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.
Kathie Greer. a member of the G-N community board, nominated me to join the panel in June. A few weeks later, I got a call asking me if I would be interested, and I said yes. A meeting would be organized in late July, and I would get another call with the particulars. Still waiting.
John, The Amarillo Daily Disappointment is the perfect example of wasted newsprint. If you want a story in the “paper” send them a news release. Most of the photos they use will have any form of identity of who the subject is.
If there is a journalism tried and true rule, The Disappointment doesn’t know about it. So sad.
I cannot quite get past the idea that a place where I spent so many years and had so much fun doing what I believe I was called to do has become this shadow of its former shelf.