A comment

It is fashionable in the local Blogosphere to spend at least part of every post gut-kicking the Brownsville Herald and its shrinking staff for it’s failure to cover local news with anything like adequacy.

I’d like to point to this week’s coverage of the weather to counter this view. Each day the Herald has posted two, three, as many as four stories by local reporters covering the city and surrounding area’s problems and responses to the weather. Publisher Daniel R. Cavazos has even come out of the office long enough to write at least two opinion pieces on the topic. I say, “Hooray!” for such obvious team effort. Well done, Herald.

Would it were that the Herald and its staff might take such a team approach to other local news topics and events. For instance, we note at the bottom of page one, space only recently available to the advertising side of the paper’s operation, the ad for a candidate for Cameron County Commissioner, Precinct 2. He’s a decent looking gentleman with a reasonable list of bulleted campaign promises, but a stranger. Who is this guy? Where has he been all this time his hair’s been turning so white? Doing what? Does he have connection to existing political groups and organizations? Who are the folks and organziations backing his campaign?

Reasonable questions and, of course, there are more to be asked. We also note that the Precinct 2 seat has attracted a fairly large number of candidates since sitting commissioner Jon Wood announced his candidacy for County Judge and his place effectively vacated for the current election cycle. What if the Herald were to take their cold-weather team approach to vetting all those candidates? Why, local folks would have real reason to buy the paper other than it ran a picture of, wonder of wonders, icicles hanging from citrus trees. Who knows? Circulation might actually go up.

Or what if such a team approach had been applied to other problems in the past, say the still mystery of the $21 million phantom bridge connecting the port of Brownsville to Mexico? Of course, the team approach to news coverage doesn’t always produce sterling results. We recall someplace in the late Nineties watching a tuxedoed news team for one of the local channels spending all of the local coverage time for both the six and ten o’clock slots “covering” the opening of a refurbished wing of a Harlingen hospital in an incredible display of public relations work, not news coverage. It was just about then that local news viewing disappeared from our routine.

So, Brownsville Herald, a suggestion: use the resources you have–which, while diminished, are still substantial– to dig out what the local citizenry really needs to know and see what happens. I, for one, would like to have a useful local paper running in 2010. The Blogosphere’s an interesting place, but it does not have the resources or energy to provide the real coverage that citizens and residents need. Help us out.

–Stan Raines