This bit of news from the Texas Panhandle hit me like a punch in the gut. It comes from the company that owns the newspaper where my daily journalism career came to a screeching halt nearly a decade ago.
The Amarillo Globe-News is ending its daily page of opinion. It will run that form of community journalism one day each week: Sunday only, man! I want to emphasize the term “community journalism” for a reason you’ll notice in just a moment as you finish reading this post.
The newspaper announced it today. The statement includes this item: This comes as we make a more concerted effort to re-invest in local journalism, with the recent addition of a reporter dedicated to covering breaking news and trends along with agriculture and West Texas environmental issues.
It wants to “re-invest in local journalism.” What that statement tells me is that dodo birds who run the newspaper place little “local journalism” value one editorials. That is a terrible shame.
You see, there once was a time when communities relied on opinion pages to lead them, to provide some form of wisdom, to offer talking points, if not outright ideas for solving community issues.
Those days appear to have been cast aside.
Read the entire statement here: Amarillo Globe-News shifts to Sunday-only opinion section, re-invests in local news – Amarillo Globe-News (newsmemory.com)
I wrote opinion pieces and edited opinion pages for the bulk of my 30-plus-year career in daily journalism. That is why this news hurts, why it cuts me to the quick.
You can spare me the lecture about how “this is the national trend” and that “the Internet has changed everything.” Man, I know all that.
There once was a time, not many years before I got reorganized out of my job as opinion page editor at the Globe-News, when I made a concerted effort to limit all of our editorial commentary to local and state affairs. That was our contribution to furthering the cause of community journalism to a region that still sought leadership from the newspaper.
It now appears that people who did that job for the communities they served — as I did with great joy and commitment — have been placed on an endangered species list.
Wow!