Category Archives: media news

media news

Calling all comments!

2 Comments

As much as I enjoy blogging and foisting my world view on those who take the time to read my musings, I now want to express an annoying frustration with High Plains Blogger.

It is the lack of varied responses. My blog draws responses from a narrowly defined audience, as best I can tell.

Do not get me wrong. I appreciate those who do take the time to comment on my offerings. They read them on a few social media platforms I use to distribute these posts. I also am acutely aware that High Plains Blogger is being read by a worldwide audience. Readers from dozens of countries on every continent inhabited by human beings have read these offerings.

More to the point. I am astounded at how so few of them take the time to comment on the “reply” block on the bottom of my blog posts published on Word Press. One guy is a regular commenter. He’s a critic of this blog. I generally don’t engage in debate with him because there’s little point in individuals talking past each other. He won’t change my mind and I won’t change his mind.

Another gentleman chimes in on occasion, often to respond to the critic. I hear from maybe two or three other commenters who take the time to reply infrequently to my Word Press posts.

I guess I am using this post to call for greater, more varied response to my offerings.

Or … could it be that I am boring the readers of this blog? Gosh. I hope that’s not the case.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep slogging on with a word of thanks to those who take the time to read these messages. If you have a response to share, then by all means speak up.

Oh, and I fully expect the critic I mentioned earlier to offer his usual brand of venom.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

media news

Jury makes example of hater

A Texas jury has done the right thing by assessing a hefty punitive damage award against one of the nation’s most noted and infamous purveyors of hate and outright falsehoods.

Alex Jones will have to pay the families of children slaughtered in the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre $44.5 million. The jury awarded that amount in assessing the punitive damages that Jones must shell out.

Of course, Jones claims to be impoverished.

Jones already was found guilty of defamation by declaring that the massacre of those kids in Newtown, Conn., was fake, that it never happened, that it was a staged event designed to gin up opposition to the gun owners’ rights lobby.

This individual is a disgrace to the human race. The jury decided, moreover, to make him pay for the damage he did to the loved ones of those precious children and the educators who sought to protect them against the madman.

What might be the fallout from this award? It is my sincere hope that this jury’s decision to hammer a known hate monger might deter someone else out there who is inclined to spew the kind of filth that comes from the mouth of Alex Jones.

I know all about the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. Gasbags such as Jones use the U.S. Constitution as their first and last line of defense against who seek to muzzle them. The truth, though, is that I don’t want them necessarily silenced simply because they espouse views I find reprehensible. I believe it is important to keep such idiots in plain sight where we all can keep our eyes on them.

However, the jury ruled that Alex Jones took several giant steps too far by defaming the families of innocent victims.

Now he has been ordered to pay for the garbage he has blathered and the damage he has inflicted.

Good!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

media news

Media relevance vanishes

3 Comments

A quick return to a community where my wife and I lived for nearly half of our married life together has produced a series of bittersweet memories.

We came back to Amarillo, Texas, for a quick visit with our son and to acquaint our new Ford pickup with our new travel trailer. We didn’t get out too much to mingle with friends, but we see did a number of them at a Rotary Club luncheon.

I must have heard a dozen references to the job I used to do in Amarillo, which was to edit the opinion pages of a once-vibrant newspaper, the Amarillo Globe-News.

That paper, or what’s left of it, has become a non-presence in the community that once relied on it to tell the Texas Panhandle story, the good and the bad, the joys and the sorrows.

“Man, we sure miss you,” came one greeting. “Why don’t you move back?” another friend said. “I once read the newspaper to know about the community, but I can’t find anything in it that tells me what I want or need to know,” yet another friend said.

Hey, I don’t say this to shore up my own ego. I want to relate to you what I sense is missing in a city of 200,000 residents that once turned to its newspaper of record to report on what is happening around the corner, or at city hall, or at the county courthouse.

I went shopping for a copy of the Globe-News. I couldn’t find one anywhere on sale. Surely, they still peddle the newspaper … somewhere! Don’t they?

It’s always good to see good friends and to catch on their lives. The good feelings are diluted by the bitter feeling that boils up when I realize that such a big part of my professional life no longer matters to the people I enjoyed serving.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

media news

I saw ‘woke’ before I ever heard the word

Hey, something just occurred to me that I want to share with this post. It made me chuckle when the thought entered my pointed head.

You’ve heard the term “woke,” right. I take it to be a sort of put-down on those with progressive/liberal leanings. Here’s a quick story that I want to share.

I was working at the Amarillo Globe-News in the early 2000s when the publisher decided to move our opinion page operation into the newsroom; it had been next to the publisher’s office in an adjacent building.

So, we made the move. My two staffers and I set up shop in a corner of the AGN newsroom. I dug into my box of mementos and found a bumper sticker that one of my sons’ high school teachers had given him … to give to me! It said: I don’t believe the liberal media.

Maybe you’ve seen stickers like it. I taped it to a window on my new office.

It didn’t take 24 hours for a colleague at the newspaper to tell me how she was “offended” by it and that others in the newsroom were offended, too. She told me to take it down or else she would take it up with the management of the newspaper.

Like the dumbass I was in the moment, I reacted two ways. My jaw dropped because I couldn’t believe I was hearing such nonsense. I told my colleague that the sign is a “joke on me. It is intended as a barb that someone was leveling at me because of my political leanings.” She wasn’t convinced.

Well, I took the sign down. I put it away. I kept it hidden from view during the time we were stationed in the AGN newsroom. We didn’t want to offend anyone … you know?

Talk about an “I wish I woulda said this” moment. I should have dared her to take it up with human resources, or even the publisher. I should have shooed her away and told her to take it up with the executive editor at the time. But … I didn’t.

Now I understand better what “woke” means. It reared its ugliness in front of me before I knew what “woke” meant.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

media news

Milestone ahead!

2 Comments

I am approaching a milestone date and I want to forewarn you of the event. I have written about it before, starting with some bitter feelings toward my former employer and the circumstances leading up to my departure from a career that brought me great joy, a bit of success and a whole lot of fun.

It was Aug. 30, 2012 when I got called into the office of a new hire at the Amarillo Globe-News. The newly installed “vice president for audience” told me, “There is no easy way to say this, but we have decided to offer your job to someone else, and he accepted.”

Hmm. I knew who the “someone else” was, but I asked if it was him. My colleague said yes.

We exchanged a few words, I rose from my chair, went to my office, called my wife and said, “I’m out.” I called my sons to tell them the same thing. I collected my thoughts and went home, but not before visiting with the publisher of the newspaper on my way to the car. We had a tense conversation. He asked me to come back the next day to “think about” my next move. I didn’t need to think about it. I quit.

I came back the next morning, cleared out my office … and was gone.

The publisher had implemented a strategy that sought to reorganize the newsroom at the AGN. He told us all our job descriptions had been rewritten. We could apply for any job we wanted. I chose to seek the one I had done there for nearly 18 years. He had something — and someone — else in mind for me and my AGN career. So, he acted.

The years since my departure from full-time print journalism have been a joyous ride. Some of it has been a bit uncertain. However, I have not only survived, I consider myself fortunate to have been spared the misery that has befallen daily newspapers in the decade since and the unique misery that afflicted the Texas Panhandle’s premier newspaper.

This blog has been a lifesaver for me. I get to keep pontificating about issues of the day. As I have told you already, I have a couple of fun freelance gigs that keep me busy near the North Texas home my wife and I purchased a few years ago.

As they say, time flies when you’re having fun. Thus, it has been a rapid 10 years since my life changed.

***

A couple of quick post-scripts …

The VP for audience and I have become friends and we stay in touch. He moved on not long after he gave me the news I didn’t want to hear. I reached out to him not long ago to reconcile and to inform him I harbored no hard feelings toward him.

The publisher? He “stepped down” from his post a while ago after the paper was purchased by another company. He and I never forged any kind of relationship during the years we worked together. We don’t speak now. That’s fine with me, too.

Life is so good.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, media news

Blogging keeps me relevant

Blogging has produced many joys in my post-full-time-newspaper world.

One of them is that it allows me to keep doing what I did with modest success for nearly 37 years: offering opinions on issues of the day.

A corollary to that joy is the notion that it also allows me to cling just a bit to a career that gave me great satisfaction and it perhaps will allow young people coming of age in this era a chance to understand and perhaps even appreciate the craft I pursued.

Whether these young people will be reading blogs or writing them remains to be seen, of course. I hope they do both. I want to remain relevant, even in some small way, to how they search for news and information and, yes, even opinion on issues of importance.

To be crystal clear, I am not yet out of the newswriting game. My full-time career ended just a month short of a decade ago; wow, it seems like just yesterday when my boss told me my services would no longer be sought at what once was the leading newspaper in the Texas Panhandle and one of the leading media outlets in West Texas.

I walked away from that post on the spot and haven’t looked back — too often in the years since.

I took up blogging along with a few part-time, temporary gigs along the way. I have managed to stay fresh and alert writing blogs for Panhandle PBS, for KFDA NewsChannel 10 in Amarillo and now for KETR-FM radio at Texas A&M-Commerce and for the Farmersville Times near where my wife and I landed in late 2018.

I even had a month-long stint as an editorial writer for the Dallas Morning News! That gig ended at the end of 2021, but at least I can say I wrote for a major metropolitan daily newspaper … if only for a flash in time!

The one constant in all of that has been High Plains Blogger. I decided to keep the name even though I no longer reside on the High Plains of Texas. Hey, it developed a brand … you know? Why mess with it?

So, with that I will keep on blogging. My work might not always remind others of the once-glorious craft I pursued, it surely keeps me energized enough to keep going for as long as I am able.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

media news

Staying away from initialized responses

I want to say a few words about a trend that became prevalent with the advent of social media and about how — as a general rule — I choose to communicate like a semi-normal human being rather than relying on this social media trend.

The trend is the use of initialized phrases. You know what I mean: LOL, SMH, LMAO, BTW, ICYMI … whatever. I can’t remember ’em all.

What’s more, I am not at all nuts about other abbreviated word forms that appear on my Twitter text messages: plz and ur come to mind immediately.

I prefer to write in complete sentences, using actual words with real definitions that one can find in a standard desk dictionary.

Why mention this at all? I guess it’s because I fear we are bastardizing our language, turning this complex language called English into something not entirely recognizable.

It was bad enough that my journalism career contributed to the destruction of my penmanship skills. My fellow journalists out there know of which I speak. I was forced over many years to write as rapidly as I could to be sure I can publish the quotes accurately from the individuals who were doing the speaking.

The result was a gradual decline in penmanship … for which I received good grades when I was in elementary school. I once was proud of my handwriting. No more, man.

Social media have taken that destruction to another level.

I am somewhat active on social media. I use email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn mostly. I just want to resist the urge to type those silly initialized references to phrases I normally would write or speak, although I do understand the reason for their existence in the first place: Twitter allows only a few characters to generate a message, so these are space-savers.

Oh, this modern method of communicating. It drives me nuts.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

media news

The joy returns

Community journalism is where it’s at, man.

How do I know that? Because I am involved in it at its most basic level. You see, I once was a retired journalist. Not at the moment. I remain in what I prefer to call “semi-retired” mode.

But my task these days is to report on city council matters, on school board matters and to write occasional features in a lovely North Texas community just a few miles east of where I live with my wife and Toby the Puppy.

Farmersville is home to about 5,000 individuals. It’s a growing community with plenty of issues relating to rapid growth. Streets need repairing. The city is embarking on a new fiber-powered Internet system. It has battled in recent years with a wastewater treatment plant. It is trying to find an individual to manage its Main Street program.

The community relies on the newspaper for which I write on a freelance basis. The Farmersville Times publishes once each week. It contains stories from yours truly and others who write for the group that owns the Times, C&S Media, based out of nearby Wylie.

I want to toot the horn of community journalism because it continues to thrive even though what the conservative talking heads refer to as “mainstream media” continue to struggle.

They struggle because of a perception – and I believe it is misplaced – that major media outlets no longer just “report the news.” They lace their reporting, the critics assert, with their own bias. I believe the bias lies in the minds of the consumer, not the messenger … but that’s another issue for another day.

I just want to declare that the joy has returned to the calling I received many decades ago to become a reporter. I so very much enjoy covering these city council, school board and feature-article issues because they deal with matters that affect citizens most directly.

It is my job – which I perform on a freelance basis – to report to the community about the decisions their elected representatives make on their behalf.

When I started this gig a couple of years ago, I came out of retirement from a career in which I was an advocate for opinion pages of two medium-sized Texas newspapers: one was in Amarillo, and one was in Beaumont. However, like virtually all print journalists, I got my start covering city councils and school boards and writing feature articles.

I learned something about myself when I started this new job: I didn’t forget what I had learned all those years ago.

I am having a lot of fun.

Johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

 

media news

Saddened by newspaper images

The images I keep seeing of the place where I spent the longest stint of my newspaper career keep tugging at my heart.

The Amarillo (Texas) Globe-News buildings have been vacant for some time. What’s left of the newspaper staff moved into a suite of offices in a downtown bank tower. Someone reportedly has purchased the G-N site, which will become a place that manufactures lubricants.

The images just tear my guts out.

The press room still has paper in the presses. I saw one picture of encyclopedias piled up. Another one had bound volumes of old editions. The newsroom looks like the staff fled the building in haste, leaving paper and assorted trash strewn across the floor.

I would pay real American money to know what the G-N’s final days were like as the company that purchased it from the owners for whom I worked got ready to vacate the site.

Next month marks a decade since I walked off my job after nearly 18 years as an editor of the opinion pages. I don’t miss it these days. I got over the pain — and the embarrassment — associated with my sudden departure from a career I pursued with great joy for nearly 37 years.

To be candid, seeing the images of what is left of the Globe-News only heightens my relief and happiness at being away when the end arrived.

Life goes on.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

media news

Trump legacy leaves scars

No matter what happens to Donald J. Trump and his political future, the individual’s legacy is going to leave lasting scars and wounds across the landscape.

The scars remain in the millions of destroyed friendships his presence on the political scene has inflicted.

I know of what I speak. I have lost some friends over the past five years because of disagreements over Trump’s “contributions” to American life. I blame Trump for that.

It sickens me terribly to admit these relationships have been torn asunder because of disagreements over policy. Except that Trump brings out the worst in many of us. I count myself as a casualty.

Even during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, I maintained friendships through serious disagreements about President Nixon’s role in that hideous crisis. Of course, there was no such thing as “social media” in those days. We relied on TV and radio and printed media in the form of newspapers and magazines. These days, the communication is instantaneous, and it allows those of us to say things without giving our remarks a first– let alone a second — thought before speaking out.

Trump has mastered the manipulation of social media to the extent that he knows the impact he has on people’s relationships.

What troubles me the most is that some of these severed relationships — not many, mind you, but a few of them — involve people with whom I have been friends. Others, though, have involved individuals with whom I have casual contact, or who I have known only through social media. If they decide they dislike my world view and my loathing of Trump, they’re free to go their own way. I have done the same thing.

Many relationships have remained intact, largely because we don’t discuss politics when we’re in each other’s presence.

It’s the actual friendships lost that I mourn.

For that I will not forgive the source of that loss.

Damn you, Donald Trump!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com