Tag Archives: AGN Media

local news

AMM has gone MIA

AMM

The thought occurred to me a bit earlier today.

Do you remember the Amarillo Millennial Movement? It was formed sometime this past year to speak for those young Amarillo residents who sought to create a more livable environment and to promote downtown revival as a reason to retain younger residents.

It had a young, energetic spokeswoman whose energy earned her special recognition by the Amarillo Globe-News as a “Headliner” winner for the year. Her efforts on behalf of the multipurpose event venue planned for downtown and the success of the citywide referendum that decided the fate of the MPEV won her lots of pats on the back and high-fives.

Meghan Riddlespurger, though, has moved on. She’s now living in Fort Worth. I trust — and hope — she’s doing well in Cowtown.

But this “movement” …

What’s become of it?

I admit I don’t get out as much as I did back when I was working full-time for a living. My media job required me to keep ears and eyes open. Now that I’m transitioning — albeit quite slowly — into full-time retirement mode my ears and eyes aren’t as wide open as they used to be.

AMM was a great idea. Its young energizer spoke eloquently for those things in which she believed. Riddlespurger managed to anger some of her then-fellow Amarillo residents. However, most folks with a lot on their minds and who are unafraid to speak on behalf of their own ideas do tend to tick others off. So, I don’t hold that against the young woman.

I’m curious about the status of this so-called “movement” she founded.

Aren’t there others who can pick up the banner? If so, they’ve been verrrry, verrrry quiet.

I don’t believe the need to keep young Amarillo residents involved and engaged in the city’s future has lessened any over the past year.

Or has it?

https://highplainsblogger.com/2016/04/movement-founder-makes-her-exit/

 

legal news, local news, medical news

‘Cheering’ abortion? Please

Abortion law

The reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that struck down a Texas law regarding abortion has been, shall we say, divided quite sharply.

The court ruled 5 to 3 to overturn a law that justices said gets in the way of a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. It set strict rules for physicians requiring admitting privileges to hospitals and required women to travel great distances to obtain an abortion.

Who, though, is “cheering” the idea of women being able to obtain this procedure? Were the folks “cheering” outside the Supreme Court building exulting in the prospect of abortions becoming easier? Were they cheering the deaths of the unborn? No.

I believe they were “cheering” the notion that a majority of justices understand that the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 that made abortion legal was made under the “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

Some in the media, though, see it differently.

Take the editorial that appeared today in my local newspaper, the Amarillo Globe-News.

The newspaper opined:

“People were celebrating the ruling. People were celebrating abortion — which no matter what form of nonsensical political correctness you apply — is the killing of unborn children.

“Odd. And disturbing.”

Celebrating abortion? That draws an unfair caricature of those who believe a woman’s right to make these critical decisions supersedes legislation that prevents her from doing so.

I understand fully the huge divide that separates Americans of good will on both sides of this debate.

To suggest — as many who oppose the court’s ruling have done — that Americans are celebrating the act of abortion only deepens that divide.

We all understand the intense anguish that accompanies a woman’s decision on this matter. The court simply has reinforced the woman’s right to make that call.

national news, political news, Uncategorized

So much grist on which to comment this election year

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trump

I ran into a former colleague of mine at the grocery store in southwest Amarillo this afternoon.

We exchanged pleasantries, talked a little about how he’s doing at the Amarillo Globe-News, where I toiled along with him for a number of years; he offered me a glimpse of the pressure he’s feeling in this new era of daily print journalism, as he’s wearing multiple hats these days.

My friend then paid me what I took as a compliment when he said, “I enjoy reading your blog … especially the stuff you’re writing about the election.”

Ah, yes. I took a breath. “God bless Donald Trump,” I told him. “He’s giving me so much material.”

Indeed, it never seems to end with Trump as he marches toward the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.

I told my friend that my confidence in an early prediction I made about a Hillary Clinton landslide was shaken a bit as Trump closed in on the magic number of delegates he needed to secure the GOP nomination. He seemed to pick up some momentum.

However, as I mentioned to my young friend, that confidence is being restored a bit by the unrest and unease being expressed by Republicans about the man they are about to nominate. Their angst is brought forward by the manner in which Trump has responded to recent crises and the continuing barrage of insults and innuendo he’s leveling at his critics.

Just so you know, I pay hardly zero attention to what the Democrats are saying about the prospect of running against Trump. I’ll just remind my Democratic friends out there what the Democratic moguls were saying back in 1980 when that cowboy former California governor/movie actor, Ronald Reagan, decided to run for president. Why, they couldn’t wait to run against The Gipper.

Bring him on! they crowed. We’ll make mincemeat of him.

It didn’t work out too well for President Carter, as he won a grand total of six states and lost by 10 percentage points in a serious landslide.

Republicans that year were brimming with confidence. This year it’s a different story, with Trump set to mount his steed while carrying the GOP banner into battle against Clinton and the Democrats.

My trouble with this blog that I write is that I’m having trouble focusing on things other than the myriad negatives that Trump is bringing to this campaign. I feel almost as though I need an intervention.

I’m going to try to do a better job from this point forward in finding some positive policy topics on which to comment. I can project with decent certainty that Trump won’t provide them.

I’ll have to look elsewhere.

When I find those topics, you’ll be the first to know.

local news

Downtown progress promotes optimism

Pollyanna or pragmatist?

I’ve wrestled a little bit with those conflicting notions for some time as I ponder the fate of downtown Amarillo.

I have used this blog as a tool to support efforts to revive the city’s downtown business/entertainment district. Yes, there have been some rough patches on that journey and there might be some more on the road ahead.

Through it all — and into the future — I’m going to continue to speak well of the efforts I’ve seen bear fruit already throughout Amarillo’s business district. Yes, I intend to look critically at decisions that might deter further harvesting of that fruit.

Some of my social media friends say they applaud my “optimism,” but keep raising doubts about the motives of the principal players involved.

They refer to allegations that real estate developers over-valued an abandoned downtown building that’s soon to become an urban campus for West Texas A&M University. Some keep bringing back the sour memory of that general development firm — the infamous Wallace Bajjali, which used to be headquartered in the Houston area.

I acknowledge being snookered by the snake oil peddled by David Wallace, one of the principal partners in that firm. He came to the Amarillo Globe-News and made an impassioned pitch that he and his partner, Costa Bajjali, were in business to improve communities. Wallace said something at the time that stuck with me: It was that he didn’t build a successful company by betraying the communities he served.

Eventually, WB went south. The one-time best friends split in a bitter dispute. The company vaporized. Another city that had invested heavily in the firm, Joplin, Mo., was left in the lurch. Amarillo, though, came out of that nastiness in relatively good shape.

The city has continued its march forward — without Wallace Bajjali.

Through it all, I’ve sought to lend support through this blog.

Am I a Pollyanna? I don’t believe so. But I am seeing some progress here that is beginning to resemble — on a smaller scale, of course — what I witnessed in my hometown of Portland, Ore.

Portland has developed an urban oasis in its downtown district. It didn’t happen overnight. It did occur, though, thanks to some vision by a young mayor who didn’t want the city to expand its highway network.

In the early 1970s, the mayor — Neil Goldschmidt — fought against construction of a freeway through the southeast portion of the city. He said the city instead should invest in public transportation aimed at building the downtown district.

The freeway wasn’t built. The city instead invested in its mass transit system into an urban model for other cities to emulate. It’s downtown district thrived.

I also should point out that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Portland’s entrenched political establishment was as risk-averse as many are here in Amarillo. That aversion to risk, though, changed over time as the city began to transform itself.

Does this kind of effort translate precisely to what’s happening in Amarillo? No. Our city’s evolution has taken another form, although it, too, is a process that hasn’t been tried until now.

Amarillo has sought to focus its efforts on reviving the downtown district. It created some political infrastructure to make it happen. It formed Downtown Amarillo Inc. The city’s economic development corporation has been aggressive in promoting the downtown district. The city created a tax increment reinvestment zone that sets aside tax money earned from property value appreciation within that zone.

It created a strategic action plan. It proposed construction of a multipurpose event venue — aka “a ballpark” — downtown. The MPEV project has yet to begin. But it should. It must.

Private investors plunked down some serious dough to build a convention hotel, on which construction is now well underway — as is a parking garage.

Oh, and as luck would have it, Xcel Energy decided to vacate the Chase Tower and move into a shiny new office complex that’s also going up at this very moment.

Change is happening downtown and as I’ve believed for as long as I’ve lived here — more than 21 years — the entire city will flourish once its downtown starts to flourish.

I’m seeing evidence of it now.

Am I a Pollyanna for wishing nothing but the best for the city where we live? Well, I’m keeping my eyes wide open. The fiasco that developed with David Wallace’s empty promise has taught many of us a stern lesson.

I do, though, remain an unapologetic optimist as Amarillo’s core continues to strengthen and grow.

local news, media news, national news, political news

Good luck, editorialists, in making your decision

1 Comment

newspaper

Newspaper endorsements don’t matter as much as they have historically.

People get their news and commentary from myriad sources. They turn less and less to newspaper editorial pages for guidance, counsel, wisdom and thoughtful commentary.

This election year is going to give those who write editorial commentary for a living a special challenge.

Who of the two major-party presidential candidates will get their endorsement? Will either of them get an endorsement? Will newspaper editorial boards throw up their collective hands and ask, “What in the hell is the point?”

I did that kind of work for most of my 37 years in daily print journalism.

I wrote editorials for a small daily suburban newspaper in Oregon City, Ore., from 1979 until 1984; I did the same thing as editorial writer and later editor of the editorial page for the Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise; then I became editorial page editor of the Amarillo (Texas) Globe-News in 1995, a job I held until August 2012.

The choices this year appear — in the minds of many journalists — to be pretty grim. Dismal. Miserable. Who gets the paper’s nod — Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton or Republican Donald J. Trump?

Now it’s time for an admission: On several occasions during my three-plus decades in daily journalism, I wrote editorial endorsements with which I disagreed. I don’t have that burden to bear these days.

In 1980, knowing my publisher could not endorse President Carter for re-election, I drafted an editorial endorsing independent candidate John B. Anderson. The publisher, in Oregon City, looked at it, brought the draft out to me and said, “No can do.” We endorsed Ronald Reagan for president; yes, I swallowed hard and wrote it.

I worked for Republican-leaning newspaper publishers throughout my career. Every four years I would huddle with the publisher and go through the motions of arguing my case for the candidate of my choosing … only to be told that “we” are going to endorse the other guy.

My final stop, of course, was in Amarillo, where I worked for a corporate ownership that is fervently Republican. Yes, through several presidential election cycles, the discussion of presidential endorsements was brief and quite, shall we say, “frank.”

Bob Dole got our nod in 1996, George W. Bush got it in 2000 and 2004, John McCain earned it in 2008. I was tasked with overseeing the publication of all of them. I cannot remember which of those I actually wrote.

The task facing editorialists this year will be daunting. I’m glad it’s their call and no longer mine.

I’ll be waiting with bated breath to see how my former employer comes down in this year’s race. Clinton has zero chance of being endorsed by a newspaper owned by Morris Communications Corp. I also doubt they’ll go with the Libertarian ticket led by former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson.

Trump is the last man standing. If the Globe-News takes the plunge, I’ll await with interest how it will set aside all the ridiculous assertions, lies, the candidate’s utter lack of knowledge of anything and the absence of any grounding principles.

Take my word for it, the corporate bosses are a conservative bunch and I will be interested to see how — or if — they set aside those principles just to recommend someone simply because he pledges to “build a wall” and “make America great again.”

Could I write that one? A friend and former colleague of mine was fond of saying, “If you take The Man’s money, you play by The Man’s rules.” Thus, I was able to justify setting aside my own personal taste and philosophy to do The Man’s bidding.

This time? I couldn’t.

I’d walk out before having to write anything that recommends Trump’s election as president.

Good luck, my former colleagues, as you deliberate over this one.

business news, local news, State news

Severance pay for state employees?

Golden-Parachutes

No doubt you’ve heard it said that “we ought to run government like a business.”

Most of the time, that’s merely a cliché that doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

Then again, you get an exception to the rule. Take the case of state agencies paying what amounts to “severance pay” to public employees who resign their public jobs.

As the Texas Tribune reports, the practice in Texas is likely to vanish during the next legislative session … as it should.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/05/27/analysis-expense-texas-taxpayers-carries-no-explan/

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office has paid such severance to several former staffers. Paxton doesn’t call it “severance.” He calls it “emergency leave” pay.

What the bleep is the difference?

This is outrageous. It ought to stop. It’s a waste of valuable public money that the state keeps harping about that it doesn’t have.

I happen to know a bit about how private business handles these issues. It’s a whole lot less generous — in a case with which I am intimately familiar — than it is in the public sector.

In August 2012 I received some shattering news from a hired gun brought in to manage the “reorganization” of the newspaper where I was working at the time. We were told we could apply for any job we wanted. I chose to apply for the job I’d been doing at the Amarillo Globe-News for nearly 18 years; I thought I was doing a pretty good job.

Not long after being interviewed twice by the management team at the newspaper, the hired gun called me into his office and said:  “There’s no easy way to say this, but we’ve decided to give your job to someone else.” The “someone else” also had applied for the same position, so my employer went with him. I was out.

I chose to resign on the spot rather than apply for another position and face the remote possibility of getting hired for that. I was qualified to do one thing at the newspaper, but I didn’t do it well enough to suit my employer.

During what amounted to an exit interview the next morning with my soon-to-be former boss, I asked about a severance. He all but laughed in my face.

I walked out.

That’s how it’s done in private business. You resign, you don’t get a severance, man. Ross Ramsey, writing for the Texas Tribune, says private businesses do offer such severance deals, but they come with a price. Ramsey writes:

“In the business world, departing employees are sometimes given a golden parachute in exchange for their silence — a ‘thanks for all you’ve done’ along with a ‘keep your trap shut about what happened here.’” I didn’t get that, so I’m free to blab.

But, when someone leaves a government job in Texas, they qualify for “severance” or “emergency leave.”

Give me a break.

End the practice … as soon as possible.

local news, media news

This is how you trick ’em

beilue_13

My pal Jon Mark Beilue has established an April Fool’s Day tradition at the Amarillo Globe-News, where I worked for 17-plus years.

This man is a master of putting one over on readers.

He does it intentionally once each year. He did so again today with this masterpiece about a proposed location for the Barack H. Obama Presidential Library.

He once spun a yarn about film star/heartthrob Matthew McConaughey moving to Amarillo; he once told a tall tale about the late Stanley Marsh 3 establishing an art museum inside an abandoned grocery store building next to Interstate 40. There have been others; those are two of my personal favorites.

I’ll just add this point before asking you to enjoy it as I have done already today.

The beauty of this kind of writing, which Jon Mark does better than anyone else I know, is that it tempts you to suspend your disbelief when you read it. You actually start to believe it could happen that, somehow, it’s not a prank.

Well, obviously it is.

Most of us in this part of the Texas surely are glad that it’s all a joke.

Others of us, well, might think differently.

Still, this is brilliant.

Enjoy.

local news, media news, political news

Feeling unchained these days

WorkingMediaImage

I had a marvelous opportunity this evening to speak to some nice folks about the state of play in media, politics, and the world in general.

The Potter/Randall Democratic Club asked me to offer some observations about this and that.

They figured I needed something to do now that I’ve been kinda/sorta retired for more than three years. A number of the folks there are acquaintances of mine. A couple of them were contributors to the Amarillo Globe-News opinion pages over the years, writing letters and sending in guest columns for my consideration.

I truly enjoyed meeting new folks and getting reacquainted with old friends and sharing some thoughts about the condition of our political and public policy world.

It occurred to me as I began my remarks that one of the true joys about being able to speak for myself is that I no longer represent someone or something else. I no longer am on a media outlet’s payroll, which enables me to speak my mind and to offer thoughts on this blog.

Sure, I do write for a couple of broadcast outlets these days; I write part time as a freelancer for KFDA NewsChannel 10 and Panhandle PBS, which means that I am not counted as being employed by them.

It occurred to me as I began my remarks that I am officially unfettered, untethered, unencumbered, unleashed, unbound, unrestricted, uninhibited … well, you get the idea. I get to speak my mind — whether I’m standing at a podium or offering comments through this blog.

Sure, my career as a full-time print journalist ended unhappily for me back in August 2012. I wasn’t entirely sure at the very moment I realized my career had ended whether I could bounce back. I did manage to pick myself up; I got off the deck and along the way I discovered a side of my adaptability I didn’t realize I possessed.

Thus, am I now glad my tenure at the Globe-News came to a screeching halt?

You bet I am.

local news, media news, national news, political news

The case against primary endorsements

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newspapers

I re-read the New York Times editorial endorsements this morning regarding the Republican and Democratic party presidential primaries.

The Times is backing Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton (no surprise there) and Republican John Kasich. The Clinton nod is full of kudos for the former U.S. senator from New York; the Kasich endorsement contains a lot of, well, he’s the best of a bad bunch.

The paper’s tandem endorsements brought to mind a policy I used to follow back in the day, before I got “reorganized” out of my 36-year print journalism career in the summer of 2012.

It was that we didn’t make endorsements — which we preferred to call “recommendations” — in contested two-party primaries.

Why not?

Well, for starters, I always was a bit uncomfortable recommending candidates running for a partisan position. We did it for many election cycles here in Amarillo and in Beaumont before that. Then it dawned on me that it was best left to each major party to manage the selection process. The media need not get involved in what essentially was a partisan effort.

We would make recommendations, of course, for those single-party primary contests. In Amarillo, that usually meant the Republicans would have a contested primary, but there wouldn’t be any Democrats on the ballot for a particular office.

In those cases, the primary becomes tantamount to election. So, we’d state our case — knowing full well that whatever we said would mean diddly squat in the minds of most voters, whose minds were made up already.

I have no clue what my former paper here in Amarillo is going to do with this primary election. The Texas primary occurs on March 1 and it’s a good bet there’ll be plenty of Republicans still in the hunt for the GOP presidential nomination, not to mention at least two Democrats seeking their party’s nod for the presidency.

Nor will I offer an opinion of what the newspaper’s editorialist should do.

There no doubt will be push back from those who (a) demand the paper make endorsements in the primary, as it is their duty and (b) those who believe newspaper endorsements no longer are relevant in the current political climate.

Indeed, the Internet has taken away much of people’s reliance on what newspaper editorial boards think anyway.

Good luck, media moguls, as you ponder these things.

local news, media news, national news, political news

Newspaper endorsements: do they matter?

newspapers

Near the end of my career in daily print journalism, I began to question the value of newspaper “endorsements.”

We didn’t really even like to refer to them out loud as endorsements. We preferred the term “recommendations.” We’d recommend a candidate of our choice while understanding that voters are independent thinkers — or so they say — and wouldn’t take whatever the newspaper said as gospel.

These days I’m beginning to wonder about voters’ independence. The plethora of social media and big-money advertising are having the kind of influence on voters’ thought process that, well, newspaper endorsements might have had a half-century or longer ago.

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry perhaps demonstrated better than anyone in recent times how newspaper editorial endorsements’ value has diminished.

When he ran for re-election in 2010, Perry announced he wouldn’t even talk to newspaper editorial boards. He’d go straight to the voters. He didn’t need no stinkin’ newspaper editors’ approval.

How did Gov. Perry do at the ballot box that year? He thumped Republican primary opponent Kay Bailey Hutchison — no slouch as a Texas politician herself — and then clobbered Democratic nominee Bill White that fall. White, by the way, garnered virtually every newspaper endorsement there was to get in Texas — including from the Amarillo Globe-News, where I worked as editorial page editor; it did him virtually no good at all.

So now, in this presidential election cycle, newspapers are weighing in. The “influential” Des Moines Register endorsed Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Hillary Clinton in advance of the Iowa caucuses. Over the weekend, the Boston Globe endorsed Clinton as the neighboring New Hampshire primary approaches.

There will be others coming along as the campaigns proceed along the long and winding road toward the parties’ conventions. Newspaper editors and publishers will extend the invitation for the candidates to make their cases. Some of them will accept; others will follow the Perry model.

In the end, however, none of these endorsements — or recommendations — likely will be decisive.

Voters are getting their heads filled by ideologues on both sides of the divide. Their minds are made up.

What’s more, during the more than three decades I practiced my craft in daily journalism, I never heard first-hand any voter say they changed their mind on an election based on a newspaper endorsement.

Maybe they’re out there.

Back to my initial question: Do these endorsements really matter?