Four years ago today -- on April 30, 2013 -- I retired
from newspapering after a 45-year-career that began with a post-Navy reporting job
at the New Albany (Ind.) Tribune in 1977 and ended with an 11-year and 8-month
run as editor of The Monitor here in McAllen, Texas. Along the way I worked at
reporting and various editing jobs at nine newspapers ranging from major metro
to mid-sized dailies in seven different states.
This morning, it seems somehow fitting the fourth
anniversary of my retirement comes the day after the White House
Correspondents' Dinner in Washington that was boycotted by America's so-called
president, Donald Trump. It was an event keynoted by speeches by Carl Bernstein
and Bob Woodward the two Washington Post reporters whose Watergate reporting
led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. They were introduced as
two reporters whose work inspired a generation of American Journalists.
I was one of them.
As they spoke, I could not help but reflect on where
American Journalism rose to in the wake of their Watergate work and where it
has descended to today, something that has troubled me seriously since well
before I retired as I watched the newspaper industry withering.
Many of my former newspapering colleagues along with
newspaper industry critics and analysts say the newspapers are dying because
they are an outmoded medium that readers are abandoning. I, however, have long
disagreed with that assessment, contending instead that newspapers aren't
dying, they are committing suicide and continue to lose readership not because
readers are abandoning them but rather because they have abandoned readers.
Proof of my theory is quite evident with this morning's
edition of the final newspaper that I had been editor of, The Monitor.
As editor, I always felt that the Sunday edition -- the
highest circulation paper of the week -- should be a showcase with a front page
featuring at the very least one well-planned, primary story package that was
investigative or interpretive or analytical in nature and always an in-depth
piece with photos or illustration or graphics and always of real and serious
importance to and impact upon readers. It was a philosophy my staff always shared
and executed throughout my tenure as editor even as the company that owned the
paper -- Freedom Communications -- slipped into bankruptcy and was taken over
by investment bankers interested only in profits who gutted our budget and
forced me to reduce staff by nearly half -- fortunately, mainly through
attrition rather than any large layoffs. In the end, the paper was sold --
along with Freedom's other Texas papers -- to its current owners.
Today, only seven members of the news staff that was at
the paper when I departed remain and only one staffer remains who was there
when I arrived for my first day at the Monitor on August 27, 2001. At its peak
that news staff numbered 53 people, many of whom -- because of their talent and
hard and outstanding work at The Monitor -- have gone on to bigger and better
things at some of the nation's top major metro dailies or highly respected, and
REAL online news sites and at least one having a piece of two separate Pulitzer
Prizes.
Some my former staffers, who have now no longer with The
Monitor, told me a couple of months after my departure that after they
mentioned to my successor that something wasn't being handled the way it would
have been while I was editor, he told them (quite correctly) that "this
isn't Steve Fagan's paper anymore."
And that was quite evident in today's fourth anniversary
of my retiring from newspapering edition of The Monitor.
The main story package was not an in-depth investigative,
interpretive or analytical piece, but rather at five-paragraph, five-inch-long,
"Staff Report" story revealing that a float normally featured in the
McAllen Christmas Parade had been carted up to San Antonio for the 2017 Fiesta
Flambeau Parade. The story -- which read pretty much like a press release --
was accompanied by three really bad (and badly reproduced) handout photos
provided "courtesy of McAllen Parks & Recreation" department. In
Steve Fagan's Monitor, this would have been a single photo and cutline probably
inside the Valley & State section, but certainly NOT on the main package on
Page 1.
One of the other three Page 1 stories -- also bylined as
a "staff report" -- announced that former San Antonio Spurs forward
Robert Horry would be the keynote speaker at the 2017 All-Valley Sports Awards
Banquet, an even sponsored by The Monitor and its parent company AIM Texas
Media, which also owns the Brownsville Herald, El Nuevo Heraldo, the Valley
Morning Star in Harlingen and the weekly Mid-Valley Town Crier.
A third story was a piece headlined "Island LGBT
celebration wraps up with parade today." This story had some promise particularly if it had dealt,
at least somewhat, with the issue of LGBT discrimination in Texas -- which has
long been pretty rampant -- and where it stands as we rapidly descend into
becoming Donald Trump's bigoted America. It could have featured, maybe, some
interviews with actual participants in the event and their feelings on where
things are headed with LGBT rights, etc. It, however, didn't and ended up
reading more like a South Padre Island Chamber of Commerce press release.
The last story on the page, headlined "Valley
businesses joining May 1 strike," had the most potential. In fact, in
terms of its topic, it could have been the main story package for the Sunday
paper. But it fell woefully short because, apparently, no one recognized its potential
for being something better than it was or, if they did recognize that
potentially, they simply didn't care enough to push to develop it. Hispanic
organizations across the United States are calling for a nationwide "Day
Without Immigrants" (Una dia Sin Immigrantes) strike to call attention to
the importance of immigrants in the United States' society and economy and to
decry the immigration policies and attitudes of Donald Trump, his
administration and the Republican controlled Congress. This could have been a
meaningful, Valley wide story that took a serious look at immigrants and the
roles in America. This area, after all, is something like 90+ percent Hispanic
in population and tens of thousands of people here are immigrants both legal
and undocumented and hundreds of thousands are descendant of immigrants. Here,
a strike by a significant number of immigrants and their supporters who grind
everything to a complete standstill. This story could have explored how many area
businesses are going to support their employees' participation in the strike
and how local government officials, chambers of commerce, schools, the University
of Texas Rio Grande Valley, South Texas College, etc. view the strike. The
story could have included interviews with workers, students, etc. who are
planning to participate in the strike and what message they are hoping it will
send and what good they think it might actually accomplish. It could have been
a very strong Sunday package including photos of the anticipated participants,
perhaps with strike placards they are making or have already prepared. But to
have carried that off would have required that someone be awake at the switch,
which didn't happen. The story instead was simply coverage of a press
conference in which two businesses said they are supporting their workers who
might want to participate in the strike -- a disappointing piece full of
unrealized potential.
Essentially, the Sunday edition of The Monitor, published
on the fourth anniversary of my retirement from newspapering had a front page
that gave readers absolutely no reason to pick it up off the lawn and certainly
no reason to buy a single copy newspaper off a rack. And a such is
unfortunately way too representative of what's wrong with too many newspapers
today.
Yep, "it's not Steve Fagan's paper anymore."
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