he told me there was an employee of the bank they were gonna have to file charges against because he had done some, he had violated some banking policies and some, or maybe even some legal matters.  And had taken it too easy on somebody that owed a note to the bank and had left some of the things in his desk drawer that should have been sent to the guy, I don’t know.  But anyway, the gentleman who was working for the bank and was in disfavor so to speak, the guy. They told it to me before they ever filed charges against him.  So I knew about it.  And then they did and of course we’d been watching over at the courthouse as to when those charges might be filed and when they got filed I wrote the story.  And then the phone began to ring.  I wrote the story and went ahead and put it in the paper, went ahead and pushed somebody out the door to go print it because I’d already had one phone call and I was getting phone calls ever five minutes from a fellow who was a friend of the bank and kinda their leg man who helped them with public relations matters without unofficially speaking, his wife worked at the bank and that was, and he may have been a stockholder, I don’t know.  But he was, and he was a good man, a good man, but he. And then the chairman of the board was, started calling me.  The president didn’t but the chairman of the board had called me and then this other guy had called me and so I just kinda let them have their piece and they kept saying “Oh please don’t run that story. Please don’t run that story, it’s such bad publicity for the bank.”  I said, “Well, the president shouldn’t have told me so early in the game that it was gonna happen and I can’t ignore that story.”  If somebody’d figure out I’d known about it a while or that the paper should have been checking. The paper checks the courthouse to see who’s being sued and who’s doing this and who’s doing that and who’s been charged with things.  And to make an exception in the case of the bank would be wrong.  Well, no you shouldn’t do that.  “What can I tell you to talk you out of doing that, Frank?”  I said, “Well, I don’t know,” and I’m thinking inside my head that press in Pecos is running tonight, fellows.  You just don’t know it.  And so they finally quit talking to me about 10 o’clock and by then the paper was being loaded into a van in Pecos and brought home.

And the bank quit advertising, completely, with the paper.  And luckily we had another bank in town which seized that opportunity to run a little more advertising, but the main thing was they got some business from the other one.

In this ethical problem that I had about that, it wasn’t rally a problem for me, it was a problem for them.  But I had a lot of pressure on me because that bank had a lot of power in the town and so it, it wasn’t an easy decision and it wasn’t an easy one to hang onto.  But the thing that really made things better was that Dad was a director of that bank and they had made him an associate director or some kind of a lesser title than a director, advisory director is what it was.  And I don’t think he had his vote any more necessarily, but he’d come home from Austin once a month for board meetings.  And he was kinda their rep down there, I guess.  But when he came home, I’d already told him that I was in trouble, I was in hot water with them.  I didn’t know how he’d feel about it either since he was one of their directors.  And I said, “Dad, I had to do it.”  And he said, “Sure you did.  Don’t forget, I was a journalist.”  So he, when the bank directors met they wanted to know why he hadn’t been able to, why I had done that, what was the matter with me and blah, blah, blah.  When they ran down, he said, “Well for what it’s worth, Frank’s right about this and I’ll back him all the way and I think you’re wrong and I’d like to have you get off his back.”  So they stayed mad and didn’t advertise for a while, but that was about it.  And then they finally realized they needed the advertising and started running again.  End of story.

What have you done in journalism am I the most proud of?  In journalism was that deal, standing up to that bank, I’ll tell you.  Had to be done.  Then there was another ethical problem, a big one. I don’t know how much of this to say anything about.  One of my employees who was married to a politician and the politician got sued for something that was unrelated to the election, but again if we hadn’t run that little story about that person being sued, the other candidate would have felt like we were not being fair and we were not doing our job.  And I wasn’t particularly, I wasn’t for the other candidate.  I was for the person who had been running for the office and the spouse that was working for me was very angry about it but didn’t, didn’t try to stop it.  And so her, he tried to stop it, tried to get me to stop it, but I wouldn’t.  And then the politician never spoke to me again.  But again that’s. You have to hold the line when you’re a journalist and there were times when I had to do that.  I didn’t have too many of those things come up.

I had one thing I was kinda proud of and that was that I ran for the school board one time and I’d already announced my candidacy as had two other people, and the school board met and they were unhappy because we’d been losing, but heck in Fort Stockton that was the name of the game, losing in football.  Never was a big football town but it has been lately and it did—  had been from time-to-time but most of the time you can’t count on a very big record from Fort Stockton in football.  So they, they decided to clean house and they fired a total of eight coaches.  And one of them was a guy who had won state in basketball, a great basketball coach.  He became a banker after that.  And that second bank in Fort Stockton did very well, thank you very much.  But anyhow, when they did that I covered that board meeting, I covered the school board and the lady reporter covered commissioner’s court and the editor covered the city because they all met right on top of each other.  You know how they do that, they all want to meet at the same time so the paper can’t keep somebody on all of them unless you have enough staff.  Luckily we did by then.  And the— when the school board did that I didn’t know what to do.  It was Tuesday night so I had Wednesday to figure out what to do and I woke up Wednesday morning and started shaving and I looked in the mirror and said, “Okay, Baker, are you a journalist or a politician?”  Journalist won and so I wrote a blistering column criticizing the school board for firing those eight coaches, really worked them over.  And so every member of the school board worked against me in the election and I didn’t win, lost by 30 votes in the runoff, but I never was sorry.  And of course one of the advantages of all that was that the guy who won was a big advertiser and I had tried to be very, very supportive toward him throughout the whole thing.  It was kinda nice I didn’t have to serve, either, on the board because I’d had conflicts from then on.  So I decided it was probably a better idea not to be in politics and journalism at the same time.

We had an interesting situation one time in which I was — This is probably my favorite story about the newspaper business.  There was a county judge who happened to be very much in favor of having Fort Stockton as a city to have a, what do you call that kind of government let’s see —  Home rule charter.  He wanted to have home rule charter so he appointed a committee of people to work on that and I thought it was a pretty good idea myself.  So I was one of the people who was appointed to the committee by the judge and the judge, a fellow named Charley, and he was very determined to get that done and had a lot money and was real apprehensive about it all.  And there were some landowners whose property came right up to the city almost, ranchers, and they didn’t want to see home rule charter because they could have been brought into the city without their willingness to be so, to do so.  And they hired a real sharp lawyer who worked up the ads for them and they fought real hard with their advertising against home rule charter.  Charley somehow managed to find a way to get city money to use on the city’s ads favoring home rule charter.  Now how that was ethical or honest I don’t know, but anyway that happened and so we had a lot of advertising coming from both sides and I had done the advertising work in favor of the charter.  And so but the lawyer’s ads were pretty doggone effective.  Then the, I mentioned Phil Chamberlain my right-hand man before.  Phil’s father turned out to be a great one too.  He was our home throw guy, our newspaper — and distributor and he would take them around to the stores and then throw them at the homes too.  And it was a Saturday afternoon a Sunday paper and it had the advertising for both sides in it and the home rule charter was gonna be voted on the following Tuesday so it was the last chance.  And I got a call from Phil’s dad, whose name was Jim, and Jim said, “Frank, Charley keeps following me around and I don’t know what he’s doing but he’s buying all the Pioneers. He’s buying all the newspapers from every stop I’ve made so far.”  And he was stopping at various drive-in groceries and stuff.  So I went, I got in the car and went on over and found Jim and he said he’s still doing it.  And then I saw Charley was waiting at the next place and then Charley’s wife was around and I saw her and she was helping him buy papers.  So I said, “Well, what are you doing on this?  Said well Charley wants to have everybody come to our headquarters, we got a headquarters, they leased, we rented a building downtown and we want people to come to the headquarters and read this thing that we’ve written which was kinda of a circular they were going to staple to all the copies of the paper that they bought.  I said well that’s real fine but why aren’t you letting the people see the paper?  Well, don’t know; just have to ask Charley about that.  So I went and asked Charley about that, said, “Charley, what do you think you’re doing?” And he said, “Well, I’m buying newspapers.”  And he told me what his plan was and I said, “Well, how in the hell do you think anybody’s gonna know that you have this headquarters?” He said, “Well, I’m gonna give out free newspapers at the headquarters.”  I said, “Well, how they gonna know you’re gonna do that?”  He said, “We are gonna run some radio spots.”  I said, “Hell, you know nobody listens to that radio station, or very few and we have a lot of folks that are wanting to see this paper and this just isn’t gonna work, Charley.” He said, “Well, I thought you’d be pleased to have so many papers sold.”  I said, “They sell anyway, Charley. And I really, I’ll put it this way, I’m not gonna— You’re not gonna get away with this, I can’t let you get away with it and so you stop right here and don’t do it any more or I’m gonna go back over to Pecos and start printing some more copies of the paper and we’ll just have a little contest between your billfold and that press over there and see if you can outrun that press or not with your purchases of newspapers.  Then when, after you’ve finished all the money in your billfold we’ll bring them back and distribute them, a little belatedly but we’ll distribute them. We’ll do what we set out to do and get them to the people to read.”  So he quit.  But that was the doggonedest thing to have this screwball county judge buying up your newspapers and you fighting him trying to keep him from doing it.  That’s the first time I ever heard of anybody having to fight to keep people from buying up all your newspapers.  I felt like the paper had to reach the people and that’s really about it on that one.

And in the election that followed, the Home Rule Charter died; it did not go.  It got thumped about two to one.  And sorta made me about half mad when he said he was scared of what Paul’s dad was doing, gonna do, the lawyer’s ad.  I said, “Well, you don’t appreciate my work, dang you.”  That’s another reason I didn’t really want to cooperate with him.  But the main thing was to let the people read the paper.

Okay, where are we going next?  The state of journalism today is that there’s more and more competition than there’s ever been.  Newspapers were changed a good deal by the advent of television.  Radio had been with them a long time and didn’t seem to bother them a whole lot.  Television was beginning to eat them up, eat into the advertising dollar and so the newspapers began to change in a lot of different ways but they finally figured out the only thing left with radio and television out there was to do the best job with the story of anybody and hope that the papers would sell.  And that’s still the way it is.

We’ve noticed, or I’ve noticed that the newspapers, the daily newspapers particularly, have become more and more political.  They have, you can tell, you can tell without reading very long that the Odessa American is a Republican newspaper.  And you definitely can tell that the Midland Reporter-Telegram is a Republican newspaper because that reflects the majority population in both towns.  The Austin American-Statesman which has a lot of Democrats in town is very much a Democrat newspaper and I don’t know how I could prove that on either— any of those papers, but the San Angelo Standard-Times for a long time was a Democrat paper while the American was a Republican paper, the Odessa American, and those are two papers that reach, two dailies that reach Fort Stockton.

And one of the dirty tricks that was played on us was the radio station manager became the reporter for the San Angelo paper, a stringer, he was stringing for both of them and trying to scoop us so that we weren’t we apparently were beating him pretty good and that’s why he was trying to, trying to water-down our news coverage but he couldn’t because they, and we ran a little, we didn’t run personals anymore as I mentioned earlier, but we ran a little deal called, just little fillers, one-liners and it said get the real story, read the Pioneer. Get the full story, get the better story and we were pretty aggressive on that because the radio guy had been pretty aggressive in other ways.  And that radio feller now is deceased and he was, before it was all over we were pretty good friends.  That happened later in life but it did.

I don’t know what the vision for the future is but one of the things that’s happened that’s made things really tough for daily newspapers now is the Internet and the smart newspapers are using the Internet and putting their stuff in it and they’re having websites of their own and that’s positive.  That’s a positive response to it because otherwise it’s gonna eat your lunch.  And unfortunately more and more and more young men and women are getting the news off the net and not as much from TV or the newspapers.  TV has been ruined in a lot of ways by all of those cable channels that have watered down the influence of the old networks so much that nobody’s really got a whole lot of control in television any more and of course the Internet is hurting television badly.  So they— things are tough.

And Mary Lee and I are in an organization called LAMP, with is a UT deal that we go over to and for six weeks at a time three different times a year and you’ve probably heard about that one, it’s called, let’s see, Lifetime Activity for Mature Persons is what LAMP means. And what it is it’s hearing various speakers on many, many topics and we heard one guy who spoke, and he was the managing editor of the Austin American-Statesman and they are really working hard to try to figure out what to do about the Internet.  The Internet’s really wrecking havoc with the daily newspapers and he was honest enough to admit it.

And the newspapers are losing circulation, especially the big dailies, they’re losing a lot of circulation as time goes by and weekly papers tend to be more static, they tend to follow what the population of their town is and Fort Stockton, when I sold the paper in 1989, the paper had close to 4,000 circulation.  Now it’s got about 3,000 and that’s kinda the, one of the trends.  Part of it is that the paper has a different way of operation now.  We sold it to a chain and chains tend to be more interested in the profitability of the newspaper than anything else and not as interested in community service as papers in the little towns used to be.  And I don’t mean to be disrespectful there, I’ll have to say the old boy paid me off, never missed a payment.  He did fine, so you really can’t—  And of course the unfortunate part of it is that most small town publishers that decide to sell out, sell to a chain because a chain is the ones that will pay the best price for the papers.  And of course, the chain philosophy is different so the paper’s different and I think it’s cost them some circulation.

A new business model might be just what those dailies are doing, and the weeklies are doing it now, too.  Is having a Web site and putting some of their best stories on it and try to, I would say when they do that they better give kind of a teaser part of the story and not really tell the whole thing so that it will make the people realize somehow that they need to read it in the paper to get the full story.  And if they don’t they’ll just be giving away their news to the web. Right now the web’s a big threat.  Years and years ago radio was a big threat and then years after that television; now it’s the net.  And everybody’s scrambling.

What should journalism schools be teaching aspiring journalists?  Teach them to be objective.  If there’s one thing journalism schools ought to be teaching the aspiring journalists is objectivity.  And there seems to be a whole lot less of objectivity in any newspaper that— of any size than there was, or in fact any newspaper, period.  But the small town weeklies are doing the best job of that and that’s because in a small town you’ve got to try to get along with everybody and be fair to everybody.  But it’s the only right way to do it is to give both sides of the story and so objectivity and fairness are the two main things journalism schools should be teaching today.

I don’t have any words of wisdom for future generations of journalists because I don’t know what life’s gonna be like for them.  But I hope they’re still around in another hundred years.

- Transcribed by Shannon Barclay Morris

[2] Not verified

He later became a country correspondent for the weekly county journal, located in Carthage. He went to college in Carthage and dropped out after two and a half years. He continued writing for the paper and became a correspondent to larger dailies as well as selling subscriptions.

He went to Kansas in work for the Topeka State Journal in 1939. He worked in Missouri and South Dakota, as well, before returning to Illinois, where he was drafted to serve in the Pacific Campaign of World War II.

Upon discharge, he returned to San Antonio, initially becoming the Circulation manager for the Gonzales Enquirer, eventually acquiring the Hondo Anvil Herald in 1946.

Bill Berger began his career during the depression when he started a daily newspaper route in his hometown of Carthage, Illinois. He was 12 years old at the time.

He took the next step up the ladder by becoming a correspondent for Chicago and Peoria daily newspapers. He was in high school then and earned the going rate of a few cents for each column inch that appeared in print.

Bill later attended Carthage College, located in his hometown. At that time, he worked as the college’s publicity writer, submitting copy to the local newspaper, the Hancock County Journal.

Following his college years, Bill worked for several Midwestern publications. Included among these re newspapers in lola, Kansas; Rolla, Missouri; and Yankton, South Dakota. He served as circulation manager of each of those newspapers.

His experience during that time included the job of city district manager for the Topeka State Journal, a rather large daily.

Following 18 months in the circulation business, Bill became advertising manager, and later managing editor, of the Tuscola Review, a weekly newspaper in Central Illinois.

About the time he had made a decision to purchase a newspaper, along came World War II, and Bill was sent to Texas for his basic training.

“No man could have been subjected to a worse fate than basic training,” Bill thought. But things looked much brighter shortly thereafter when he met a University of Texas coed by the name of Jerry Barnes. She became Mrs. Bill Berger several months later.

Bill was then sent to the South Pacific for a two-year tour of duty as an Army warrant officer. But he kept his hand in journalism by publishing a camp newsletter.

He then returned to the U.S. and Gonzales, Texas, where Jerry was teaching home economics. Bill took a temporary job with the Gonzales Inquirer. A short time later, the Bergers purchased the Hondo Anvil Herald from retiring publisher Fletcher Davis. Their first issue of the Anvil Herald was dated June 7, 1946.

During the next 20 years, additional newspaper purchases by the Bergers included the Zavala County Sentlnal, Carrlzo Springs Javelin, Seguin Enterprise, Waelder Home Paper, Schert-Cibolo Valley News, Randolph AFB Wingspread and the Sabinal Times. They also took this time to have three children.

The Bergers have since sold all of their properties except the Hondo and Sabinal newspapers.

Bill has also had considerable experience in government service. In 1965, he was appointed to the Texas Water Rights Commission by Gov. John Connally. Following that service, he held subsequent jobs with the Water Quality Board, the State Insurance Commission and the Texas Railroad Commission.

But Bill continued to serve as publisher of the Anvil Herald during those 15 years of work with various state agencies. He also helped establish the weekly magazine supplement, the Texas Star during that time.

Meanwhile, Bill refuses to be retired. With his son, Ed, he now owns and operates Associated Texas Newspapers, Inc., an Austin-based newspaper brokerage and consulting firm.

Link to Berger’s newspaper:

http://www.hondoanvilherald.com/

Listen To Bill Berger:

(click to play in new window, right click “save target as” to save to your computer)

Part 1

Part 2

Read Bill Berger’s interview:

My name is William E. Berger, most people call me Bill.  I was born in Ferris, Illinois, which is in Hancock County on the western edge of Illinois near where Iowa and Missouri intersect with Illinois at the Mississippi River.  It is the same county which was the home of the Mormon Church at Nauvoo when they were first organized in a large way.  At the time of 1840s that town was larger than Chicago at that time, but they were driven out after the murder of the Smith brothers and the county declined in population up until just quite recently.  It’s now, still a rural county, primarily a farming county.  I was born there on June 6 of 1918.  My father ran a small-town grocery store and not long after that, as soon as I was old enough, I started my first business in sales.  I sold the magazines and imposed on my neighbors and finally got a paper route when I was about 10 or 12; I’ve forgotten the exact age.  It was the Burlington, Iowa Hawkeye Gazette, which was a town about 30 miles from us and we got the paper every afternoon thrown off a small train or motorcar that came on the route from Burlington to Quincy.  That is my initiation into newspapering.  And I had 30 customers.  They paid ten cents a week and I netted four cents if they paid me.  So my income started out at about a dollar week.

Later on I began writing news as a country correspondent from a little town of about 300 population for a larger county seat weekly, the Hancock County Journal, which is located in Carthage about five miles away.  That town was about 2000 population.  And it also was the home of Carthage College, at that time Lutheran school with about 325 total students and that’s where I wound up going to college.  It was unfortunate but I dropped out after about two and a half years.  It was quite a chore to get the money together and even though it seems ridiculous by today’s standards, the total tuition was $90 a year but that was hard to come by.

The newspaper which I had been writing for was located in the same town as the college and as a result I got to hanging around the newspaper office on every opportunity and took a few pictures for them and wrote features and sports stories.  And then I also picked up correspondent’s fees by writing for dailies from the surrounding area as far away as Chicago or Des Moines if they wanted a story on our college.   So occasionally I’d get a dollar or two or three dollars from those papers as a fee for the correspondents and I also sold subscriptions on commission.  That’s the way I stayed alive in those days.

I was 21 before I finally got an actual salaried job and that was with the circulation service company called Williams Company and he, Mr. Williams made contacts with daily papers to furnish a circulation manager and to build up their subscription lists.  My first assignment was to go to Topeka, Kansas, where I worked for the Topeka State Journal and I went to work on September 1 of 1939.  That was the same day that Hitler marched into Poland and I was a great success when our circulation went up when the war started.

I later was sent to Iola, Kansas; Rolla, Missouri, and Yankton, South Dakota, before the War finally caught up with me.  And I was in Rushville, Illinois, the day the War started helping a friend of mine the editor of the Carthage paper who had bought the Rushville newspaper at that time and it was a competitive situation.  We worked hard for a few months and I drew no salary, it was just a volunteer effort and I lived with him and he fed me and put me up so I didn’t have any expenses or income.  But I was offered a job in Tuscola, Illinois, as managing editor of a weekly.  So I went over there in March of 1942, and worked until July when the draft got me and I had to quit.  So I went from there to Texas, wound up at Camp Swift near Austin, near Bastrop, and on weekends we went to Austin for recreation and to get a hotel meal, my favorite was the Driskill Dining room at that time.  They had an excellent steak for 50 cents as I recall it.

One of the ladies who was at the USO, which had a corner of the Driskill for their desk, offered me a ticket for a barbecue.  She said it’s a free meal so I took it up and went out to The University where the home ec group was serving a dinner for service men; there were about 50 of us who showed up.  And a girl named Jerry Barnes served my plate and we got better acquainted and in fact we were married as soon as I got promotion enough to afford a ring.  So we were married then in February of 1943.  We had been transferred as a division to Fort Sam Houston so we were in San Antonio by that time.

The Army had a habit of moving us quite often so in rapid order I was sent from San Antonio to Louisiana to the California desert then over to Pennsylvania down to Fort Bragg and from Fort Bragg to Seattle and then from Seattle to Honolulu near the place where Pearl Harbor happened and I was in an artillery unit at that time as a supply officer.  So after a little bit of training in Hawaii, we got on board a boat and went to Leyte in the Philippines where we were getting ready to invade Japan. By that time we were fully cognizant of the fact that Japan was going to be a tough job.  Fortunately Harry Truman authorized dropping the atomic bomb and the War was over before I had to do any actual combat.

Then I was transferred into another unit and set to Sapporo in Hokkaido as part of the first occupation troops.  That was an interesting session for a few months and then when I finally was discharged I was sent back to San Antonio where I was turned loose and my wife had been teaching schools.  She was in Gonzales at the time so I went there to be with her and for lack of something better to do I walked into the Gonzales Inquirer to see if they had any work and they did.  I became their circulation manager for a few weeks and kept looking for something to buy.  We found the Hondo Anvil Herald and bought that, took over June the 1^st of 1946.

The Hondo Anvil Herald was a paper that had been established in Castroville in 1886.  The paper was moved to Hondo because the county seat had been transferred from Castroville to Hondo and it made the move about 1900.  The owner was Fletcher Davis from about 1900 until 1946.  He had owned the paper all that time.  In those days it was usually an eight-page weekly and he was using what they called Ready Print at the time.  So there would be four pages printed in Chicago or somewhere and shipped down there with feature stories and what you might call time-copy that had no time value.  One side of the big page was about 32 x 48 and the newspaper would set up and print four pages on the other side.  And then it was folded and made into an eight page weekly.

That was not enough to suit us so we began to add other pages and soon developed up to 12 and then 16 and after a year or so with the Ready Print, we dropped that and went to a complete home print publication.  We added a few country correspondents and tried to expand the paper and bought another weekly in the same county which was called the Lacoste Ledger after we’d been there for about two or three years.  And later on as we progressed we bought a newspaper in Crystal City and then one in Carrizo Springs and Sabinal.  By the time, I think it was about 1957, we had added another one in Seguin.  So we had a group called Associated Texas Newspapers – because we had great ambition at the time we thought we’d just buy every paper in the State, you know.  We had a lot of people helping us and we had grown rather rapidly but we soon found that it was pretty difficult to get the type of management help that we needed to keep expanding.  So along about 1960 or so we began selling off.  So we kept several papers for a long time.  We were with the Seguin Enterprise; we operated that with the help of a very good friend and co-publisher named Othur Grissom.  We operated that one for 25 years before we sold it.  And by the time of 1962 I became interested in politics, met John Connally at Corpus Christi where we were both on the program to talk to the State electric co-op group and he was about to announce for his race for Governor.  He was Secretary of the Navy at that time.  And after we had met in Corpus Christi he asked me if I would help in his campaign.  So I moved to the Driskill Hotel for about six weeks, spent about four or five days a week up here, left the paper in Jerry’s hands and of course our other weeklies were being published by local publishers so we didn’t have any real problems with that.  I say, but Jerry might have a different thought.

Then after the campaign was over and Connally was elected, I went back to Hondo and settled in as publisher there and the operation of our group.  I thought no more about it but Connally asked me to serve on the Texas Tourist Development Board which he thought was to publicize Texas and that was because they had amended the Constitution to allow Texas to publicize its qualities and to seek outside travelers.  Since the Civil War days it had been illegal for Texas to try to attract other people into the State.  We’d had all we needed of carpetbaggers so we decided, or Connally and the Legislature at that time, decided we should organize a publicity campaign to develop tourism.  So the Texas Development Board was established and we began to buy advertising nationwide and that was handled by a manager of course.  It was very small at the time but I remember among others we had Pop Mabry who was the PR man for Humble Oil and Jim Gaines who was the manager of WOAI and John McCarty who was the Frito-Lay publicity man and one other if I remember was Kern Tipps who used to do the broadcast for football.  He was part of the Wilkinson, Schiwetz and Tipps Advertising Agency.  Anyway, we met once a month and talked about how to publicize Texas and we found out that most people outside of Texas thought it was nothing but a big desert with cows and we had to bring out the fact that we did have forests and trees and beaches.  But that was just a meeting of once a month for a couple of years and didn’t take up much time.  I was just, felt honored to be on it, but it was fun.

Then one Sunday afternoon I was going through the mail at Hondo and the phone rang and it was Connally on the phone and he wanted me to take an appointment as a member of the Texas Water Commission.  Well I didn’t know much about it but finding out it had a fairly good salary and was fulltime, we had a quick discussion and decided I would take it.  So I came up to Austin Monday and accepted the position.  It was a three-man group that handled water quality and the permits for building dams around the State.  Sort of like the judicial job.  People would come and seek permission to build a dam and we’d hear the testimony and for and against and decide whether they could go ahead.  That was very interesting and it was fulltime so we had to move to Austin.

We bought a house in Austin and moved the family when school was out in 1965 and we had to make arrangements to operate all of our newspapers by remote control.  We had managers or publishers in each town so it wasn’t too difficult.  Probably were pretty sloppy in the way we ran it.  I’m sure we could have done better if we’d been there on deck but this Austin business was quite a bit of fun too.  And we have been in Austin ever since although we maintained the ownership of the newspaper.

When our youngest son Jeff graduated from UT in ’83, he went back to Austin, I mean back to Hondo and operated our radio station which we had put on the air in 1969 and then he did that for a few months and decided he liked newspapering better even though his major at UT was Radio, TV and Film.  He became publisher of the newspaper and has done that ever since.

That fairly well outlines where we’ve been with the newspapers but we still own the paper but Jeff runs it and has full control.  But we are the owners just for tax purposes we’ve kept ownership and we’ll continue to do so far as I know as long as we live.

We had fairly good luck with our newspaper.  We were able to improve it and increase the circulation, the quality, and we went and became involved in the newspaper organization such as the South Texas Press Association and the Texas Press Association.  We joined those very early and did go through most of the chairs in both of those organizations.  Also we were involved in West Texas Press Association and the Gulf Coast Press Association just because we liked to go and meet with other publishers.  That’s been an interesting way to get some vacation time without being away from the place too long.

CASH:  Can you talk a little bit about owning papers and running them, as you said earlier, by remote control, some of the challenges in operating that way and what kind of autonomy your local publishers had?

BERGER: I tried to give the local publisher autonomy as far as his choice of news or if he wanted to get involved in politics, who he would support.  I remember one time in the South Texas area we had four newspapers, Sabinal, Carrizo Springs, Crystal City, and Hondo and there were several candidates for State Representative.  It so happened that each of the four papers supported a different candidate.  Some people thought I was crazy for not picking one, but I just let the local publisher decide who he wanted.  And we tried to run them as loosely as possible, but I’m not sure that was the right way to do it but that’s what we did.

CASH: And what about the challenges of getting involved in local politics and running a community newspaper and trying to sell advertising and satisfy those advertisers?

BERGER: We tried not to get too involved in local politics the city or county level.  We tried to do the best job possible for our local advertisers and we would draw up spec ads which for those that aren’t familiar with it that means what we would suggest in the form of advertisement.  Usually we’d make it on a full-page basis and take it around and talk to the merchant and if he wound up buying a two column by four inch ad we were happy although we’d like to sell a bigger one.  That was one way we tried to do it although I must admit we didn’t always succeed.  But most of the papers were able to at least break even or make a little bit of money.  My best solution to the problem were when we finally sold them.  We usually sold them for more than we paid for them and I guess that was probably due to inflation more than my good management, but we did.

One time we had a problem with the fact that in Hondo the mayor was also a car dealer and the city bought cars and they tended to buy them from the dealer and we carried a story about it which as it develops was probably illegal.  I think the fact is that they should have put it out for bids and we carried the story and the dealer got pretty unhappy with us but we ran the story and we recommended it.  That was one item that I can remember, although that sort of thing didn’t happen very often.  It may have happened and we didn’t know about it too.

CASH: What have you done in journalism that is right up there, the hallmark of your accomplishment?  What would you single out if you could think of one thing?

BERGER: We have given an opportunity to many young people who went on to greater things after working with us.  I was Chairman of the Intern Committee the first time TPA had one back about the 1950s as I recall it.  I remember one of our first persons who came to work with us was a young man named Pat Galvin.  He joined our staff inn 1946 right after we came to Hondo and he worked for me for several months and maybe a year or two, he put out an outstanding news coverage and the San Antonio Light hired him.  We were glad to see him get a better job.  Of course we couldn’t pay very much.  He went on from there to the Light and then the Light having been a Hearst newspaper he wound up being transferred to Chicago to the Hearst paper in Chicago where he was on the City Desk for several years.  Later he began to do freelance writing and went into the magazine business and he wound up as publisher and editor of five trade magazines, like “Builders.”

We had several people who worked for us for a short time and later went on to greater things.  We had a young Aggie who was our advertising director and he worked for me for about a year and then went on and he became the advertising director of the Armstrong Cork Company which was the company that made Armstrong linoleum and it was a pretty big-time job.

Another was a girl, Peggy Simpson came to us as her first job out of Texas Women’s University, I think that was the name at the time, maybe they’ve changed, I’ve forgotten.  Anyway, her first job was with us in Hondo and she did a pretty good job writing news and when we had a murder mystery there that ran on for several weeks I gave her the task of filling in the Associated Press.  I was the prime fascia Associated Press correspondent if anything big enough happened in Hondo.  So I let her call in the stories about this on-going murder case and after she had done that for about 12 or 13 weeks, they Associated Press, dern their hide, hired her.  So she left us and went on to their employment and was in the Austin Bureau and later in the Dallas office and finally went on to Washington where she covered Congress and her, I guess perhaps one of her greatest accomplishments is that she was elected president of the Women’s Press Club, whatever it was called in Washington at the time.  It’s since been absorbed by the National Press Club, but at that time they had a men’s press club and a woman’s press club.  And she’s gone around the world on some of her stories.  She’s been a foreign correspondent.  I remember picking up listening on a radio one time and heard her voice coming out of Warsaw, Poland.  But we’ve kept up her friendship.  We send her the paper and she still reads our paper and now lives in Washington.  She may be retired too by this time.  Everybody seems to get old in this business.

CASH: You mentioned your association with different news trade organizations.  Could you tell us a little bit about some of the work that you did and initiatives within the Texas Press Association?

BERGER: Well, I enjoyed being at the Texas Press Conventions and as things go I’d be put on various committees.  I was involved in talking about advertising.  I was on several programs.  I remember addressing the National Newspaper Association which at that time was called the National Editorial Association.  I spoke to two of their conventions on small-town advertising.  And then we would get involved with Texas Press trying to help promote the sale of advertising for all the papers in the State.  And of course that was primarily handled by our manager.  At that time it was Vern Sanford.  And we, I just encouraged as much as I could.  I was also elected as a member of the board of the National Editorial Association subsidiary called the—

CASH: National Newspaper?

BERGER: Well, no.  The National Advertising sales arm of the National Editorial Association.  I was a member of their board for several years and we would meet in various places.  I remember we would have meetings in San Francisco or Las Vegas or New York, Chicago.  But our efforts were to sell national advertising for all the newspapers and I was on their board for several years.  And it was interesting.  I don’t know whether I gave them any help or not but anyway, I was part of it.  The Texas Press, I was elected to various positions there and wound up as the president in 1964 I believe it was.  And I had been president of the South Texas Press in 1954.  By curious happenstance my youngest son Jeff was elected president of the South Texas Press exactly 40 years from the date that I served.

CASH: Let’s talk about today and the state of journalism today.  Do you read paper?  Do you look at them on the Internet?

BERGER: I do both.  I read newspapers.  I read the Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily on weekends, and the Austin-American and those are the dailies that I read and then I also look at the Internet to see what I can find and there’s a lot of stuff out there but I don’t read it all.  I read perhaps too much of it.  My wife thinks I spend too much time in front of that screen, but it’s fascinating.  There is a lot of talk about the decline of newspapers and I think a lot of that is the big dailies have seemed to be losing their grip.  I think in some ways they are not covering the world news as well as they used to.  Of course I’m sure a lot of that is due to financial reasons.  But I can remember when the Dallas News had foreign correspondents, but they also had coverage of the entire state.  They sent a paper to every newspaper in the State as a trade-out they’d run a little ad for the Dallas News country circulation in all the papers in the State.  And they gave that up a long time ago when the postage rates got so high and apparently the cost of printing and mailing was more than it was worth and they apparently have given up their thoughts of trying to influence statewide news coverage.  And in fact several papers did that; Houston did it and even San Angelo tried to cover the West Texas area, but they’ve all cut back due to the high cost of delivery of the papers and they’ve just shrunk down.  They are losing their total income.  Most of them are much less profitable than they were.  But I’ve found that most of the good country weeklies are still doing as well as ever and some keep improving a little bit.  Ours has had a light gain in circulation almost every year since we’ve been there.  When we bought it it had about 1800 circulation and now of course the county is a little bigger, but it’s now up to 5500 and our volume has gone from $9000 a year gross when we bought it to well over half a million now and it’s hard to make a profit even though you handle lots of money, but we have managed to stay afloat.

CASH: Why do you think the weeklies and the small dailies are prospering while their metro daily counterparts are shrinking?

BERGER: The people like to read about their friends and neighbors and the small papers specialize in covering the news of the school, the city, and the accidents and births and deaths and obituaries.  We’ve never charged for an obituary in our paper unless somebody wants to run a half a page tribute.  But we don’t charge for weddings except for a small charge for a picture and we have a lot of them as a result.  And I think people like to do, read those things.  No telling how many scrapbooks are filled with our clippings from our publications.  This is true of all the weeklies.

CASH: What about the proliferation of online news?  How is that affecting the way that weekly newspapers are doing business?

BERGER: We have been forced into joining the webs.  We put out a weekly summary after the paper comes out.  Usually it’s on the web by Friday after the paper’s out Thursday morning but all we cover is the highlights.  We put down an abbreviated obituary list and the top two or three stories and the top few sports stories and we have that on the web and we’ve found it to be rather interesting.  We’ve had people write us in on the internet, send us emails from Afghanistan or Iraq before our local people have gotten the paper out of the post office.  It’s amazing to me that this can happen.  In my case I’d write a column each week.  I’d write it on my computer in Austin, send it to Hondo in computerized form, it’s converted into typography that fits the newspaper, goes directly to our editorial page and they don’t even have to touch it down there except to set a headline.  I can’t understand it but that’s the way it works.

Then we have a printing plant in Hondo which we have in conjunction with our friends in Pleasanton and Uvalde and we print about 17 weeklies there and we receive many of these papers over the telephone.  They send us their made-up pages in typography that somehow is transmitted over the wires.  I don’t know how but it works.

CASH: You don’t have direct contact with the young reporters, young journalists coming out these days, but what are you hearing from colleagues who do and from your publishers and your son about what these youngsters know and maybe what they don’t know.  What do they need to know that they aren’t getting?

BERGER: I think what they need to know is that there’s no better place to get an understanding of the news business than the small rural weeklies.  They can work there for a year or two and pick up experience in every phase of writing while if they’d gone directly to a daily they might get assigned to the Obits or to the City Hall and do nothing but that day after day and they don’t really get exposed to everything else.  I think it’s valuable for them but we haven’t had much interest in it and probably because we simply can’t afford to pay as much as we would like.  The average, I get the impression that the average journalism graduate would like to go to the New York Times and immediately have a by-line.  It’s not going to work that way.  Or they’d like to go on network television and see their face nationwide.  It’s amazing how many have that ambition but how few are able to do it.

CASH: What about the state of journalism out there?  Is there anything that worries you about coverage or encourages you about coverage?

BERGER: The coverage varies a great deal.  It all depends on the tenacity and the curiosity of the reporter and the greatest value, the greatest attribute I would say is curiosity.  If a person is curious about what happened and why he might make a reporter, but too many people just let it drift by and they don’t really— They’re not curious about why things happen.

CASH: Do you have a concern about the drive for corporate profits?  We hear so much about newspaper companies being more concerned with the bottom line than with the by-line and what the content is.

BERGER: Yes I am concerned about that.  I have also been a newspaper broker for about 30 years.  I’ve done appraisals for other people and helped people buy and sell papers and I’ve noticed that many of the good papers have been snapped up by chains, large and small.  And when I see the results most of the chains do their best to get out a reasonably good paper.  They have to in order to sell advertising.  But a lot of them seem to be aimed at what they can make out of it and the publishers and a lot of them are, of course, looking for a job that makes them a good living.  But I prefer, or at least I think I do, prefer the local ownership so far as possible.  I say this with the knowledge that I had a chain of my own at one time.  We had about nine or 10 papers but we didn’t try to run it as some chains do now.  But there is a danger in trying to worry about nothing but profit.  Maybe that’s why I don’t have 10 papers any more.

CASH: Your papers always focused on community service?

BERGER: We tried to, yes.  In fact several of them won the, in newspaper competition, won community service awards.  We won one in Hondo early on for our editorial campaign for better telephone service.  We won a National Editorial Community Service Award that we received in Providence, Rhode Island, at a convention one time. Real proud of that.  We got to receive it from the hands of the president of AT&T.  Hondo at that time had a telephone service like so many small towns where you called the operator and she plugged you in and I expect that had its values too, you could always ring the operator and say where is Granddad, but we needed to grow and so we now have— Shortly after that we began to get dial service and connected to the world.

CASH: Well Bill if you could give some words of wisdom, advice, to somebody seeking a career in journalism, what would you tell them today?

BERGER:         Well I don’t know exactly where to start there.  I had the advantage of growing up with every phase of it.  I, as a child I was a carrier and a correspondent and sold advertising and took pictures and had to develop them; did the whole thing and it just sorta grew on me.  So I don’t know whether—  I guess the way you do it if you have that ambition is to hang around the paper.  Most publishers or editors will, are encouraged by kids who show an ambition, wanting to help, I think.  Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s the way I got all my start.  I remember that when I was working for the local paper I thought the publisher was over the hill.  He was 35.

CASH: [Laughter.]  That was pretty old.

BERGER:         Yeah, pretty old.

- Transcribed by Shannon Barclay Morris

Brisendine, 60, is a past president of Texas Press Association (2000-01), West Texas Press Association (1985) and Panhandle Press Association (1979).

Born in Amarillo, he grew up in Hereford, graduating from Hereford High School in 1965. He was a longtime newspaper carrier, throwing a Hereford Brand route from 1957 to 1965. He also serviced an Amarillo Globe-News route for four years and was awarded a Master Carrier certificate during those years.

After high school he began his career at the Hereford Brand where he took a job as an apprentice printer. Pouring pigs, sweeping the floor and killing out pages turned into a job as a back shop floorman and eventually a Linotype operator.

In 1969 he began as an advertising salesman at the Brand. In 1971 he took over as the advertising manager of the Lamesa Press Reporter. Two years later he returned to Hereford and served as the advertising manager until he moved to Brownfield, purchased stock in and took over the Brownfield News as publisher and president on April Fool’s Day 1977.

Brisendine is the secretary of the board of South Plains Printing in Lamesa. He has been an associate of the Roberts Publishing group for more than 30 years.

Brisendine has been a member of Lions International for 38 years where he has been on the board of directors and served as an officer in three clubs, Hereford, Lamesa and Brownfield. He was president of the Brownfield club in 1985. He also has been a Mason for almost 40 years.

He has served on the boards of and been president of the Brownfield Development Foundation and the Brownfield Industrial Development Corporation. He also is a past director of BID Corp. and former chairman of the board for Kendrick Memorial Library in Brownfield.

He has served on the board of the Terry County United Way. He served on the formation committee and later the board of the DFYIT (Drug Free Youth in Texas) organization in Brownfield.

Brisendine was Terry County’s Outstanding Citizen of the Year in 1991.

The Brownfield News is a semiweekly publication with a circulation of 3,000. The paper has won numerous awards during Brisendine ’s 30-year tenure, including nine consecutive Texas State Teacher Association School Bell awards. He also has won several awards for his Paper ‘n Ink column he pens twice weekly.

The Seminole Sentinel also is a semiweekly publication with a circulation of 2,000. Both newspapers are completely paginated operations.

Brisendine is married to Linda, who has worked 28 years for the Texas Department of Human Services as a social worker with the aged and disabled. On press nights, she proofreads for the papers.

They have three children and by the end of 2007 will have nine grandchildren.

Brisendine enjoys playing with his grandchildren, working on his backyard ponds, traveling, golf, reading and watching the Texas Rangers and Houston Astros.

Listen to Lynn Brisendine:

Link to Brisendine’s paper:

http://www.brownfieldonline.com/

Read Lynn Brisendine’s interview:

Lynn Brisendine:  My name is Lynn Brisendine and I was born November 30, 1946, in Amarillo, Texas.  I grew up in Hereford, Texas, in the Panhandle of Texas.  I actually sold newspapers to get into the movies when I was 7, 8 years old.  We’d go out and sell Coke bottles all week, enough to go to the newspaper to buy newspapers to go on the street and sell them to get enough to go to the movies and buy a Coke.  So later I started as a newspaper carrier when I was 10 years old.  Then about 1956 I carried the Hereford Brand for almost eight years.  It’s a semi-weekly newspaper.  I carried the Amarillo Daily News which was the Globe News at the time it was an afternoon paper, five afternoons a week and Sunday morning.  I carried that route for four years.  I was a master carrier for three of those years.

I graduated from high school, thought I was gonna go into the military.  My dad had other ideas.  I went to work at a gas station making 80 cents an hour and hated every minute of it.  Not knowing exactly what I was gonna do, a job came open at the Hereford Brand, I walked up to the door to apply for the job and held the door open, a Hispanic fellow walked in in front of me and I held the door for him as he walked in and he got the job and I went back to the gas station.  Ten days later the back shop foreman at the newspaper called me and said he didn’t work out, do you want to give it a try?

So I thought that sounded like an interesting proposal to me to be working in the back shop of the newspaper so I went to work as a printer’s devil.  I swept the place out, I poured pigs and from the day I got there I fell in love with the place. I worked in the back shop at the newspaper for about four years.  I was a Linotype operator, a floor man.  I can still read upside down and backwards faster than I can read the proper way.  I proofed, I did everything I was supposed to do back there and one day the General Manager of the newspaper Melvin Young called me and said I want you to go play golf with me.  So we went out and played golf and afterwards he said are you old enough to drink a beer and I said just turned that.  So we went to the country club and he looked straight at me and said Monday morning I want you to show up with a necktie and start selling advertising which absolutely terrified me. But Monday morning I was there and my first lesson was how to tie a necktie.

Anyway, I worked in the advertising department at the Brand for another four years at which time the Roberts Group bought the Hereford Brand from Jimmy Gillentine; Speedy Nieman took over and was publisher.  I worked for him for about 18 months and one day he said I want you to go to the press with me, which was across town, so I got in the car and we drove across town and he said they need an advertising manager at the Lamesa Press Reporter, are you interested?  I said okay I would think about it and I went down and talked to Walter Buckel and one day they called up and said be at Lamesa Press Reporter at 8:30 Monday morning.  So I threw everything I owned in the back of my Chevrolet and drove to Lamesa, Texas, and started there.  I worked two years as advertising manager at which time Speedy called Walter back and said my advertising manager left and I want Lynn back.  So I went back, I worked for about six months and Speedy named me the assistant publisher and advertising of the Hereford Brand which to me was king of the hill.  That’s where I started my whole deal, you know, my career.

Anyway, I worked for another four years, until 1977 and I may be getting my years all mixed up.  In 1977 James Roberts called and said we want you to go to Brownfield, Texas, and publish the newspaper there.  So I went to Brownfield on a Monday morning and started, met Walter Buckel there and we went to the bank and borrowed more money than I thought was ever printed to bail out the paper; it was in a mess.  So that was April the 1^st 1977, and I’ve been there ever since.

On January 2^nd of 2002, I took over as publisher of the Seminole Sentinel, which is a semi-weekly, as is the Brownfield News a semi-weekly.  I’ve been there ever since.  I work half a day in Brownfield and half a day in Seminole nearly every day.  It’s 40 miles one way.  And I love both places; I’m not smart enough to do anything else so I’m pretty much stuck in the newspaper business.

My mentors were D. Melvin Young, Speedy Nieman, Walter Buckel, James Roberts and my dad who was not a newspaper man but taught me a great deal of stuff.  I never had the opportunity to go to school as a journalist.  I think that it’s kind of amazing and ironic that as we speak my son is now a part owner and publisher of the Hereford Brand.

Ethical dilemmas come up about once a week it’s always more or less shoot the messenger.  So far I’ve stood up to them eyeball to eyeball and tried not to blink.  I’ve told my son and everybody else that’ll listen to me that I consider our business, we have one magic bullet and if we ever shoot it we’ll miss the target and we’ll never get it back.  So we have to use common sense in everything we do and protect the freedom of the press in our communities the best we can.  There’s been several run-ins with sheriffs and county attorneys and district attorneys and state senators and, but you just do the best you can and be as fair as you can and go about your business.

CASH: How would you describe your leadership style?

BRISENDINE:  It’s laid-back and frantic.  [Laughter.]  I try never to holler at anybody or yell at anybody and I tell them when I hire them that nobody’s gonna slap anybody around.  But there is gonna be times when I tell them they need to do something and that’s the way it’s gonna be.  And so I try to be as fair as I can with those people because I worked for people once and I’ve been—  I’ve had good people to work for and I’ve had some bad people I’ve had to work with and you know, the real funny thing about that is that I may have learned as much or more from the bad people than I did from the good because it told me what not to do.

CASH:  Talk a little bit about the changes in newspapering, the physical, logistical changes.

BRISENDINE:  Okay.  Basically I’m a dinosaur.  They’ll never be another me in this business because I started pouring pigs, sweeping the floor, reading type upside down and backwards when a page in the newspaper weighed a hundred and twenty pounds.  We put them together in turtles with chases, locked them up, it was all total lead, Linotypes, intertypes, Ludlows, handset type, I’ve done a little bit of that.  And that is just, I— You’d be hard pressed to even find that equipment in a museum any more.  I wouldn’t give for it.  I loved every minute of it but I would never want to go back to it because it is hard, hard work.  It’s laborious.  Each page was laborious and now— Then we went to what they called cold type which I hated cold type.  I never thought it was a proper way to do it, but because of help, because of equipment issues, offset presses, that’s what we had to do and I never thought we put together a page that was straight.  I don’t care how hard you try and what kind of light table you used or anything.  They came out with a machine called CompuGraphic which was a marvelous machine except it was extremely expensive to operate, had photographic paper.  So when we got the opportunity to go to computers I jumped on it and I went with Macs and I still use Macs.  And most of the other people that I associate with went PC; I don’t regret it for a minute.  I love the Macs.  We have to use PCs in our business on our bookkeeping side and circulation and things like that, but as far as producing the newspaper, the Mac is magic in a box.  And if you came up the way I did, it’s just— I still just am in awe of how we do it now.  Not only that but we have digital photography now which I can take a picture and have it ready to go in the newspaper in 30 seconds if I want to.

The Internet has come along.  It’s a tool we use.  We couldn’t get along without it.  It amazes me that I can be writing a column, that I can click a button, go to Google, research something in a split second whereas used to you had to go to a library or even if you could find it there.  But nowadays it’s just, it really is magic in a box and I love it.

CASH:  So how did you make these transitions, these technological transitions?  Did you seek training, did you teach yourself?  Was it seat of your pants?

BRISENDINE:  Well for me most of it’s really been, I guess, seat of your pants.  I just kinda decided that’s the way we were gonna go and did my best to learn as much about it as I could.  That was one of the reasons that I really looked forward to walking in that door and getting into that back shop was to learn something, you know.  To be able to use my hands and do something and then all of a sudden it turned in to using your hands and using your mind and I probably don’t do a very good job of either, but I love it.  I can’t imagine life without being in the newspaper; I really can’t.  It just— There just wouldn’t be for me.

CASH:  What do you see as the big challenge that’s facing newspapering in 2008?

BRISENDINE:  Right now I think that, I honestly think a major challenge is the lack of readership, the lack of kids growing up the way I did.  I mean when I grew up my Dad took two daily papers and a semi-weekly newspaper.  We got those all the time and I grew up reading a newspaper, I grew up reading.  I mean I read, I try to read two books a month if I can.  And right now I’m in the process of trying to read a novel off of the best selling fiction and I try to read a book off the best selling non-fiction.  And I try to stagger them so I don’t get too caught up one way or the other.  But reading is the challenge and I don’t think our kids are reading and it scares me.  Not just because it’s going to affect my business but I think it’s going to affect the way we live.

CASH:  Has the Internet threatened you?  Do you feel intimidated by it?

BRISENDINE:  You know—

CASH:  You said you embraced it.

BRISENDINE:   Yes.  I really think it’s a two-edged sword and I think that right now both my newspapers have, I consider excellent websites that we utilize everything we can.  As a matter of fact we’ve turned two semi-weeklies into 24-7 dailies.  I mean if something happens we have the ability to get on the Internet and put it on there instantly.  Pictures, news— Whatever.  And we do it quite a bit.  But I never want that to supersede or override my print product because when you take some time and you sit down with a newspaper then you’re gonna do yourself some good.  If, it might sound egotistical but I truly believe that.  You’re feeding your mind.  You’re taking a respite from the rest of the world, you are able to take from that newspaper what you want from that newspaper and nobody’s forcing you to do anything with it.  You can read every word and every ad in it; you can read the headlines, whatever you want.  But I think once you’ve picked up that paper and looked at it, I think you’re the better person for it.

CASH: What would you tell aspiring journalists, would you encourage a career in journalism?  Would you discourage them?  And if you’d encourage them what advice would you give them from your perspective?

BRISENDINE:  I think my first response to that would be I do something every day that I love and I get paid for it.  And I don’t know how many other occupations, avocations, careers, that you can say that you could do that.  To me the news business, I love every bit of it.  I love selling ads, I love writing a column, all, you know.  It’s— The whole process, I love being able to sit down and design a page.  And it’s just all like a big game except it’s a very serious game and I just used the word very and I don’t do that.

As far as advice, I think there’s a whole world out there that isn’t centered around New York City or Chicago or Dallas.  It’s in the small town and if you want to make a big frog in a small pond then that’s where you need to go and you can do so much good.  Sure, there are times when you’ve got to stand up to the bad guys, even in a small town.  But you try to do it as tastefully as you can.  You always depend on the truth, you never tell a lie.  I’m not kidding about that.  On the telephone with a customer, in the building with an employee or in your column, you never tell a lie.  And you know that’s, when you get right down to it, it’s pretty exciting, pretty wonderful.

– Transcribed by Shannon Barclay Morris

In 2008, Buckel, the 108th president of the Texas Press Association,  was inducted into the Texas Newspaper Foundation Hall of Fame.

Forty years earlier, in  March 1968 Buckel merged his paper with the Lamesa Reporter. James Roberts had just bought the Reporter from Ben Woodson. Buckel was named president and publisher of the Lamesa Press Reporter.

Prior to his work in newspapers, Buckel spent seven years in radio sales and management. Before that, he worked for Lamesa public schools directing cafeterias and transportation. He also ran for county clerk and won two-year and four-year terms before resigning in 1957 to enter the insurance business.

During this period, Buckel had his own daily radio sports program and was a play-by-play announcer of all sports. He played a summer of amateur baseball in Manhattan, Kan., and for the Lamesa Loboes of the Class D, West Texas-New Mexico League.

His career then included stints at Pampa and Idaho Falls (Idaho) before being called into service with the U.S. Air Force. After two years overseas, as a radio operator in North Africa, he was discharged in November 1945.

He played with the Montgomery (Ala.) Rebels of the Class B, Southeastern League, the Dallas Rebels of the Texas League and then Lubock and Lamesa where he became the team’s business manager.

Buckel married Rubye Neile Mitchell in March 1947. They had two children. Buckel was president of West Texas Press Association in 1982-83.

Read Walter Buckel’s interview:

My name is Walter Buckel, B-u-c-k-e-l.  I’m from Lamesa, Texas, and I have been retired now from the publisher’s position for five years at the Lamesa Press-Reporter and I didn’t particularly want to retire but felt like I should because I had capable people ready to take over.  I’ll be 87 this year and in relatively good health.

I came to Lamesa in 1941.  I hitchhiked from California, coming to Lamesa to play baseball or to try to find a job playing professional baseball.  And I was fortunate in that they were looking for ball players at that time.  Lamesa had had a terrible record in 1940 and I had found that information out through the sporting news so I came to Lamesa, Texas, basically thinking they needed a ball player.  And I worked out a couple of days and they signed me to a contract of $75 a month.  And I played baseball there in 1941.  In 1942 that franchise was sold to Pampa in the same league the West Texas-New Mexico Baseball League which was a Class D league at that time in professional baseball.

And so I went to Pampa in 1942.  Prior to that I was working at Consolidated Aircraft in San Diego, California.  When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor I was in San Diego because they had a winter league baseball team, the San Diego Padre Juniors and I went up there to work at Consolidated Aircraft building bombers so I could play winter league baseball.  So I was playing winter league baseball on a Sunday in San Diego when they announced that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.  And all the service people departed the ball park immediately and I stayed on there through that period of time which I felt closer to the war effort than at any time in my life.  San Diego was blacked out; camouflage nets were over the aircraft plants and everything because we thought the Japanese were coming to San Diego.

But anyway I stayed there until I reported to spring training at Pampa in 1942.  And we knew at that time that probably we would run out of players and on July 4^th we were playing in Amarillo when they suspended the rest of the schedule because so many players were being called into the service.  We were all 19, 20, 21 year old boys.  And so that night I had an offer to go to Idaho Falls, Idaho, to play baseball for the rest of the season.  So that night another player and I caught the Denver Rocket out of Amarillo and went to Salt Lake City and joined a team in Salt Lake City that night, the next day and I played baseball there for about 40 games before I had to report to the service in San Francisco.

In the service I was shipped back to Texas, to Wichita Falls, to take basic training and from there I was assigned to the Air Force Technical Training Command in Chicago.  The Air Force and the Army needed a base, a huge base, quickly to train radio operators, radio technicians, and radio repairmen so they commissioned the Stevens Hotel in Chicago on Michigan Boulevard, at that time the biggest hotel in the world.  They commissioned that as a base and there were thousands of us sent to the Stevens Hotel for radio training and it was there that I learned International Morse Code and was there for about six or seven months, stationed in the Stevens.

From there they sent me to advanced radio training at Kelly Field in San Antonio and I went down there and I was supposed to be down there for another six months of advanced radio training and after about three weeks they walked in and said we need 19 people for a special assignment.  Can we have 19 volunteers?  And no one volunteered.  So they just started off Anderson, Brooks, Buckel and so forth and they got 19 in a hurry.  Two weeks later we were sent out and went to Boca Raton, Florida, then to Natal, Brazil, and on Easter Sunday 1943 we were all loaded on a Mars flying boat at that time, it was a Pan American Airways and we flew a day and a night to land at Liberia in West Africa.  And from there I moved around some and finally settled at Dakar, French West Africa, as an air-ground radio operator.  And while we were never in combat, we really felt like we were critical to the war effort.  Day after day a hundred bombers would come from Miami to Natal to Dakar and we’d work them down and turn them loose at daybreak the next morning going to the 15^th and 8^th Air Force and then here would come another hundred big bombers in.  And that’s where my military career was, there and in the Mauritania, in the desert, for a brief stay and then at Casablanca before I had enough points to come home.

Came home in November of 1945, the only thing I wanted to do was go play baseball again.  So I went home to California and spent the winter with my folks and then I signed with the Montgomery Rebels of the Southeastern League which was a Class B team.  And I caught a bus to go to Montgomery to spring train there and so I played the 1946 season in Montgomery, Alabama.  And it was there that I met my wife and we married in early 1947.

At the end of the season I was sold to the Dallas Rebels of the Texas League.  They were owned by the Schepps family at that time.  We trained down on Oak Cliff is where the ball park was.  So I played there through spring training then was sent out to Lubbock and by that time I had enough experience where Lubbock couldn’t keep me and they sent me back to Lamesa.

So I went back to Lamesa in ’47; stayed there ’47, ’48, part of ’49 became the business manager of the baseball club and then I guess I was the business manager in the latter part of ’49, ’50 and maybe ’51.

And then I went to work for the public school system which was one of the best things that ever happened to me.  And I went to work with the school system in charge of transportation and cafeterias, managed both ends of it.  So I’ve been in a management position since 1949 really.

And from there I went into the insurance business, no from public school system I ran for County Clerk and at that time, that was 1952, the assistant superintendant was making $42 hundred a year; had a master’s degree.  I had dropped out of high school to play baseball and come back to Lamesa.  I won the County Clerk’s job starting at $45 hundred and I ran and won a two-year term, then I won a four-year term and then I decided I was too young and I needed to do something else.  And so I resigned my County Clerk’s position and went into the insurance business, bought into an insurance agency and stayed in that business about three years until the radio station approached me to come and manage the radio station.  That would be 1960.  I went to the radio station and managed it to 1967.  And at that time I was, the local paper was owned by the Woodson family out of Brownwood.  And it was rather run poorly and was not covering the news as they thought it should.

So several businessmen approached me because of the baseball background, the County Clerk background, I was well-known in the community, to buy a little eight page tab and it was very, very weak; didn’t have any circulation or anything but we bought that paper off of a widow lady and started competition against the Woodson paper which was the Lamesa Reporter at that time.  My paper was the Dawson County Free Press.  And after about three or four months all the merchants joined in to help.  They just came together and supported me and everything and after two or three months Ted Taylor who was a media broker at that time, came to see me wanting to know if I would be interested in joining with James Roberts if he could buy the Lamesa Reporter and we would merge the papers and I told him yes.  I said I certainly would.  It was my wife and I and two children and my wife was getting tired she said.  I set all my type on an IBM typewriter, didn’t justify it right side, carbon ribbon.  I did all the typing, I built all the ads.  My wife and kids would help me in the evening Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday I would stay all Thursday night working on the paper and Friday morning we’d run it to Lubbock to a grocery store to print it for us.  Well we were very blessed and had a lot of support and so Taylor and James Roberts come to see me and said we have a contract to buy the Reporter from the Woodson family in Brownwood, can we buy you out and you come in as president and publisher and I said yes, that would be fine.  So I went into the newspaper in August 1967; knew nothing about it.  I just thought I could do it and James Roberts and I merged our papers on March the 1^st 1968, and from there Roberts expanded his holdings.  We bought Brownfield a couple of weeks later and then Seminole and then as they fell in line and James Roberts was a war veteran and such a tremendous gentleman, you know, but he was a thinker and he needed somebody to, as he said, dot the “i”s and cross the “t”s and I was the man.  And so I was with him on every purchase that we made over the years and I still sit on all of the boards and served as secretary of the boards for many years, typed up all the minutes and so forth.  I don’t do that now; we’ve given that to the publishers.

And so that’s how my newspaper career has developed.  I happened to be at the right place at the right time.  I was an organizational man.  I liked to organize, like to do things right and like to work good people, surround myself with good people.  So all of that sort of dove-tailed into what Mr. Roberts was doing, James Roberts was doing in forming.  When Roberts Publishing Company was formed the Lamesa Reporter was the first paper purchased and my Dawson County Free Press and then from there it went to Brownfield, Seminole and Hereford.  Eventually Vernon, Snyder, Gatesville, Azle to where we are now.  And I’ve been very fortunate to sit on all those boards and still do except at Hereford and North Plains where a young man is running it now Brian Brisendine, the son of Lynn, and so I sold Lynn a little bit of my stock so he could sit on the board and I dropped off.

Now that’s basically how I got here I guess, Wanda.  I am just overwhelmed at this honor because I have seen so many good men and women come through this organization over the years that I just, I was stunned when they called.  I just couldn’t believe it.  And so this is what brings us to Dallas at this time.

CASH: Can you talk a little bit about the differences that you see, or that you discerned from the beginning of your career in newspapers to when you retired a few years ago.  And the change of the self-taught newspaper man to the journalism school hot-shot reporter of 2008?

BUCKEL: Well, I was fortunate in that when I went into the newspaper business hot type was going out, cold type was coming in.  I never did work in a newspaper where there was hot type, smoke, the lead setting, I just knew the offset because the Woodson family had taken the Lamesa offset just six, seven, or eight months before and put in a press.  And the technology now just dumfounds me.  I don’t know that I could cope with it; not at my age.  I probably couldn’t because I see so many changes just taking place every day.  Of course I have a son in the business in Azle and Springtown who is up with the technology.  We print at our plant over at Granbury where Jerry Tidwell and his people are technical gurus or whatever you want to call them.  So the changes are just so massive I just can’t imagine and yet I realize that technology has taken over.  I just came from a session upstairs and I was fortunate in that I did not experience the hot type industry.  I saw the old big blue CompuGraphics and the old—

CASH: Varitypers.

BUCKEL: Varitypers and all of that.  And went through that.  I probably went through three or four stages of typesetting, not realizing we were moving along until we came up to the computer-generated generation.

CASH: As you look around today, in 2008, at the new generation are you concerned?  Is there anything that worries you about the future of news distribution?

BUCKEL: Well I have been fortunate in Lamesa in that I hired good people and many of them are still with me.  My bookkeeper reminded me when I left the other day, she says Mr. Buckel remember when they induct you that I was with you before any of your publisher friends or anything else.  She came to work for me in 1968, March the 1^st; she’s still there.  I think there’s a tendency now— I don’t know what we can hire, in our market in Lamesa in West Texas, journalism students.  We can’t, we can’t afford them because they’re coming out looking for benefits, insurance, retirement, and we can’t do that in the smaller ones.  And so that’s a problem now in that we, I think the journalism student coming out of school is first of all looking at retirement, 401Ks, health program, salary, working conditions.  And in the small markets we work night and day.  So you have to be committed and I think it poses a major problem for small newspapers.  Our best bet is to find a housewife or a young man that’s wanting to change careers or has an interest in sports or something coming out of high school and you probably sacrifice some journalistic expertise but you have no choice.  Our best write in Lamesa right now is a farm lady that loves people and loves to interview.  She’s done a good job; wonderful job.  So I think, you know, in the last five years since I retired and got out of the way and went home, Russell Stiles has done a good job and has kept up with the technology.  I don’t know that I could do that now; not at my age.  I may have way back there.

CASH: The focus of the Lamesa Press-Reporter, the core mission hasn’t changed?

BUCKEL: No.  Local news nobody can touch us for local news.  That’s all we carry.  We carry nothing else, we don’t carry the moon shots, we don’t carry anything else; we carry local news, the funerals, the weddings, the construction, the business and so forth.  That is, that has to be the modus, that’s the only way the small newspaper can compete; there’s no other way.  And I think now that they’re getting into online stuff they have to get into that.  But—

CASH: Are you online Mr. Buckel?

BUCKEL: Yes I think they are, just recently they’ve gone online.

CASH: And you?  Do you have an email account?

BUCKEL: No.  I have a computer at home I use to write letters on and type up agendas and to type up board meeting dates on all the boards I’m on.  I set up all the __________ [background noise blocked that]  So I’m still involved in all the papers but not in day-to-day terms.

CASH: Would you recommend community journalism as a satisfying career and way of life?

BUCKEL: Yes, very much so.  Even with the upcoming technology and so forth, and I relate to my son in Azle who is in a growth market in Azle and Spring Town, his paper is loaded with all local ads and news and little items that are just beautiful.  And that’s the only way we can compete.  And the Star-Telegram, so far has not come out to compete with him because he’s not carrying any Fort Worth ads, you know, they just don’t come out there.  But they’re not coming out taking his ads.  Community journalism is yes, a marvelous outlet.  I stumbled into it but I’ve been so blessed it just dumfounds me, I am just overwhelmed by the way we’ve been blessed, me and my family.

- Transcribed by Shannon Barclay Morris

In January 2009, Roy and Jeannine Eaton sold the Messenger to Phil and Lesa Major.

Eaton was state chairman for the National Newspaper Association when he was elected Texas Press Association president.

He was inducted into the inaugural class of the Texas Newspaper Foundation Hall of Fame in 2007.

Eaton began his journalism career as a part-time reporter for radio station KXOL in Fort Worth in 1956, following his freshman year at Texas Christian University. While still a student at TCU, he was named news director of the station in 1958. He graduated in 1959.

In 1960 he was elected president of Texas Associated Press Broadcasters Association. He was president of North &_East Texas Press Association in 1983-84.

After a decade as news director of KXOL, Eaton became assistant to the president of Fort Worth’s largest Ford dealership. He moonlighted as the automotive editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for more than eight years.

Eaton returned to news in 1968 as news director at WBAP, then owned by the Star-Telegram. He began directing television news coverage two years later.

He and Jeannine have been married since 1958. They have three sons.

Eatons sell Wise County Messenger to Phil & Lesa Majors:

http://www.texaspress.com/index.php/publications/messenger/messenger-archives/759-eatons-sell-messenger-to-majors

Read Roy Eaton’s interview:

I’m Roy Eaton, I’m the publisher of the Wise County Messenger in Decatur, Texas.

I began my journalism career at the end of my freshman year at TCU when I went to work as a street reporter for a radio station in Fort Worth, and I worked there for 10 years. And then I wanted to learn television so in 1968, I went to WBAP-TV, which was the NBC affiliate in Fort Worth owned by the Star-Telegram. I went there as radio news director knowing that I wanted to learn television.  So after a year as radio news director I evolved into the anchorman of a newscast at noon and then I switched entirely to a television side as director of television news coverage. And in that position I was in charge of all the camera crews and reporters that worked in both Fort Worth and Dallas.  And I worked nights on that shift, it was a… And then I became the anchorperson of their 10o’clock news in the Dallas-Fort Worth market and did that until 1975.

In 1973 my wife and I had the opportunity to buy the Wise County Messenger, which – Wise County is my home, I was – So we were able to buy the newspaper.  It was a very small newspaper, 2,500 circulation, once a week.  I continued to work at the television station and by that time I had been moved to a daytime shift so I was able to drive from Fort Worth to Decatur which is about a 40-minute drive to even, to cover some nighttime events.  My wife, she’s an accountant, and she would go up two or three days a week to handle all the accounting side.

So that was our start in the newspaper business. I knew nothing about that. I was not journalism major in college. I was a government and education major in college. And so I knew nothing about the technical side of newspapering.

The funny story I tell is that when I walked in on the day we bought the paper I looked at a Heidelberg Commercial Press and I asked the guy that I bought out if it were a paper cutter.  [Laughter.]  And I know, at that point, that he was delighted he was not carrying the note on the newspaper.

So we had a couple of fulltime employees.  Our first editor was a young man named Ken Roselle who had worked in the public relations department at the University of Texas at Arlington and was an excellent photographer and a good writer. He’s still with us today, you know, 35 years later he is still there, doesn’t do the same things.

I left the television station in 1975. The Star-Telegram sold the TV station and at that time I was a, what they were calling only a talent employee because I was trying to transition from the TV station to the newspaper. We built our new home in Decatur, it was done in ’75 and we were able to move there.

So the new owners of the TV station decided that they didn’t want any just talent employees so that was really a good exit line for me.  And the newspaper had grown a little bit so that we could afford to take salaries and so we did that. So in 1975, two years after we bought it, we took, you know, we were able to actually go to work there.

It’s been a very interesting career. We’ve been really blessed by a growing community, a growing county that is very interested in the news.

My theory has always been that if you cover the news properly the advertising will come. And me, knowing nothing about advertising, that has certainly been the case. And we have, have been very successful.  In about 1985 we changed to a twice a week paper and that’s where we are today.  I guess technically you could say three times a week we have a total market coverage product but we have really three deadlines, a Monday, Tuesday, and a Friday deadline.

A few years after we got there, Wise County did not have a radio station. Decatur is a very Forth Worth-oriented town. But we didn’t have a radio station so there was no way to do daily news.  So we started a publication called the Messenger Update.  It’s a single page publication that covers the news of the day.

For example, if we had had a Monday night City Council Meeting, that story comes in the Tuesday update.  But our paper in those days went to bed on Tuesday night and so if something happened Wednesday morning there was no way for that story to get out.  So we were able to do that.

Update continues today.  It’s one of our most popular products, brings in revenue in excess of $150,000 a year.  It is the foundation for our Web site because of the breaking news possibilities.  And so our Web site, every morning we post the update on the Web site but by 8:00 in the morning and I still write it, starting at 7 — and it includes the daily news, it includes all the funeral notices, back before HIPA it included the hospital admissions. But so, today it forms the foundation of our Web site.  And it allows us even during the day if something has happened an hour and a half or two hours after that we have breaking news capability which becomes the lead story.  So I think that it, as a journalist, it is really the backbone of good journalism.

We have tried blogs and we’ve tried discussion forums and I’ve become very discouraged because they get so mean so quickly. And our system is just not right I don’t think for editing it properly so we’ve dropped that. I want to go back to it though. I think that we’re going to need to do it but they are so subject to highjacking by single-interest people.

So our newspaper has grown from a circulation of 2,500 when we bought it, and about ten pages, to more— to about 7,000 paid circulation. We seem to have hit a 7,000-circulation ceiling.

Our county is growing so much with people coming from Fort Worth that our challenge is to bring them in to be a part of our county when they’re still a part of Fort Worth.

So we developed a total market circulation project and it goes to non-subscribers called All Around Wise. And we did that about probably 15 years ago and it is very successful.  It goes to 30,000 non-subscribers.  It has become the product of choice for inserters, to Lowe’s and JC Penney and Home Depot, that’s where they want their product.  So I think one of the interesting things that’s going to happen, particularly for those of us who are so close to the metro area, is whether we continue to be paid circulation products.  I think perhaps that someday— We couldn’t do it today, we would lose our circulation revenue and our legal notices and probably cost us $300,000 a year in revenue, but I am just wondering if in the future we might not be a free cir— We’ll still be a real newspaper, but be a free circulation paper.

There’s a guy in Keller, Texas, named Bill Lewis who has set a really good standard for that. Keller is a very close suburb to Fort Worth. He knew he probably couldn’t build a paid circulation.  Excellent newspaper but yet it has free circulation.

So I mean I think one of the great challenges we face is that— Another great challenge that we’re facing here in 2008, is the influx of large businesses who don’t necessarily know about the local papers and how important they are, what a good value we are.

We’re really lucky to have really a good strong commercial base in our own county but we need to reach out as JC Penney puts in a store on the north edge of Fort Worth, which they have done, and they’ve become inserters.  So they understand all this, but we have.

The one employee we added in 2007 was on the Internet side.  We added a person to work there.  And I think we are slowly but surely making sure that we are not just a newspaper but we are the provider of news for our county on many different platforms.  The printed word, the Internet, our little daily update, which we print 5,000 of those and deliver them around town.  We fax them to another 150 people.

Maybe if we started Update today we wouldn’t do a printed version, we might just do an Internet version.  But we sit there with 5,000 hits a day on our front page which includes the Update, so I think, you know for a town of our size, 6,000 people, 45 minutes from Fort Worth, the Internet is going to be a great way…

And young journalists today, we were talking earlier about convergence and I think that is one of the really great keys that young journalists need to know that when they come out of college, they’re going to have to have a lot of skills that can be, that can be directed toward a wide — even if they go to work for a community newspaper. They’re going to, their skills are going to need to be directed toward the Internet and I think that’s happening.

A lot of young people that we are able to hire, I mean that’s what they want to do, you know.  They are excited about it.  They’re excited to say okay if this is my weekend on scanner duty and there is a major fire I don’t want to wait until Monday to put it in Update or the next Wednesday to put it in the paper, I want to be able to go back to the house, use all the codes, download it from my personal computer onto our Web site.  So that the people who heard those fire trucks or the people who saw the smoke can click on there and see what it was.

When I first went to work my — and its unusual for a radio station manager, in my experience, to be very interested in news.  It’s just [sorry, background noise is taking over] and my guy, the manager of our radio station, he was interested in news. I’ll never forget when he hired me; he said, “When people in Fort Worth hear a siren, I want them to be able to turn on the radio and you to tell them what’s on fire.”

And that has been my, you know, the foundation of my career, breaking news, hard news is the foundation of my career.  And I think we’re almost back to where I started so I can tell my reporters when people hear a siren or see smoke or, you know, ambulances going all over everywhere, I want them to go to wcmessenger.com to find out what it was.

And I think as that grows, as the familiarity of our Web site grows the advertiser will come along. And we have done a good job but it’s hard to, I mean when you have a small advertising staff like we have just like five people. It’s small; it’s hard to get them to sell both the print ads and the online.  So how we started is we just added to the cost.  I mean if we charge you $10 for a classified ad well now it’s $11 and we give you the Web site. And, or if we, like on our daily update, the bottom ads, if they were $50 well they became $60 and then on our web page, you also had a little…

So I think the future, I mean I think the future of community newspapers is great but it’s going to be different. We’re going to have, you know, a very broad-based, you know, a very broad-based way to deliver the news but we’re still gonna be delivering the news.  And that’s gonna require journalists, photographers, editors, and to me that, that is, I mean it…

There’s a very bright future for young people who want to get into the news business.

When I started and when we started in the radio, in the newspaper business, I mean, you know once a week, one reporter and this guy sold the ads and he shot the pictures and all this stuff.  Well, he, today he still does that.  I mean he creates ads for our automobile dealers that run in the major metro papers because, you know, they’ve got confidence in us to do it and pay us to do it.  So it works real good.

So I think for the future it’s great and for the young journalists there’s no reason for them to be afraid because the skills you learn in reporting and writing the news are going to still be very valuable.  They just may be applied in different ways.

She attended Stevens College in Columbia, Mo. After her sophomore year, she enrolled at the University of Texas as a journalism major.

She worked for The Daily Texan and landed her first job on the city desk at The Dallas Morning News where she was the only woman not in the society department. She and her husband moved back to Gilmer to work with her father as editor.

Link to Greene’s newspaper:

http://www.gilmermirror.com/

Read Sarah Greene’s interview:

My name is Sarah Greene.  I was born in Gilmer, Texas, on Jan. 11, 1929, and I still live there.  I guess you could say I was born into newspaper work because my parents owned the Gilmer Mirror at the time I was born and my grandfather had bought it in 1915 and they had joined him.

So what drew me to it I guess was inheritance and what I like best about it is that if a person has any kind of intellectual curiosity it is a job in which you can, a career in which you can always try to find out what’s going on.  And I guess I have that.

And my newspaper career began when I was probably about eight or nine years old when I would go around town collecting for subscriptions, knocking on doors and getting a little commission on each one that I collected.  And then I did various little odd jobs around the office, my favorite one of which was on election night when my father would represent the Texas Election Bureau and I would run the returns from the courthouse when they came in to him at the newspaper office and he would call them in to Dallas which was a very important seeming job.

And then I, of course, graduated from high school in Gilmer and went to Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, a girl’s school, for two years and I did not declare a major.  At the end of my sophomore year I realized I was, couldn’t put it off any longer and I   at the time I thought that women’s only roles were you could either be a secretary or a nurse or a school teacher.  And none of those things appealed to me.  There were really very few other career roles for women at that time so as time ran out and I had to decide where to transfer to.

I enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin as a journalism major.  After that, after I graduated with a BJ in journalism in 1949, I went to work for the Dallas Morning News on the City Desk staff and worked there for three years until I married my UT classmate and colleague on the Dallas News, Ray Greene.

After a year in Fort Worth when he was working for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and I worked briefly for the Government Airplane Plant Number One, the Convair Plant in the Service Engineering Department, my parents invited us to come to Gilmer and he became editor of the paper and co-publisher with my father.

As for what education helped prepare me, the University of Texas Journalism School was crucial.  Working on the Daily Texan and at that time it was part of the class work.  You had no choice but to work as, in the reporting — when you took the reporting course and the editing course you worked on the Texan. But I also did volunteer work on the Texan at night and became news editor and that was just invaluable.

Then as far as lessons I’ve learned from my working life.  It is that it’s a large responsibility to be involved in a community newspaper in a small town like I have been for most of my career because I’ve always considered it sort of a quasi public utility that the people have, you know, didn’t matter whether you liked somebody or not they have the right to have their story told and it becomes a historical resource; really the only, the main one in a town like Gilmer or any other small town.

Favorite stories from my newspaper career? There have been so many of them that I hardly would know where to start but one of them was early in my Gilmer career in the 1950s when we had a sheriff who had a, was a very kind man and he had a trusty, a young man who he was letting leave on the, letting out to do work around town on the weekends and the guy disappeared one day.

And it became a cause celebre in the town and the sheriff actually got indicted for letting this prisoner escape. And it became a national story when Life Magazine showed up to cover his trial and at the climax of the trial his defense attorney said “I’ll now call to the witness stand the man who escaped who had found out his friend the sheriff was in trouble and has come back” and it became a spread in the — I still have the Life Magazine and the photographer, John Dominis was who took the pictures, was a young man who went on to become one of Life’s more famous photographers.  So that was a fun story.

And as to what distinguishes journalism from other fields.  Well to me, it’s just so much more interesting.  You wake up every day and you don’t know, you know, don’t know what’s gonna happen next and it’s not like just going to a —  living, dealing with advertisers in stores or waiting for somebody to come in and buy something or not buy something.  It’s just a lot more interesting I think.

I think of myself as being pretty laid back as far as trying to lead anybody else because I’ve never been —  I don’t like being bossed around in a high-handed way myself so I try to let people do, under supervision, but to try to bring out what, the best they can do.

As to what I’m proudest of in my career, it’s I guess having kept this home-town, independent, family-owned, newspaper. My role in keeping that going over a period of more than 50 years now with all the tremendous changes that I’m sure everybody will tell you about in the terms of your advertisers and the technological changes and that’s, has been quite an experience for all of us who have been in this business I think.

I did face an ethical dilemma that was, I think unique in my career.

In about 1992 a young woman named Kelly Wilson, a 17-year old, disappeared. She was working at a video store downtown and she closed it up about 9 o’clock one night and has never been seen since.  Of course all the law enforcement mounted a search for her and after a certain length of time a 7-year-old child told his case worker at the Department of Human Services, Child Welfare worker, that he had seen this woman at the foster home that he had been placed in and that this family who lived out on the Cherokee Trace, a country road north of Gilmer, that this family was running a Satanic cult and had killed her and eaten her.

This became a national story, you may remember it.  And the ethical dilemma for me became the fact that I was — that the policeman on the case, a Gilmer policeman a man named James Brown, was indicted for her murder even though there was no body and has never been found and I was on the grand jury that indicted him.  And I’m still under oath, I still can’t tell what went on in that grand jury, but it became a national as well as a local story in that people thought that…

Well, one local man got up on the courthouse square and told a mob that Sarah Greene was covering things up and accused me of telling my reporters what was going on in the grand jury, which was the last thing I would do.

They were very enterprising, my reporters knew actually more about the case than the grand jury did and eventually Victoria Lowe of the Dallas Morning News came out and I couldn’t tell her anything but I talked to her a lot.

And the Attorney General was called in and exposed the whole thing as a hoax and the two members of this family that I still have a closet full of tapes that the two women in the family that the 7-year-old boy accused, totally fabricated this story. Mike Cochran of the AP came out, NBC News came out, and ten years later Dateline NBC did a documentary on it.  And so that was to me was a unique experience in my time in the newspaper business.

As far as an ethical code, I think that you have to, I believe in what, everything that the Freedom of Information Foundation stands for and I try to support it.  And you have to… I don’t believe that the current opinion that journalists are not objective. I don’t— I just disagree with that entirely.  I think you have to be as objective as you possibly can be and to me it’s always been easier to be objective than to go out on a story and think now let’s see what side of my story am I on and who am I going to try to look better or worse in this particular event.  I was trained in objectivity and I try to do that.

That comes down to the biggest influence on my professional life.  I went to the University of Texas when the late Granville Price taught the editing class. I still think of him.  I recently had a conversation with Dick Elam who was my classmate there and we talked about Granville Price and I said that I wish I could mark- up the front page every week like Granville did to show where you’d gone wrong.  Dick Elam said “Oh, I do that.”  He’s the owner of the Wharton and El Campo papers and I said “Well, if I did that, I’m afraid everybody would walk out.”

But that would be my ideal to be able to do that.

The other biggest influence was Jack Krueger the now legendary, late city editor of the Dallas Morning News.  I felt really privileged to work under him because this was a time right after the War when there were a lot of talented young veterans back, both in my time at UT and on the Dallas News, a lot of talented people who have gone on to imposing and important careers and I’m even in touch, still in touch with some of them and we reminisce about those times.

As to the state of journalism today, well, to put it mildly it’s certainly in a state of transition. I’m sure we’re all agreed that nobody knows exactly where it’s going in this new Internet Information Age and it’s a challenge for both small and large newspapers to figure out how it’s gonna settle out. But I think it will settle out and you see through a glass darkly right now because it’s hard to tell, but I think there will be a new business model and I hope… because I think that the topic of the day now is blogs.  Well, blogs are very interesting and I read them all the time but how do you know whether one is authoritative or not?  I still think you have to have journalists who you can rely on to go by the facts and not some alternate reality.

Wanda Cash:  What about the role of women in journalism, Sarah?

SG:         Well, apparently it’s becoming more important, more women publishers, more women in all sorts of roles and I remember in our weekly newspaper business at the time when World War II started we had an all male staff and that’s been changing from right after World War II on. And I think that women are certainly going to be vital in the future.

Well, in fact, when I went to work for the Dallas Morning News most of the jobs, it was very hard to get a job outside of the society news department.  And I was so determined not to work in society news that when I signed on I worked for a couple of months in the morgue and a couple of months as the receptionist outside of the newsroom and I finally got inside and on the city desk and got to start writing obits.  And now of course it’s women columnists, women reporters, women editors, and women publishers are just taken for granted.

WC:         Was it like Ginger Rogers dancing backwards?

SG:         [Laughter] Sort of, yeah.  It was.  My good friend and I shared an apartment with Dorthea Lyle McGrath who was the labor news reporter for, she was several years older than I was and had started in Wichita Falls, and she was unique as a labor news reporter in the ‘40s and early ‘50s and she had to be better than most of the men to do that.

WC:         When you took over more of the leadership role at the Gilmer paper did you encounter obstacles from people in the community who didn’t, might not have thought it was an appropriate role for a woman?

SG:         I don’t think so because, and the reason I don’t think so is that my mother was a very strong person who had worked on both of the, both the advertising side and the news sides from the time she was a young woman and I think that because of coming out of the family I did. I really didn’t have that obstacle that some women might have had.  If they thought, if anybody thought that, they kept it to themselves.

I’ve never felt discriminated against and I’ve done all the usual things like president of the chamber of commerce and on the board of the industrial foundation. I was for 20 years a bank director and I was the only woman on the bank board and right now I’m the only woman on the Industrial Foundation Board so I just think I’ve been fortunate in that respect.

WC:         In small communities is there an unusual pressure on the publisher of the paper when the publisher is called upon to sometimes make decisions that are best for the community or maybe not in the best interest of the newspaper?

SG:         I definitely think so and when you, and you know your advertisers and they’re, it’s hard to keep the wall of separation between the advertising and the news as rigid as it is on a bigger paper and I think that’s definitely a problem.

WC:         Has your coverage ever cost you friends?

SG:         There were times when I thought maybe so, but not in the long run. I don’t think so.  Now I have told, I’ve told all my friends and acquaintances too, that I can keep a secret but you’ll have to tell me if it’s a secret because otherwise anything you tell me is liable to end up in the paper.  And I think they don’t tell me things necessarily because they suspect that.  [Laughter]

WC:         What worries you, if anything, about what’s going on today?  You mentioned blogs and not knowing the source of the information and worrying about your credibility and the information that’s out there.

SG:         Well I think that our… It worries me a great deal because I see so many people just following…  In years past, people, it seemed to me like, didn’t just think what they wanted to think. Nowadays if, if it suits their political, you know, there is this kind of alternate reality where people just think what they want to think.  And it’s a problem right now in the presidential election and in a divided country and there’s no… When a newspaper like the New York Times or the Washington Post or the LA Times is not accepted by people that would rather believe say Rush Limbaugh’s facts, I just think that’s very worrisome.  You can’t say well you have to believe one of these.

But there are standards in journalism that matter and it just bothers me to see them being ignored.

WC:         From what you can tell are journalism schools doing a good job?

SG:         I hope so. I hope my alma mater is and I think so and I’m proud of the people that are still, that are enrolling in journalism schools now because from one standpoint you could say well are they training to be railroad telegraphers?  Is it going down?  And I think the journalism schools are helping keep the… keep hope alive and keep the dream alive that we can have quality journalism that matters.  And I think it’s, well, we’re all familiar with all the quotes about from Mark Twain to Thomas Jefferson and everybody else about rather have, you know, how important newspapers are.  And of course newspapers. Now I’ve seen a whole lot of change from when the television relied on newspapers for the news and now that’s no longer so and it’s a worrisome time but…

WC:         Where do you think journalism is headed?

SG:         Well that’s where I say I see through a glass darkly because I hope it’s heading for a continuation of the best of what it has been through the years but it’s hard to tell.

WC:         What do you think about this trend of citizen journalism where anybody with a computer and a modem can be a journalist these days?

SG:         Well that’s one of the things that worries me. If you believe in free speech, which of course I do, you have to think that that’s a good thing.  Both of my grown children have blogs as many millions of others do and I think that, well I don’t know, over the…

I think it’s just too early to tell what the long-range effects of that trend [noise] and I would like to pass along the thought that the young people of today should not assume that they can just get on their computer and start pounding opinions and be a real, they might call themselves a citizen journalist, but that doesn’t mean they’re a real journalist.

WC:         Would you sum up for us?

SG:         Right.  I think that I hope that in my life that I have been consistent in trying to, well I’ve had a life of course, I’ve raised two children and have a grandson and I’m inordinately proud of all of them and that’s been my personal life.  And in my professional life I have always kept in mind that this community was being served by a newspaper that had a real responsibility to represent the best in that community and I’ve always like the motto of the Abilene Reporter-News, I’ve forgot who, it used to be on their masthead, I guess it may still be, it said “With or without offense to friend or foe we sketch your world exactly as it goes.”  And that’s, I think, a good ideal to try to live up to.

Holley remains active in the Texas Press Association.

Alvin Holley, publisher of the Polk County Enterprise and incoming president of Texas Press Association (summer 2000), was inducted into the Texas Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2008.

Holley believes he received his best education 50 years ago when he sold newspapers on the streets of Corsicana. That’s where he began his newspaper career in 1950 at the Corsicana Daily Sun.

He learned quickly how to stand on his own. It gave him an opportunity to learn about economics and how to make a living as a salesman. As a hawker, he sold newspapers on the streets for 5 cents — 3 cents was paid to the newspaper and Holley got to keep the remaining 2 cents plus tips, which usually were no more than a nickel.

During his teenage years he developed his own route and sold more than 500 single copies each afternoon, earning the right to claim “most copies sold daily by a carrier at the Corsicana Sun.”

Holley says he remembers well his conversation with Corsicana Sun Publisher Fred DuBose when he was offered a job to work in the office of the Sun.

“I told him if I couldn’t make more than I made on my paper route I wouldn’t take the job,” Holley said.

Holley took the job and recalls it started at 7:30 a.m. and ended no earlier than 7:30 p.m., six days a week. But the best thing was the opportunity. His first paycheck was $65 per week, an amount that provided for him, his wife and baby son.
Holley developed a strong relationship with DuBose, who became his tutor and mentor.

While working for the Corsicana Sun Holley advanced through the ranks as circulation manager, advertising manager and general manager.

In 1972 Holley and David Durham, also an employee of the Sun, bought the Polk County Publishing Co. in Livingston.

After leaving a daily paper Holley expected putting out a weekly paper would allow him to have more free time. He said that dream quickly was shattered when they found there wasn’t enough money to pay the bills due to the limited advertising income.

They did the quickest thing to economize and make ends meet, cut all expenses, including the payroll.

Holley remembers that every job cut was another one left for him to do. Like most weekly publishers he had to “fill all the gaps.” That included as needed, working an average 60 or more hours a week selling advertising, run·ning the press, preparing the mail, delivering all the newsstands and doing all the things later he learned publishers of small weekly papers do every week.

As East Texas began to grow, so did Polk County Publishing Co. Holley bought his partner’s interest in their company. He now serves as publisher of seven newspapers in five counties, The Polk County Enterprise, San Jacinto News-Times in Shepherd, Trinity Standard, Groveton News, Corrigan Times, Houston County Courier and the Tyler County Booster in Woodville. Additionally his company produces four weekly shoppers and does commercial and job printing from two printing plants.
“I recognize that my newspaper career could not have been successful without some good employees and my family,” Holley said.

Linda, his wife, is advertising manager for several of the newspapers. Three of their six children presently are employed at the Polk County Enterprise. All six have been employed there in previous years.

Holley has received several community service awards and was named Polk Countian of the Year in 1985. This year he has been nominated for the Dr. Ralph W. Steen East Texan of the Year Memorial Award. This award is presented annually by the Deep East Texas Council of Governments to someone who has contributed significantly to the growth and prosperity of the East Texas area.

Link to Holley’s newspaper:

http://www.easttexasnews.com/

Read Holley’s interview:

I’m Alvin Holley.  I’m with the Polk County Enterprise in Livingston, Texas.  I was born in Corsicana and grew up in Corsicana outside in the rural community of Rome, Texas, which is about five or six miles outside of Corsicana.  And moved into Corsicana at an early age and started in the newspaper business actually early as well because I was 10 years old when I went to work at the newspaper.  And I guess as much as anything just because I had a friend who wanted to go into the newspaper as well, or wanted to sell papers on the street so I went with him just out of curiosity to see what it was like.  And we went up and got our papers and I remember well is that they told me that we had to sell 15 papers because if we didn’t sell 15 papers we’d lose our job.  And that, to a 10-year old was, you know, I was sincere about wanting to sell the paper so I remember that first day that I think I sold maybe 25 or 30 papers and I thought well this is easier than I thought.

The paper sold for, at that time, a nickel apiece and we were able to, well we were responsible for every paper that we didn’t bring back that they issued which was actually if they gave us 25 papers we were responsible for pay for 25 papers if we sold them.  If we didn’t, they’d check us in at 7 o’clock at night and we started usually about 3:30, as soon as we got out of school and could get to the newspaper.  And go down and pick up our papers on the street and just walk up and down the street and we didn’t get off work until 7 o’clock at night.

And we had very strict rules, we couldn’t gather together, we couldn’t play in the alleys, we couldn’t do all the things that kids wanted to do and if we did we got laid off for three days.  And that was kinda like it wasn’t the fact that you got laid off and didn’t make the money, it was the fact that you didn’t want the mark on your record at that time to be laid off for three days.

But anyway, we did all the things that they told us not to do.  We played in the alleys.  We did a lot of things that I guess kids, you know, you learn to— all the things that kids weren’t supposed to do you quickly learned the cuss words, you learned all the things that kids slipped around and shouldn’t do, that’s the things that you wanted to do.

It was always such fun at that time and you didn’t, it wasn’t a matter of having to have the money because my parents were, I mean we didn’t have any money as far as the family goes, but we never really had to work because our parents told us we did.  My parents told me that whatever I made that it was my money and I could spend it as I wanted.

I remember my dad telling me that you could have it, you could do anything you wanted as long as it wasn’t immoral or illegal, meaning that I guess I got the message and did whatever it amounted to.  But I was able to save a few bucks and went through, I was pretty frugal I guess, because I, you know, to think that you didn’t make but sometimes 50 cents a day for working for four hours and it was, it was a fun trip. I mean to be able to do that each day but at the same time you got a lot of valuable lessons.

I moved up in the newspaper business, though, because I stayed with it and went on up and went to work later in the office after working there for several years because I was so successful with my paper sales that I actually went into selling the papers on the street and before I went on up into high school I was selling about 400 to 450 papers a day and this was not like on a route, this is where you actually sold them for a nickel apiece and you had to check that money in each night.

And to sell that many papers, to distribute that many papers and sell them individually is a lot bigger job than just throwing a paper route and riding a bicycle.  And I had little ways that I would. For example we got to move to the front of the line, the person that sold the most papers, got their papers out, they were the ones that got out first.  So I soon worked my way up to the front of the line and I learned that I could go to the location for all the, where the domino parlors, the pool halls, all the places that had sort of an accumulation of people and I could just run in those places and I would pitch the paper in there and I could make one block and distribute a hundred papers and come back around and the next time come back around and was able to collect my money for those things.

In other words I could get my five dollars for the papers that I’d distributed at that time.  And that, it really was, as the intent of kids selling papers, it really was a merchant’s program; it was called the Little Merchant’s Program. And it gave me an opportunity to see what you could do by working hard and as I think about it, I learned such a valuable lesson in doing that and I was still in high school.

I married early in my high school, before I got out of high school  was selling newspapers and I remember my boss telling me that you know it doesn’t look good for you to be married and selling papers on the street.  And I told him I made more money selling papers.  And at that particular time, well taking a step back, I had a very loving family and my dad was just a common laborer and I remember that at that time he was making $40 a week.  And I could make about, almost $50 a week selling newspapers in the afternoon so I was making more in three hours than he was making as a laborer all week long.

Cash:  And tell us when this was, Alvin.

Holley: This would have been, when I started was in 1950, but then when I graduated from high school it was 1959 and this would have been at the time that I was making my most on my paper route.  And but I would make from $40, $40 to $50 a week at that time.

And the reason I bring this up is because the owner of the paper, or the publisher of the paper saw that I was a hard worker and he felt like that I had the potential to do something with the newspaper and he offered me a job in the office.

And I remember so well that, his name was Fred Dubois, he was the publisher, and he offered me the job.  And when he offered the job I said “Fred, I can’t take the job unless you’re willing to pay me more than I can make on my paper route.”  And he said, “Well it looks pretty bad for you to sell papers and you’re married and you’ve got a child coming and here you are peddling papers in the afternoon.”

But of course I, you know, what I expected to do when I got out of high school was to work some part-time jobs.  And always have and still do as far as that goes, I’ve always got something on the sideline.  But he offered me $65 a week.  And I thought then, I said well sure that’s good.  So I went ahead and made the move to $65 and I went to work at 7:30 in the morning and I got off at 7 at night.  And you know it makes me wonder what kind of decision that was to give up three hours a day for 12 hours a day.  But that was I guess more of a reflection of what I wanted to do with making a change in my lifestyle and with my family.

And went from there, Fred was a person that was I guess probably the mentor of my life as far as business because other than maybe my grandmother who told me things that I needed to do in life and kind of directed me along with my parents. But my grandmother lived in our home with us and since she was always the one that tried to direct me with morality and saying don’t do this and don’t do that and she would always be wise in telling me what to do.  Anyway, Fred Dubois was the one that, that was my sort of my idol I guess in terms of business after I learned more about Fred.  And he was a person that had a lot of, I don’t know, he was a hard businessman, very few people could work for him.  And later, because I could work for him and he respected me for my hard work, we became the best of friends and until the day that he died we, even after I made a move to other newspapers, well he was my best mentor as far as business goes.

But anyway, we — I moved from the circulation department, finally moved into the composition department, into the composition into at that time which was hot metal type and hand-setting type and it’s nothing like the days of computers today where you sit down and punch a computer and all the typing that was going on with Linotype machines and different things in the back shop.

And then from there I moved up into the front office and went into ad sales and that’s where Fred really was my mentor as far as directing me in making a living and he showed me the importance of dealing with life and dealing with people and being able to get along in life really is what it came down to.

I don’t have any education other than a high school education and the opportunity, I think, that maybe Fred gave me was the fact that he could show me ways that you, you be aware of the people around you, you be aware of the opportunities and use those opportunities to develop your life and to build something that’s worthwhile.  And I’ll always respect him and believe that anything that I’ve got, he probably was the one that led me in my business life.  And that was something that I’m very thankful for, that I had that opportunity to work for him.

Now he was a hardnosed business man and very few people could work for him, but he would challenge me as far as my work and I would go out and do it.

Cash:         Did he help you towards your next opportunity in newspapers?

Holley:  He moved me into the ad department and then when I went into the ad department, after about two years of running proofs and doing whatever, you know when you worked for a newspaper then you just worked in the newspaper. You didn’t work as a specialty person to work in a certain area. And I can remember if he didn’t have me busy selling ads then I may be unloading cottonseed hulls out of the back of his trailer at his farm.

But what I’m saying is that he taught me about the effects of hard work in developing a career and that gave me the opportunity to build and to see that I could do whatever I wanted to do.  He would —  At the end of the day when I started out in the ad department I would make my calls and when I would come back in he said, “Alvin what did you learn today?”  And I would say, “Fred, I don’t know.”   And he’d say let’s sit down and talk about it.  We would, you know, sit across from each other and I remember the newspaper was so cramped that at his desk we were about three feet apart so we’d look eye-to-eye to each other and he’d say, “Well what did this account tell you?  What about this?  What about that?”

And usually the ones that would tell you that I don’t want an ad or I can’t buy an ad, he would say go back tomorrow and talk to them again. And I’d say, “Fred, I’ve already talked to them three times this week.”

He said, “Go back and talk to them again” and the persistence that he taught me to be able to learn that life is that way.  I mean it’s not just selling ads, the way that you get along in life is not hard-sell; it’s just a matter of being persistent and pursue your goals.  And once you reach for those goals it’s up to you to make them happen is what it amounts to.

But anyway, from that, that’s sort of the beginning of my career in the newspaper business and this, I’ll always be grateful to him for all that he did.  And then from there Harte-Hanks Newspapers bought the chain out, or bought the Corsicana paper out and it gave me a different view and a broader perspective of what newspapers are about besides just Corsicana being a small newspaper.

And I stayed with them until 1972 and moved on up to general manager of the Corsicana paper in 1972 and David Durham a man that was in my classified, he was my classified ad manager, was associated with Harte-Hanks directly through a family relationship and he wanted to go and make a move to buy a newspaper and he went to Livingston, Texas, and bought the Livingston paper.

And all the time that he was going there he was asking me do I want to go do this and be a part of it and all like that.  And I was hesitant to do it because I hated to go because I’d already built a good career where I was.  And so from that point David and I were the best of friends, I mean that’s the key that put us all together because we were not only good workers together, but I decided that the best thing for me to do was to go ahead and go with him because if I stayed with the Corsicana paper and with Harte-Hanks the best I could look for would be to take a step up, I might be able to get a publisher, a publisher position but not at the Corsicana.  It probably would be somewhere halfway across the country because they were a growing chain at that time and I knew the last publisher that was at Corsicana went to Ypsilanti, Michigan, and I didn’t want to get to Ypsilanti, Michigan, or someplace like that and they were still buying papers and that was sort of my goal to see that I could kinda fulfill a dream of having my own newspaper.

So David and I bought the papers in Livingston, Texas.  And then from that point we began to build on the basis of Lake Livingston and the growth of what we thought was gonna be Lake Livingston and so we built that or we built it from the one newspaper to seven newspapers that encompassed Lake Livingston as well as two abutting or two connecting counties.

And altogether now we have, or I have, I bought the newspaper chain or the rest of the group from David and we put that together in addition to buying the Houston County Courier which is Crockett and the Tyler County Booster which is at Woodville.  And that completed ours and actually just stopped at that point in buying other papers.  We had other opportunities but we just felt like that was, and it has worked out to where it was probably best to just hold what we’ve got there because it’s, it’s a pretty good chore just to keep up with them and the way that the industry’s changing now it’s extremely hard in a small newspaper to make money and pay people, qualified people, I’ll say, that can do a good job in developing the amount of revenue it takes to produce it.

One thing I’ve found with small newspapers is if you don’t get somebody that’s from the local area, I mean if they’re not from the community in which you have the paper, it’s extremely hard to maintain and keep them there.  They come and they — especially college students, that when they get out of college, they’re looking for a new career and they’re not looking for a small town to stay in.  They want to get the stepping stone and take the next step forward so you’re always looking for somebody.  And we found that the best way to have people working there are people that actually have an investment in the community.  I mean they’re, they enjoy being in the community or they wouldn’t be there and therefore it’s an opportunity for both of us.

Cash:         So you have kind of an in-house training?

Holley: Yes. That’s mostly what it is and of course we —  From time to time we have people who come to us that are looking for employment and so if they do and if it’s a good mix we certainly will hire them if we can put it all together.  We’ve been very fortunate though because some of the people that we have that are key people have been with me at the newspapers, some of them for 30 years, Greg Peak has been there about 30 years, our sports editor for about 30 years, our bookkeeper 28 years, I think.

And all these people are people who evidently like the style in which we operate.  And that’s something that I’m proud of because all of the people that we have pretty well have an opportunity to run their operation, or their part of the operation as they want.  So it’s something that we’ve — that’s made me very proud and I am very proud that we have, well people that are just good, good people.

The things that I see with the newspapers today though is that there’s so many changes because of the fact that we have, the way the  news is reported and the way that, the methods that we have to be able to carry it to the public.  And particularly with the Internet and all the things that have changed is that I don’t know whether our, whether it’s in the schooling or whether it’s just the fact that we have the students are coming out that are more aggressive and they’re looking for a quicker approach.

I do know that because the world is moving so much faster with the Internet, with other ways of carrying the news to the public is that we are, we’re finding it harder and harder to get people to be in the newspaper business.  They come, the young people are coming out of college and they seem to enjoy the glamour and the quickness of getting to the, either the television or getting to their own forum of covering the news.  And the Internet has brought about a lot of that because they can, they can report it and put it right out in front of the people so quickly.

Cash:         But you have an Internet presence with your publications.

Holley: We do. But it’s still not as, somehow you —  It’s just hard for somebody and that’s made these changes through all this, you know, going back all the way from hot type to say you go to offset and then going to offset and here we are in the Internet process.  It’s just a, it’s moving so fast and the fact that competition could come in and just walk in and start doing this so quickly.  I mean, they just start putting it together and it’s something that it’s a real challenge is what it amounts to and we’re gonna have to do — In our company we’re gonna have to make a lot of changes is what it amounts to be able to get, to keep up with what’s happening.

Cash:         But the core focus of your journalism has been community service?

Holley: Community service and I don’t see how anybody in smaller communities can look at it in any other way.  And I think that there’s a great opportunity in that respect because we’re seeing the metropolitan papers and you look at the numbers of circulation, of their circulation department and how it’s beginning to go down and the numbers are depleting and our numbers are staying up and it’s nothing more than the fact that we’ve got a core business that people want.

We still report the smallest things that happen in our community and you don’t see that in a metropolitan paper. And there’s no way that they can produce that and that’s the reason that the Internet is working so hard against them.  Now, we probably will have to adjust ours because we know that there will be people who will come in with an Internet presence that we’ll have to compete with.  If we do then we’ll meet that head on as we get into that.  But, and maybe we’ll get a head start on it, but at the same time it’s a different world.

It’s a new time that we, for an old guy that’s been in the business as long as I have, it’s hard to make those changes and we’re gonna have to get some new and fresh blood in to be able to lead us and direct us in those directions.

Cash:         What would you, what would you say to that new fresh blood?  What would you say to the aspiring journalist?

Holley: That they have a great opportunity to just walk right into it and build the same type of career that I built except that they’re building in a new phase.  I mean if they build it in a new direction but there’s nothing more than the excitement of covering a good news story or, you know, even going out and selling a good ad campaign.

I can remember starting out early in the ad department and I had one account and I would go out— when the paper came out and would see people actually standing at the door waiting for the door to be unlocked for them to go in and buy.  And there’s nothing that would excite the person that develops an ad program any more than that and if you can get an honest relationship with an advertiser where they’ll actually tell you what’s happening then you can build with them and they work with you and it’s still just as good as it ever was.  I mean it’s—

And the same way with the news, you know, communities, the community news, the things that are happening in your city and county government, we all have this battle about we won’t release this information, we won’t let you have this, you can’t do this or do that.  We have no more rights to anything anymore than the citizen, but at the same time it’s our obligation to be able to report it and if we have good reporters and good news content we’ll always have a good direct route to the public.  And the public will respond to that and it makes for a good community, it makes for good newspapers and it makes for better government and that’s just a plan simple formula for all of it.

But all of this is, I’m just as excited about it now as I was, you know, when I was maybe 17, 18, 19 years old when I started because I’m just that kind of person.

I enjoy challenge and the fact that this is a challenge to me and I’ve been through a lot of challenges in my life and I know that this is not the end of the row, all I’ve got to do is just find the right route and get on it.  And that’s I think anybody should be, a young person, whatever they’re in, whether the news business or newspaper, publishing business, there is so much opportunity for them but they’ve got to be willing to pay the price.  It’s just the bottom line is that you’ve got to be able to—

Nothing is free.  You work for it and there’s plenty of people who, who will help you get there if you just show them that you want to be there.  There’s a good relationship between you and a publisher, a good relationship with anybody in business.

I hope these are some of the things that people will follow and maybe direct young people to do this and I’d be happy to share it with anybody that wanted to learn it. I mean it’s, it’s been fun for me and well it continues to be fun for me. I’ve got a family of six children that and all of them are adult, of course now, but all of them came up through the newspaper business and I’m very proud of all of them.  They’ve all, four of them still work for me, or work with me, I can’t say for me.  They work with me and my wife works with me and it’s just a family relationship.  And we know that this, it’s not just a business but it’s something that links us to the community and the community ties us all together in some way or another.

Cash:         Any closing shots?

Holley: I think I’ve already, you know, basically said that if anybody would use that opportunity, I mean a young person coming into the field, it’s still wide open for anybody and it’s up to the individual, it’s  not something that there’s a closed gate for this one and an open gate for that one.

It’s up to the individual that wants to get there is the way I look at it and I still feel that way.  I don’t care age, or in this day and time I think that ethnic, you know, being— you can do anything that you want because the opportunity is there in whatever challenge you want to take.  Just accept it and do it.

]]> http://texasnewspaperoralhistory.com/2009/02/05/alvin-holley/feed/ 1 http://texasnewspaperoralhistory.com/2009/02/05/larry-jackson/ http://texasnewspaperoralhistory.com/2009/02/05/larry-jackson/#comments Fri, 06 Feb 2009 02:02:29 +0000 admin http://texasnewspaperoralhistory.com/2009/02/05/83/ Larry Jackson is the new editor and publisher of the Fayette County Record. For the past 15 years Jackson has been editor and general manager of the Wharton Journal-Spectator and vice president of River Publishers, which owns the Journal-Spectator and East Bernard Express. Jackson was president of Texas Press Association in 1999-2000 and is the current president of the Texas Newspaper Foundation and the state chairman to the National Newspaper Association.

Jackson’s career has included being editor or publisher of both daily and weekly newspapers in Texas and California. He was Texas Press Association’s 121st president.

As a teen-ager, he had a paper route for the Austin American-Statesman. When he graduated from S.F. Austin High School in Austin he took a summer job in the printing department of a book publishing firm and has worked in printing and publishing ever since.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of The Daily Texan staff.

He began his newspaper career with the Arlington Daily News and has since been city editor of the Laredo Times, managing editor of the Henderson Daily News, editor of the Austin Citizen, and publisher of the Round Rock Leader, Pecos Enterprise and Corona Independent.

After four years in California, Jackson returned to Texas in 1991 to assume management of the Wharton Journal-Spectator. He left Wharton in 2007 to become publisher of the Fayette County Record.

He was president of South Texas Press Association in 1996-97. He won the Jack Douglas Photo Sweepstakes Award from the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors Association in 1987. He served as Texas’ state chairman to the National Newspaper Association until 2008.
Jackson and his wife, Susie, have three children.

Link to Jackson’s newspaper:

www.fayettecountyrecord.com

Read Larry Jackson’s interview:

I’m Larry Jackson.  I’m publisher of the Fayette County Record in LaGrange, Texas, and I’ve been there about a year.  It’s been a most interesting year in my life because this has been… It may well be my last spot in many, many changes in newspapers.  I’ve been a newspaper publisher for, oh, gosh, 40 years.  So I’ve seen a lot of different towns and I’ve had a great time.

I’m still enjoying it and I figure that I’ll keep on doing this as long as it’s fun.  So far it has been.  I’ve lived sort of in mortal terror all my life that one of these days I would have to get a real job and it’s beginning to look like I may actually reach retirement without ever having to go to work.  Because, really, going to the office every day is not going to work, it is really doing what I love to do.  And I think that’s true of so many people that are in the newspaper business.

A lot of people would call us workaholics and we really are.  I may get up at— I may be at the office at 5:30 in the morning and I certainly have been there long after midnight a lot of times.  But I don’t think it’s really being a workaholic because we’re so much involved with people and with people’s lives.  We’re involved with Boy Scouts, with Little League, with the school board, with our politicians.  We’re involved in obituaries and wedding stories, we’re involved with people when they’re hurting and we’re involved with people when they’re happy.  And I think that involvement with people is what makes it such a joy.  At least it has been for me.  So I’ve had a great time.  It’s been very interesting for me to be in the newspaper business at this particular time in history.

I grew up in Austin and I was, I was one of those kids that was a bicycle newspaper boy.  I was one of those kids that went crew working and probably most people never heard of crew working, but what it really means is that all the paperboys would get together on an evening and go to knock doors and try to sell subscriptions.  And we’d go out and work for a few hours and then we’d all go to the movie.  The district manager would take us all down to the Paramount Theater or wherever in Austin.  The paper of course had free tickets to the movies and all of us kids would go watch a movie together and then he’d take us out for ice cream or whatever.  And I don’t think that a man could get away with doing that with that many little boys today.  The world has changed.  We wouldn’t go out knocking on strangers’ doors like that.  So I got into it at a great time. It was fun.

One of the things that got me into newspapers, paying more attention to newspapers was that I frankly thought we had a sorry newspaper in Austin. The American-Statesman was pretty pitiful in those days.  When I got into The University of Texas, I was first involved in politics. I had been drawn to the Republican Party and the conservatives and that was a different kind of conservatism at that particular time.  The Austin American-Statesman was establishment Democrat in everything that it did.  It was cheap.  It hired University students as slave labor and they thought, the Statesman thought that was quite adequate in putting out a paper.

Composition was done by a union shop that laid out the pages.  They didn’t have journalists laying them out, the guys that were the typesetters laid it out and they laid it out in just the easiest way possible and created lousy looking pages. Stories would always run out from underneath their headlines just as an example because it was easier for the compositors to put it together that way.  They were not going to reset a headline because they didn’t like the way it looked.

One of my… Sort of my disgust with the way that the Statesman ran things, they didn’t even have photographers, they had an arrangement with UPI, the United Press International photographers in Austin at the Capital Bureau took every news photo that was run in the Austin paper.  They gave UPI rent free darkroom space and UPI went and took all the photos. Pretty pitiful.

At that time when I got in into the University of Texas, one of my projects, I’d started taking some journalism classes and one of my projects was that I was going to track the Dallas Morning News as an Austin newspaper.  My contention was that the Dallas Morning News was doing a better job of covering Austin than the American-Statesman was because the American-Statesman would simply run AP stories about Austin.

The Dallas News would have their Capital Bureau correspondents write stories about Austin.  And so my notebook was filled with all of the examples of where the Dallas Morning News was doing a better job on local coverage than the Austin American-Statesman.

Why do I reflect on that?  I think it is that I think the quality of journalism was pretty poor back then in the ‘60s.  People took the easy way out on everything and I really believe that we’ve improved a lot.  I think that there’s a lot of, a lot better journalism being done today than was being done back then.  A lot of things have caused that.  It’s not just been, well let’s see, the changes.  There have been changes in ownership, changes in technology, changes in expectation.  Changes in competing media, a lot of things have forced newspapers to do a better job today than they used to.  They’re still not perfect by any means but I think most newspapers, or weekly newspapers, I think most weekly newspapers in Texas today are far superior to the small weekly newspapers that were being produced in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  We’ve improved a lot. I’ve been fortunate again to work through all of that period.  The technology has made lots of changes.

One of the things that when I first began at the University of Texas, at the Daily Texan we were still using Linotypes and setting headlines with Ludlows, that’s type of a hot metal arrangement that we would set the headlines.  And we would then go to a Stereotype mat that would create a lead cylinder that we’d put onto a printing press and it was called a letterpress because the press actually printed directly from that lead of raised type and it was very capital intensive.  You had to have a lot of money to buy a newspaper press and all those Linotypes back then.  The coming of offset changed that.  You were able to put out a newspaper without sinking a huge capital investment and that brought about a lot of competition.  I think that’s part of what made better newspapers.

The American-Statesman had to deal with some competitors.  Of course, they had to deal with the coming of television and a lot of other media competition but I think that one of the things that has driven the improvement of newspapers overall has been the ability of people to get into the newspaper business with little capital.

Used to you basically had to buy your own printing operation, a big manufacturing business, really, to get into the newspaper business.  The coming of offset web presses allowed a central printing plant to print many newspapers and one of my first experiences with that was a little weekly newspaper that struggled and struggled in Austin called the Austin Times Herald.  It came out, I’m gonna guess in about 1960 and they printed in what was called a central plant.  Instead of having to buy their own printing press they were able to print that at an offset plant, bring it in and distribute it in Austin once a week.  Didn’t work, but it was trying to give the American-Statesman a little competition.  And somehow that seems to have been a fixation in my life.  Later on there was a paper called the Austin Citizen and I went to work for it when I was in college.

So I had been off at a variety of other newspapers and a friend of mine that owned the Austin Citizen was still around and called and said we’d like you to come back and be editor of the Austin Citizen.  I said well hey, that’s kind of a neat deal to be editor of a newspaper, that would be good.  And so I previously had been at the Arlington Daily News and agreed to come back and be editor of the Austin Citizen.  Well, it was a quixotic to say the least but it was fun and it gave me an opportunity to find out what being the editor meant as a really young guy.

And later on, I decided I needed to move on to somewhere else and I went on to the newspaper in Laredo as a reporter and city editor and I thought I ought to be the managing editor there and somebody else got the job so I said, “Well I’m outta here.”  They said, “No, no, don’t go away mad.  We’ve got other newspapers and you can be a managing editor there.”

And so sure enough I came and talked to Mr. Hartman, Fred Hartman in Baytown and I also talked to Roger Walker up in Henderson and decided that I liked Henderson better than Baytown and became managing editor of the Henderson Daily News which was a good run for a while, too.

Again the guy that was at the Citizen, they said “You know what, we’re gonna go daily in Austin, we’re gonna compete with the American-Statesman. We need a general manager.”  I said, “Well that sounded good, let’s go down there.”  And so I went back and became general manager of the Austin Citizen.

It was a good experience for me for a lot of reasons. It didn’t work out for the Austin Citizen.  I left that and moved to Round Rock and the Austin Citizen subsequently did go daily and tried to compete with the American-Statesman, didn’t succeed and that’s somebody else’s story.  But it sort of it seems like that that fixation on the Austin newspaper has been a part of my life for a long, long time.

The move to Round Rock was particularly interesting because again technology had changed so dramatically.  There was a little old spinster lady named May Kavanaugh who owned the Round Rock Leader and when I was in college our classes would always go,  our professor Olin Hinkle would always take us up to Round Rock because he said this is a dinosaur, this is the last of the breed.  May Kavanaugh sets by hand a weekly newspaper up there in Round Rock and we would go watch her set type and do this hand-set weekly newspaper.  Well, I had the opportunity then to, after I left the Citizen, to become publisher of the Round Rock Leader.

A guy named Bill Todd had bought the newspaper from May and May was still working there.  She stayed on as the office manager and she was a spry little lady and it was truly an opportunity to see a long gone institution.  May’s father had owned the newspaper and they called him Firecracker Kavanaugh because he was an interesting guy, a great old-fashioned small town newspaperman.

May grew up in those days of Depression and the War and never got married.  So she stayed and ran, helped her father run the newspaper.  I never knew her dad but by the time I got there he was gone.  But May walked everywhere.  She didn’t drive a car.  In a little town like Round Rock, she was the organist for the Methodist Church.  She walked to church every service.  She’d walk to the office.  She’d set the type, her brother would come in from Austin and run the press for her on Wednesday nights I think it was and he would, an old flat-bed press that they would print, probably 700 or 800 copies maybe, fold it and then they would address it with a pencil.  They would sit at the kitchen table and write out the addresses, take it to the post office and mail it.  It was, I didn’t get to watch all of that, but I got to hear about it many, many times from May who continued to work there at the newspaper for me for a number of years.  And so I really feel like I got to touch a part of newspaper history.

But I was watching the changes that were being made in technology.  We’d moved from hand-set to Linotypes, to the strip printers of photographic offset, the Varityper Printers that we called headliners where you would literally set them one letter at a time, squeezing a little trigger to cause a light to go through a matrix of a letter and then advancing the paper film to the next spot for the next letter to be done.  It exposed a strip of film and you’d wind up with a paper headline and you’d have to go to the darkroom to develop it and you’d develop that, pull it out, let it dry and then put either wax or rubber cement on the back of it and paste it down on sheets of paper until you could come up with your ad or your page, newspaper page.

Later on, we got the machines that would set lots of type.  CompuGraphic was one of the big names and we went through that and then ultimately of course, we went to computer layouts, Apple Macintoshes just revolutionized the way that the newspapers were put together.

I think that change, again we’ve seen the value of competition as different technologies came out and what they kept doing is they kept driving down the capital cost of people being able to get into the newspaper business.

WC:         I’d like you to sum up if you can.  Just give me some parting comments about whether you think…Just sum up whether you would encourage young people to pursue a journalism career.

JJ:         Okay.  I’ll do it.

WC:         Briefly.

JJ:         Very briefly.  I wish I could tell you whether I thought people should pursue a journalism career.  I don’t know and the reason for that is I don’t know where journalism is going to be 20 years from today.  Things have changed so dramatically that I just don’t know.

I do know this, journalism education prepares you for thinking, for communicating, for being able to absorb other people’s ideas and transmitting them to an audience.  I think that will always be valuable.  I don’t know that you’re gonna be able to find a job with a newspaper. I don’t know if there’ll be a newspaper.  I hope there is.  I suspect that there will be and I suspect that that newspaper is going to be in many ways very similar to the newspapers that existed a hundred years ago.  I doubt that it’s gonna be read and handled in the same way that newspapers are.  I know Kindle is kinda the big deal right now.  Will it work?  I don’t know, but it certainly could.  If it doesn’t something else probably will.

There’s gonna be technological changes that I can’t even imagine.  But the skill of communicating has been important for as long as there’s been people and I don’t see how we could possibly think that journalism would not be a wonderful preparation for the future.

She was the daughter of Cap and Kitty Henkel and a “newspaper brat.” Her parents were publishers of the Mid-County Review in Nederland when Judson was born in 1953.

Her first paying job was as a columnist for the Refugio County Press. As a fifth-grade student in 1963, she wrote “Junior Beat” about the comings and goings of elementary and middle school students. She went on to write a similar column as a student at Refugio High School.

She attended Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos and worked at the San Marcos Record when it went daily.

She transferred to the University of Texas at Austin where she majored in journalism and worked as a summer intern at the Corpus Christi Caller where she met her future husband, Murray Judson, a staff photographer.

After another semester at UT, Judson went to work at the San Patricio County News in Sinton as assistant news editor. She left the newspaper in April 1976 when she married.

She and Murray moved to Refugio where they assumed editor and publisher positions from her parents who were retiring.

In January 1981 the Judsons purchased the Port Aransas South Jetty and the following September they bought the Refugio County Press.

They moved to Port Aransas in May 1983. In spring 1989 the Judsons and George Phenix purchased the Goliad Advance-Guard.

Judson served as president of South Texas Press Association (1980-81) and Texas Gulf Coast Press Association (1994-95).

Link to Judson’s newspaper:

http://www.portasouthjetty.com/

Read Mary Judson’s interview:

My name is Mary Judson, I’m editor and co-publisher of Port Aransas South Jetty newspaper in Port Aransas, Texas.  I was born on Jan. 4, 1953, in Port Arthur, Texas.  Janis Joplin and I share a hometown. What next?

Wanda Cash:  How did you get into the newspaper business?  What drew you to it?

MJ:         I was born into it.  My parents were newspaper people and I resisted it until I needed a job after my freshman year in college and I went to work for my dad at the Refugio County Press and fell in love with it.  I particularly liked feature writing at that time.  I’ve now become someone who likes just the facts, ma’am.

WC:  So tell us about your career.  You started in Refugio, then?

MJ:  Actually my first job at the Refugio County Press was as the junior beat reporter when I was 12 years old or something like that, doing a little social column.  And from there I went to work for my dad the summer after my freshman year in college.  Was hooked on it, went back to Southwest Texas State University and began to major in journalism and that carried on into the University of Texas and my, I worked at the San Marcos Record during that period at Southwest Texas, now Texas State.  And from there I went to the University of Texas and dropped out. Walter Cronkite and I are both dropouts. I went to work in Sinton at the San Patricio County News for the Tracy family.

And then when my parents decided to retire from the Refugio County Press it was quite convenient that Murray and I were getting married about that same time and they proposed that we come and take over the newspaper, which we did.  They didn’t own it, a small corporation owned it.  So we went to work for the small corporation and had a beach house in Port Aransas.

And everybody kept saying why don’t y’all buy the South Jetty?  And every time we talked to the owner he wanted a million dollars and this was in 1970-something.  And we said, “Yeah, when you’re serious give us a call.”  So one day he said, called and said, “I’m serious.”  So we actually bought the Port Aransas paper first and then turned around and bought the Refugio paper from that small corporation. Then a couple of years later we ended up selling the Refugio paper and moving to Port Aransas. This is not completely historically accurate is that, okay?  Because I don’t remember, that’s one of the things I failed to write down.  Anyway, when I went to Port Aransas that is when I think I really became more of a journalist. It was much more challenging. I had a much more demanding audience and it really honed my skills.

I’m not used to talking about myself, so it’s a little uncomfortable.  My educational training was at the University of Texas, and of course, growing up in the newspaper business I did circulation with Daddy in the wee hours of the morning, that sort of thing in the olden days back when we did less of the post office’s job.  Now we do more of the post office’s job and pay them more to do less.

Lessons that my work has taught me.  I guess probably to look at all sides.  I’m probably annoyingly … and I don’t know what will happen to me when I’m not a newspaper person any more.  I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to just take half the story and run with it.  But that’s probably the biggest thing.  I never could just believe the gossip on the street, it’s usually not right.

And favorite stories from my newspaper career?  I wish I had as interesting a life as people like Willis Webb had, but I have not had that kind of a life.  We’ve had crazy employee situations.

We’ve had, probably one of the most dramatic things that ever happened was we had a shooter out in a pasture on the waterfront.  He was bipolar and he was out there with a gun and it was a big lock-down and I was up all night because I got trapped at the office.  They wouldn’t let me back into my neighborhood because it was in my backyard, actually.  And so I had to stay there all night and it was press night and so it was a very big challenging in writing on deadline.  That was pretty exciting and the man ended up killing himself and wounding some police officers.

WC:  Tell us about running a newspaper in a resort town.

MJ:  That is really neat. That’s exciting. There’s always something different.  A sperm whale beached itself on the beach just last week. And it was euthanized and they did a necropsy right on the beach, that’s an autopsy on a mammal.

And Cuban refugees picked up offshore by a tanker and brought into, picked up by the Coast Guard and brought in, our reporter road the boat, the Coast Guard boat, back into the Coast Guard station.

Tall ships coming through on their way to Corpus Christi ,which we’re the greeting point, we’re the entry to the Port of Corpus Christi.

The development issues, the environmental issues, the tourism.  People, permanent residents trying to preserve their home and their heritage while we’re growing as a tourist resort destination.  It’s, I call it reporter heaven. It’s really a lot of fun. I never have to worry about something for the front page.

WC:         Do you feel like you’re permanently on vacation?

MJ:         No. We are not on vacation. Everyone else is on island time. I would love to take a vacation in Port Aransas, but no it’s work just like anywhere else, except for Murray wears shorts to work and I don’t have to wear hose.  So that’s kinda nice.

WC:  Tell us what you do at the paper and your type of leadership.

MJ:  Okay.  Most recently I’ve actually become a real editor.  Before I was mostly a reporter who acted as the editor and developed the news package.  Now I have two reporters and a part-time staff writer who does rewrites and soft news.  So I’m spending more time planning the news package, actually editing reporters’ stories and more of a leading other people rather than leading myself.  And I’m kinda learning that job actually and it’s challenging and it’s fun.  And I have a great staff, so—

WC:  Talk about your leadership.

MJ:  Well, that is something that I am developing, but I would have to say that I try to develop a team concept where it’s not about me, it’s not about the reporters, it’s not about the photographers, the ad sales people. It’s all about the South Jetty. It’s the baby that we want to take care of so team work and I’m not a upfront. I’m not an out-front person that wants to crack a whip or get a lot of credit.  I would rather stay in the background and put out this wonderful product and so my leadership style is to try to get people to buy into that.  It needs some work.

WC:  Are you pursuing any training or development courses to help you lead?

MJ:  Actually I am.  I am looking into resources for that and this session today that we had with Texas Press was one of the things that I had asked about because our paper’s growing and I’ve not had to do this before so I need help. I need to find books, I need to see if TPA can put on management type sessions and in the conversation on the TPA list server.  I found out there are other people in this position.  So I think probably TPA is gonna be our best resource.

WC:  Talk a little bit about TPA and your involvement over the years.

MJ:  Well, TPA is fantastic. When I was first involved in TPA as a professional person I was very active in a lot of the seminars that we used to have.

Do you remember the news clinics and all?  I would be a news clinic chairman and all and TPA just offered so much and I wanted to be a part of it. So I enjoyed that.

Now TPA has really evolved. I think the services that they provide are just incredible.  The list server alone would be worth everything.  That is, it’s discussions among newspaper publishers and they have it for publishers, editors, advertising people and there might even be a technology list server.  I’m not a tech person so I’m not sure about that.  But that’s a fantastic service.

The press conventions are very, very good. Even if the speakers aren’t good, which is on rare occasion, just networking with other publishers. So I’m a cheerleader for TPA and of course the Newspaper Foundation which funds a lot of this.

WC:  And what has been your direct involvement with TPA?

MJ:  I was on the board of directors for about 10 years and then I was put into the officer rotation. I was the first woman president of Texas Press Association.

WC:  At the tender age?

MJ:  Oh, how old was I?  I don’t know how old I was, early 40s?  Something like that?  You probably know better than I do. Early 40s.

WC:  And talk about that.  The first woman president of the Texas Press Association, which at that time had existed for more than a hundred years under male domination.

MJ:  Yes.  It was a hundred and ten years old when I was first put into rotation and I probably was on the board longer than any other past president and it wasn’t that I was running for office at all.  I loved helping with other news clinics and whatever else I did.  I like being involved.  I got more out of it by putting something into it.  But being the first woman, I had already been the first woman president of South Texas Press and technically, I was the second.  I think Mrs. Salter from Kerrville was the first.  She filled her husband’s term when he died.  And when I became president of South Texas Press there were actually women who had their noses bent out of joint because they just didn’t think that was a woman’s place and that was in 1977 and I was 20-something.  I was not 30 years old.  I was 25 or 26.

But when I became president of Texas Press Association, I will never forget Hal Cunningham from Llano. He was already in, he was not very mobile, but he and Hazel were sitting, we used to sit up on the head table. He was sitting right below there and he had Hazel come over and get me after I was introduced as the second vice president. And he wanted to tell me how proud he was and how much he supported me and that meant the world to me. And I felt that if I had his support everything was gonna be okay. And not only his support I had everyone, as far as I know I had everyone’s support.

It was scary, though. I was afraid that things might be a little different and some things were. Some of the things that the previous past presidents had done, I was not asked to do, that had to do with some sports thing. I don’t even remember what it was and it didn’t matter to me. But I wasn’t in that male loop. That’s about the only thing that I can think of that I might have been left out of. And it doesn’t even happen any more, I don’t think, whatever it was.

WC:  So you were a pioneer for women in journalism.

MJ:  Well, I don’t look at myself that way but I suppose technically, maybe.

WC:  Coming to ownership and the publisher’s job early and being president of a regional press association and then the state organization.  Serious accomplishments for a woman.

MJ:  Well, I suppose I have never thought of that so much because my mother was a real strong woman. She was probably one of the early feminists.  And my parents never, ever put in my head that because I was a woman I couldn’t do anything, do certain things.  It never occurred to me that I couldn’t do that.  And I was surrounded.  You know at that time the women were there.  They were in the newspaper business but they took a backseat by choice or whatever.  So I guess I just kinda am not that sort of person.

WC:  Didn’t even think of it.

MJ:  No.  No.  It was just a natural progression for me.  Then I was worried I might be the last one.  But there, as you can look around and see, there are women here but a lot of them are not in the publisher roles or they take second fiddle to their husbands.  But there’s still women who are active and in leadership positions in newspapers.

WC:  Has being a woman posed any challenge for you in your leadership of your newspaper in Port Aransas?

MJ:  Never. Never. I have always been absolutely accepted and it might be that I am a strong-willed individual and I just, I don’t let anything get in the way.

About the only time I can remember any discrimination was when I was in Refugio and we got a new police chief and he came in to introduce himself to me and we discussed how we would work together and he proceeded to tell me that if he had anything that was a little rough that he would talk to Murray. And I told him that that would be fine, but then he would have to talk to me because Murray does not write the stories. And we got along just fine.

WC:  What about running a newspaper, being the voice for the community and writing the stories that aren’t always pleasant, aren’t always a positive reflection of the community and then having to show up at church or at the Little League game or at the grocery store next to the subject of that unpleasant report?

MJ:  Well, that sometimes is very challenging but I always, when there is a subject like that, I’m always very direct and it’s the elephant in the room and I look the elephant in the eye and they know I’m being professional and for the most part they have responded in the same way.

WC:  Can you think of any story, any coverage that has cost you an allegiance, a friend, an advertiser?

MJ: When we went to Refugio I was 23 years old and the City Council fired the good ole boy police chief.  And it was a pretty nasty situation to the point that if the police chief, ex-police chief’s wife’s car was parked in front of the pharmacy which was the coffee shop, people would not even walk on that side of the street.  That was a very divisive situation.  I didn’t lose any personal friendships over it but it was, I grew up real fast on that one because it was, I had to write very tough things about the guy they fired.  They were justified in the firing.  The way they did it was probably not the right way, but that was tough especially at 23.

WC:  Let’s talk a little bit about ethical dilemmas.  Is there anything that stands out?

MJ:  You know, in a resort town I guess we have, there’s a lot of business and development going on and Murray will want me to do a story on some development and he and I have to really work it out.  I’m going are we doing this because they’re potential advertisers or does this meet the criteria?  And so he and I have to work that out.  He’s as ethical as I am, he’s not gonna ask me to do something that isn’t, but there’s been a project here recently that I just, I’m making it really go through the paces to be sure it fits the news criteria because I don’t want to have people coming back at me saying well you did this for somebody else for that person and not for me.  Because we operate on what we do for one we do for all.  So that, in our present situation, that’s probably the most difficult.

WC: What are you proudest of?

MJ: This sounds kinda silly and I could get a little teary, but I really think we serve our community and we have a fabulous community park.  The community park came about largely because we had this, we had this little swimming pool where all the kids were taught to swim and it had to be closed down several times a week because the chemicals couldn’t keep up with the demands put on it.

And here we live on the Gulf of Mexico, people have swimming pools in their backyard, they have canals in their backyard.  I felt that it was a safety issue as well as a recreational need for the community.  And so I approached the City Council about creating a recreational facilities task force which they immediately made me chairman of.  And so we met and the long story short the city ended up reinstating its Parks and Recreation Department and it took some time, but as a result of that we got a matching funds grant from Texas Parks and Wildlife.  And not only do we have an absolutely fabulous, functional, well programmed swimming pool, with it is a community park with a skate park, ball field, jogging trails, the whole nine yards.

I personally worked on it and the newspaper, I wrote editorials supporting the city’s procuring that grant and then when it came time to determine what the scope of the swimming pool would be I was very emphatic especially after the research that I had done for that facilities task force, that the pool be done right or not be done at all.  And the community just backed it, I mean we had a sales tax increase that’s for recreational sales tax and it won by a landslide, the election to instate that tax, so I’m very proud of that.  I think that we really pushed that and helped make it a reality.

WC:  How do you balance that with critics who say newspapers, newspapers publishers should remain aloof from civic involvement and who say they should just objectively cover what’s going on and not actively be involved?

MJ:  I’m one of the people who feels that way. In this particular case this was a special committee of the, just appointed by the City Council.  We had no power. All we did was research and recommend. And so I don’t feel that that was a conflict and then I think, and I think publishers or editors have an obligation to promote things that are good for the community.  So once I finished with the facilities task force it was a couple of years before all of this came into fruition.  So I did one job and then from then on my role was to encourage the city to do a project that was very necessary.

WC:  Do you see that as the role of community newspapers?

MJ:  Absolutely; yes.

WC:  How did you come to that philosophy?

MJ:  I guess I’m just such a, I’m a community person.  I believe in my community, I love my community, I am, you know, from my perspective I’m doing things, I try to do things that will ensure the quality of life in Port Aransas, the economic viability of Port Aransas, the health and safety of Port Aransas, that’s what I think we should do.

The influences on me professionally, if I have to select a professional individual, Red Gibson truly impacted me. Before he died, I would always, I was able to identify certain things that I knew came from Red.  When he was dying, I went through his book, the second book that he wrote The Writer’s Friend, and I started realizing, oh, that came from Red too, that came from Red, that came from Red.  So professionally he probably is my strongest influence.

But another very strong influence has been the young people that have worked for us.  I’ve had a couple of interns and a couple of young people pursuing a degree in journalism and those kids have kept me sharper.  I love working with young people.  They make me remember what Red taught me and try to be true to that so that’s they’ve been a great influence.

WC:  So reflect on the time in journalism when you were starting out and today.  Give us a comparison and contrast.

MJ:  Vastly different.  Journalists of today are very spoiled.  They have resources at their fingertips that are instant.  That, you know, we had to thumb through a big dictionary, go to a library, go to an encyclopedia and now you strike a key and you can find out information or things like the List Server at Texas Press.  It’s instant.  It was very labor intensive from the Royal typewriter on.  That’s just technologically newspapers how they’re produced has changed more in the last 20 years than it had the previous 200.  It’s been phenomenal.  My parents could not walk in the newsroom and know what to do.  It’s amazing.

WC:  What about the content?

MJ:  Oh, I think that in order to compete with television and the Internet I think our content might have suffered some because I think we try to do a little bit more fluff and flamboyant to compete with that.  That’s—

WC:  Is that a worry for you?

MJ:  Not really because I think what Martha Jean told us today is really true we are the best news gatherers there are and I think people still really do want the good information.  How we deliver it to them may change but I think that we are the supreme news gatherers, supreme may not be a good word.  We’re the best qualified news gatherers.

WC:  You mentioned the Internet.  Has that been a challenge, a concern or an opportunity?

MJ:  I think it’s probably an opportunity and if we don’t look at it that way we’re gonna be in trouble.  We cannot ignore it.  We’re trying to make it a companion to our print edition.  It is a, ours is a duplication of our print edition and was the HTL format and PDF format.  And we don’t focus on adding breaking news to it the way we should but I think there’s probably, there’s probably gonna be more of a change not so much between a print newspaper and the Internet but between weekly newspapers and daily newspapers.  Weeklies are gonna become more daily as we update Internet editions.  So weekly newspaper people need to learn to think on a daily basis.

WC:  So, go a little bit further with that and talk about your vision for where news distribution is headed.

MJ: I think it’s probably headed for the Internet, but I think the Internet has a lot of complications that are coming up and that’s in terms of regulation because with freedom of the press comes responsibility.  The Internet is almost completely unregulated.  I cannot see that continuing.  I have no idea how it would be regulated because it’s so, it’s so accessible to people who want to post things.  I’m not technologically skilled enough to know how that could change, but I think that that’s where we’re going.  Because people age 30 and younger mostly get their news off the Internet.  And they may be reading newspapers on the Internet, but that’s where they’re going.

WC:  You talked about enjoying contact and work with the interns and the young journalists.  Are journalism schools doing the right thing by these aspiring journalists?

MJ:  I am not sure.  I think that the way changes are happening in daily newspapers journalism schools are gonna have to broaden what they teach journalism students.  Right now they teach print journalism students to be reporters.  Well, they’re gonna need to be able to shoot pictures, shoot video, be able to lay out pages, it’s gonna be more of a weekly environment.  You’re gonna have to have the skills someone needs to work on a weekly newspaper.

WC:  What words of wisdom would you pass along?

MJ:  I don’t know.  I think no matter how easy technology may make this job, the stories and the dramas that occur in life are gonna be just as dramatic however the news is delivered so I think this is definitely a profession that you have to love.  It is a calling, as Martha Jean said.  Don’t get into it for a paycheck.