{"id":52210,"date":"2022-07-09T00:00:23","date_gmt":"2022-07-09T00:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=52210"},"modified":"2022-07-09T00:00:23","modified_gmt":"2022-07-09T00:00:23","slug":"the-joy-returns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=52210","title":{"rendered":"The joy returns"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n

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Community journalism is where it\u2019s at, man.<\/p>\n

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 \u201csemi-retired\u201d mode.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Farmersville is home to about 5,000 individuals. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I want to toot the horn of community journalism because it continues to thrive even though what the conservative talking heads refer to as \u201cmainstream media\u201d continue to struggle.<\/p>\n

They struggle because of a perception \u2013 and I believe it is misplaced \u2013 that major media outlets no longer just \u201creport the news.\u201d 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 \u2026 but that\u2019s another issue for another day.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It is my job \u2013 which I perform on a freelance basis \u2013 to report to the community about the decisions their elected representatives make on their behalf.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I learned something about myself when I started this new job: I didn\u2019t forget what I had learned all those years ago.<\/p>\n

I am having a lot of fun.<\/p>\n

Johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\n

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Community journalism is where it\u2019s 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 \u201csemi-retired\u201d mode. But my task these days is to report on city … Continue reading The joy returns<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[8355,2858,2978],"class_list":["post-52210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-news","tag-community-journalism","tag-mainstream-media","tag-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52210"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52212,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52210\/revisions\/52212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}