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Time of My Life, Part 53: Returning to reminders

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Every time we come back to places we called home I am reminded of the joyful times I had going to work every day.

I also am reminded of why I am delighted to no longer facing the pressure that greets journalists who are reporting to work each day in these very trying times.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am way past the time I would have retired on my own terms. I just turned 71, which puts me fairly deeply into the “senior citizen” category of Americans. However, when I return to Amarillo, I confront memories that used to give me great joy.

I did visit downtown when we came back, but I avoided looking at a piece of property I usually visit I normally do when we come back to the Texas Panhandle. I usually drive by the now-vacant building where I toiled for 18 years as editorial page editor of a once-fine newspaper, the Amarillo Globe-News. It isn’t fine these days. In fact, it hardly covers the community, let alone the Panhandle, or eastern New Mexico, or the Oklahoma Panhandle.

However, when we come back to Amarillo, I cannot help but remember how the state of daily print journalism functioned when I reported for work at the Globe-News in January 1995.

The Globe-News published two newspapers each day. I had responsibility for the opinion pages of both editions. We sought to write fresh editorials daily for the morning and the afternoon newspapers. Our newsroom was teeming with staffers: reporters, copy editors, photographers, a librarian, a secretary, line editors.

These days? They’re almost all gone. They have vacated the building where we once reported for work. The Globe-News building is now scarred by graffiti. It sits vacant and is getting seedier every time I look at it. I couldn’t go there on my latest visit. It hurts too much to see it decaying before our eyes.

In the old days, we had tons of fun. I made many friends among the colleagues with whom I worked. I had some difficult relationships over that span of time, to be sure. But what the hey … you cannot expect perfection everywhere.

Returning to the Panhandle reminds me of how we used to serve the community. I recall fondly those grand times. I do not ever wish to return to the grind. I am enjoying a new way to celebrate the latest time of my life.

local news

Men and Women of the Year? Of course!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

One of the stark truths of this blog is that it hasn’t offered much praise for a newspaper where I worked for nearly 18 years. I have watched it decline to a level I no longer recognize.

Then the Amarillo Globe-News did something the other day that I find truly inspiring. Instead of singling out a Man and Woman of the Year for 2020, it chose its Men and Women of the Year: the frontline medical staffs in the Texas Panhandle who have risked their lives saving others’ lives in the wake of the killer pandemic.

A no-brainer, you say? Eh, one could make that argument. Except that not all publications that bestow these honors have followed that lead.

The Globe-News solicits nominations from the public. It would gather its management team at the end of a calendar year to deliberate over who should get the honor. The newspaper would dispatch a reporter to interview the subject and those close to him and her, concocting some pretext for the interview. Then the paper would publish its Man and Woman of the Year on Jan. 1. The paper has honored its Man of the Year since 1950; its Woman of the Year since 1974.

It’s still doing so, but with a dramatically different setup than I remember. Whatever the case, the choice this year was at one time an easy call and an inspired one.

Perhaps every community in America should honor their first responders, their medical staffs, their emergency services personnel in such a manner.

The Panhandle has been staggered by the toll brought by the virus. Its acute-care hospitals have been stretched to the limit. Its nursing homes and assisted living centers have been ravaged. They all are staffed by dedicated men and women who have become in many cases “surrogate loved ones” to patients who have struggled with the COVID-19 virus. They have held the hands of patients, told them of their love for them … and then watched many of them die.

It has been heartbreaking beyond measure.

Yes, they deserve to be honored for their hard work and their selflessness. As the newspaper stated in its New Year’s Day editorial: We also know this year, that while there were others nominated for this distinction, we found none more deserving. After all, a year like no other should yield honorees like no other.

Well … done.

local news

Hmm … a good question

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

A former colleague and a friend of mine is posing a question that needs some attention up yonder in the Texas Panhandle.

Jon Mark Beilue, with whom I worked at the Amarillo Globe-News, asks:

Just making an observation: On Monday, Nov. 23, Potter and Randall counties (combined population, 255,128) reported 623 new COVID cases. On this same date, Dallas County (2.6 million) reported 541 new cases. A county with 10 times the population has 82 fewer new cases. Just asking a question: Why?
Does anyone have an answer for my friend? Anyone at all?
local news, media news

Time of My Life, Part 51: A new beginning

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I understand that Scripture tells us about new doors opening when one slams shut.

It happened to me in 2012. A career in print journalism came to a screeching halt in August of that year. I was adrift for just a little while.

Then a friend from Panhandle PBS got in touch with me. Linda Pitner was general manager of the public TV station — affiliated with Amarillo College — at the time. She wanted to know if I would like to write a blog for the stations’ web site.

Would I? Of course I would! With that, a career that came to an end got restarted in an entirely new form at Panhandle PBS. I was doing things for public TV that my former employer at the Amarillo Globe-News didn’t think I could do. I had joined the world of online journalism.

I have to say that I had a serious blast writing that blog and doing the kind of video blogs — such as the one I attached to this brief post. The gig didn’t last an overly long time. Panhandle PBS brought in a new GM eventually and he decided that my services no longer fit the direction he wanted to take the station.

We parted company. That didn’t end my blogging time.

A local CBS affiliate GM asked me the same thing Pitner did: Would I like to write for KFDA-NewsChannel 10? Of course I would, I told Brent McClure. So, he hired me as a freelancer to write features for the website. I would write them and then the on-air news anchors would introduce the features in a brief segment during the evening newscasts. They would assemble video presentations to complement the text I had submitted to the website.

That, too, was a seriously good time for this longtime print guy. The KFDA gig, though, came to an end when budget constraints kicked in. No worries for me.

My wife and I gravitated from Amarillo to the Metroplex in 2018. The fun continues.

Another friend of mine — who is news director at KETR-FM public radio — gave me a shout. Mark Haslett and I worked together at the Globe-News for a time; prior to that he was an executive at High Plains Public Radio in Amarillo, so we knew each other pretty well.

Haslett asked if I would — you guessed it — write a blog for KETR, which is affiliated with Texas A&M University-Commerce. Why, yes! I would! So I have been writing a blog for KETR and once again am having the time of my life.

That’s not the end of it. When we settled in Princeton, just east of McKinney and just a bit northeast of our granddaughter in Allen, I put a feeler out to the publisher of the Princeton Herald. Did they need a freelance reporter? The publisher, Sonia Duggan, said “yes.” So … she and I agreed that I could write for the Farmersville Times, which is another weekly newspaper in a group of weeklies Duggan owns with her husband, Chad Engbrock.

Therefore, I have come full circle. I am now covering city council and school board meetings for a weekly newspaper, along with banging out the occasional feature article.

It’s where and how it all began for this old man.

And I am still having the time of my life.

media news

Growing city needs strong newspaper

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I was speaking the other day to a member of my family; we were talking about two issues simultaneously: the growth and maturation of Amarillo, Texas, and the long, slow and agonizing demise of the newspaper that formerly served the community.

It occurred to me later that both trends work at cross purposes. I find myself asking: How does a community grow and prosper without a newspaper telling its story?

That is what is happening in Amarillo, I told my family member.

The city’s downtown district is changing weekly. New businesses open. The city is revamping and restoring long dilapidated structures. Amarillo has a successful minor-league baseball franchise playing ball in a shiny new stadium in the heart of its downtown district.

The city’s medical complex is growing, adding hundreds of jobs annually. Pantex, the massive nuclear weapons storage plant, continues its work. Bell/Textron’s aircraft assembly plant continues to turn out V-22 Ospreys and other rotary-wing aircraft. Streets and highways are under repair and improvement.

Amarillo is coming of age. Its population has exceeded 200,000 residents.

What, though, is happening to the media that tell the story of the community? I can speak only of the newspaper, the Amarillo Globe-News, where I worked for nearly 18 years before walking away during a corporate reorganization of the newspaper. The company that owned the G-N for more than 40 years sold its group of papers … and then got out of the newspaper publishing business. It gave up the fight in a changing media market.

The newspaper’s health has deteriorated dramatically in the years since then. Two general assignment reporters cover the community. That’s it. Two! The paper has zero photographers and a single sports writer.

The paper is printed in Lubbock. It has a regional executive editor who splits her time between Amarillo and Lubbock and a regional director of commentary who does the same thing.

There exists, therefore, a serious dichotomy in play in a growing and increasingly vibrant community. I see the contradiction in the absence of a growing and vibrant newspaper that tells the whole story about what is happening in the community it is supposed to cover.

Spare me the “it’s happening everywhere” canard. I get that. I have seen it. None of that makes it any easier to witness it happening in a community I grew to love while I worked there. I built a home there and sought to offer critical analysis of the community from my perch as editor of the Globe-News editorial page.

I do not see that happening these days.

Meanwhile, Amarillo continues to grow and prosper. If only it had a newspaper on hand to tell its story to the rest of the world.

media news

Moving farther away from the past

It pains me to say this, so it is with some anguish that I must report that my tie to the last full-time print journalism stop on my journey has been all but severed.

The Amarillo Globe-News no longer resembles the place I worked for nearly 18 years. I worked there longer than I did at any of the four newspapers where I practiced my beloved craft.

The building is vacant. What is left of the news reporting staff and the advertising department is holed up in an office suite down the street in a downtown bank tower.

Here is what really hurts: I look at the online edition and am amazed at how little actual Texas Panhandle news is being reported. I shouldn’t be surprised, given that the G-N now has precisely two general assignment reporters, or roughly about 2 percent of what it once employed. I have to subscribe to the paper to read the stories, so I all I see are the headlines.

What’s more, a real head-scratcher deals with all the Texas Tech and Lubbock-centric headlines I see on the home page. Tech and Lubbock? Yep. That’s what I see. I have looked at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal home page, too and I have discovered that the A-J offers none of the kind of Panhandle-centric news for its readers that I see in the other direction at the Globe-News.

This is my way of admitting that I am letting go of a big part of my professional and personal journey through life.

I enjoyed some modest success along the way. My career began in Oregon; it took me to Beaumont and then to Amarillo in Texas. Indeed, the Oregonian — where I worked briefly before gravitating to Oregon City, Ore. — bears no resemblance to what it once was. The newspaper in Oregon City is gone, pfftt! The Beaumont Enterprise has shrunk dramatically, too.

Looking at the last stop on my journey, though, is one that hurts the most.

The good news? I am a happy fellow today. That was then. The here and now is quite good.

media news

A tragic metaphor

The picture attached to this blog post symbolizes something that is troubling to me on at least two levels: one of them is personal, the other speaks to a broader phenomenon.

It came to me today from a friend who is visiting Amarillo with her husband on a family matter. Hubby snapped the picture. I want to call your attention to the graffiti on the second floor of the structure.

The building used to house the Amarillo Globe-News, where I worked for nearly 18 years as editorial page editor. I left the business in late August 2012. The corporate ownership changed hands a few years later and then the new owners vacated the building. They moved what was left of the newspaper operation into an office suite in a downtown bank tower.

What you see here is the rotting hulk of what used to house a once-proud community institution.

The personal impact on me is obvious. I went to the Texas Panhandle in January 1995 full of pi** and vinegar and ready to slay some dragons in my new surroundings. The newspaper had a proud tradition. It won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service — which is journalism’s highest award. I was proud to be part of that legacy. We didn’t win any more Pulitzer prizes during my time there, but I developed a lot of close friendships with colleagues and managed to eke out a modestly successful tenure during my time there.

None of us got into the business of chronicling a community’s story to make lots of money. We did it because of our commitment to the craft we pursued.

I had a lot of fun there and managed to embark on many fascinating assignments during my time.

So when I see this picture, my heart breaks on a deeply personal level. The property is up for sale. It’s been on the block for quite some time. I do not know how you repurpose an office building that once served as a newspaper office; the building next to it on the same block once housed the paper’s presses and distribution complex. Good luck with peddling that structure, too.

The picture symbolizes what has become of print journalism in communities all across the nation. Once-vibrant community institutions are being relegated to empty shells. They become targets of graffiti “artists” intent on making some sort of statement about … whatever.

Newspaper staffs are slashed. The paper charges whoever is left to cover a community with virtually no one available to actually do the work of reporting on and then writing what they learn.

Those who once depended on newspapers are turning to other media. I cannot vouch for the veracity of what is being disseminated. Some of it is valid. Some of it, well, is just crap.

I am happy to report that I have moved on, as have so many of my former colleagues. I am in a much better place now. I hope they are, too. The remains of the Amarillo Globe-News? The future for the building and the medium it once housed — to my way of thinking — look decidedly less promising.

I am saddened beyond measure.

media news

Time of My Life, Part 49: Those were the days

Social media occasionally allow us a look into the past, giving us a chance to reminisce on how it used to be and even think wistfully about what we are missing.

So it happened today when a friend and former colleague posted a faux newspaper page saluting his departure from his job and the start of a new adventure. My friend left the Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise in the late 1980s and the posting of the page on Facebook has elicited a lot of comment from our colleagues and friends about this fellow and about the special feelings we all felt toward each other.

It reminds me of a series of special relationships I was able to cultivate during my career in print journalism. My journalism journey took me to four newspapers: two in Oregon and two in Texas. The first job was at the Oregon Journal, the now-defunct evening paper in Portland. My second job took me to the Oregon City Enterprise-Courier. Job No. 3 transported me to Beaumont. The fourth post was in Amarillo, Texas.

Throughout much of that journey, I was able to make lasting friendships that have survived the tumult, turmoil and occasionally the tempest of an industry that has undergone — and is undergoing — so much change.

I cherish those friendships perhaps more than I have expressed to those with whom I have worked, played, laughed and occasionally cried.

I mentioned to the friend who displayed the “fake” page the special camaraderie we enjoyed in Beaumont. It truly was a remarkable, talented group of professionals. Moreover, many of them had huge hearts that they opened up to me, who was then brand new to Texas and who had much to learn about the state and the community I would serve as editorial page editor of the newspaper. Moreover, I had left my family in Oregon when I took the job; they would join me later that year and we’ve never looked back. Many of my colleagues knew I was lonesome for my wife and young sons and they took me in, invited me to social gatherings and brought me into their fold.

That all made my transition to Texas that much easier.

Then again, the relationships I developed in Oregon City, Beaumont and Amarillo aren’t unique in an industry that used to comprise individuals from disparate backgrounds. They came together to work for an organization, seeking to do the best job they could do, to keep faith with the readers they served.

The newspaper industry, as we know, has been torn asunder in recent times. The Enterprise-Courier is gone; the Beaumont Enterprise staff has been decimated, as has the staff at the Amarillo Globe-News. We’ve all moved on, some to retirement, some to pursue — as the saying goes — “other interests.”

The Facebook post reminded me of how it used to be. I shall cling tightly to those memories. Those truly were the good ol’ days.

State news

Kinky Friedman: ahead of his time

I enjoy looking back on musings I pushed out via my blog, seeking to find common ground with current events.

On July 28, 2010, I wrote a short piece about Kinky Friedman, the fascinating humorist who once ran for Texas governor. He was one of the more provocative and interesting political interviews I ever conducted.

He spoke about a notion that was getting some traction among Texas Republicans. He opposed building a wall along our southern border.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2010/07/where-have-you-been-kinky/

I won’t give up with this blog post what he said then, but I do want to alert you to what feared might occur in the United States if matters kept spiraling in a direction that Kinky didn’t like. Just check out the item I have attached to this post.

Kinky Friedman was way ahead of his time.

media news

Worried about future of journalism in a city I love

1 Comment

My concern about the future of newspaper journalism in a city my wife and I once called “home” is building. I am unsure of how or where this concern will end up. Suffice to say I cannot shake this feeling of doom for the future of the Amarillo Globe-News.

I do not read the daily print newspaper. I no longer reside in Amarillo. I do try to read the “paper” online, but I need to subscribe to it. I decline to do so. Why? There’s not enough news about the Texas Panhandle to interest me.

The Globe-News is now owned by Gannett Corp., the company that merged with GateHouse Media; GateHouse assumed control of Gannett, but kept the Gannett name. Gannett is known throughout the newspaper industry as a cost-cutting juggernaut. It seeks to “save its way to prosperity.” From what I have seen for many years now, through three corporate ownerships, the Globe-News has been slashed, decimated and reduced to a newsgathering organization that is just a mere shadow of what is used to be.

The most troubling thing I see in the online edition is a heavy reliance on news from down south, in Lubbock, where Gannett also operates a newspaper.

My point is this: I see a lot of news relating to Texas Tech University on the front page of the Globe-News’ online edition. Texas Tech is a fine school, but it is headquartered in Lubbock. It has a decent presence in Amarillo, but its influence there remains somewhat muted.

Conversely, when I look at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal’s online edition, I never see news covering Amarillo or the Texas Panhandle. Do you get my drift? If not, it is merely that the influence flows only in one direction, from Lubbock to Amarillo.

I am left to wonder whether there will even be an Amarillo Globe-News in the future. The newspaper used to employ dozens of reporters, line editors and photographers. It now employs a single sports writer, two general-assignment reporters, a regional executive editor and a regional director of commentary.

That … is … it!

The grumbling I hear from my many friends in Amarillo all say the same thing. The newspaper doesn’t report the news.

It saddens me terribly.

I want desperately to be wrong about the future of print journalism in the Texas Panhandle.