McDonald: P is for press, municipal newbies

Last month, after municipal elections were held around the state, a bunch of fresh faces took their oaths of office and became city and town councilors, trustees and mayors for their first time. To help prepare them for their job, the New Mexico Municipal League, in its March newsletter, set out to educate them.

Randy Van Vleck, general counsel for the state’s Municipal League, took a clever approach to do that. For the newsletter’s lead article, “The ABCs of Being a Newly Elected Official,” he created an alphabet soup of what the greenhorns need to know to do their jobs. From “Attitude” to “Zoning,” he

Tom McDonald

penned a good read for anyone who’s new to the world of hometown governing.

I’m glad he included Freedom of Information under F — in my line of work, that’s a must for covering city hall — but in his P for Personnel I was disappointed, not for what he wrote but for what he didn’t. I was hoping P would be for Press.

As a newly elected municipal official, you’d better be prepared to deal with us “inky wretches” because our role in informing the public is critical to your job.

So, in the spirit of counsel’s informative essay, allow me to offer a few additional insights, these on how to deal with your hometown newspaper. But instead of ABCs, I’ll use good old-fashion newspaper “bullets” to make my points:

• Don’t assume journalists are just “out to sell papers.” Reporters have standards that are far more top-of-mind than that. They want to get the story straight by reporting the details fairly and accurately. If it’s a boring issue on the surface, yes, reporters and their editors will try to present it in an interesting way, but we seek to do it responsibly. Our job is to inform the public, and that’s what sells our newspapers.

• If you don’t want something reported, don’t say, write or do it. Most reporters are going to give you a lot of leeway when it comes to your personal life, as long as it doesn’t overlap with your position as a city official, but when it comes to the public’s interests, you should operate on the presumption that someone’s going to find out about what you’re up to and report it.

• Answer our questions and get back to us. Unless you’re misbehaving, it’s in your best interest for the newspaper to report the full story, from all angles, but that’s hard to do if people in positions of power are unwilling to speak with us before our deadline hits. Moreover, “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” isn’t just for testifying in court, it’s also a good standard for speaking with reporters, since that’s what we’re after.

• And please, don’t just give lip service to the idea of transparency. Speak and behave like you mean it. I’ve never heard an elected official actually say that citizens don’t have a right to know what their locals government is up to, but I’ve sure seen a lot of them behave that way. Be open in all your public business dealings, and the press will respect you for it.

Remember, the press is not your natural enemy, but we can be turned into exactly that by deceit and shady dealings. Behave appropriately in office and we’ll all get along fine.

That said, good luck, newly elected officials, in your efforts to make your hometown a better place to live. In that regard, your hometown newspaper is rooting for you. After all, it’s our town too.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

[email protected]