McDonald: It's an honor to work in local news

A little more than three years ago, I started my own business, Gazette Media Services LLC.

That happened after eight years running the Las Vegas Optic for its corporate owner.

Tom McDonald

I wanted to carve out my own niche, and one of the first and most important things I accomplished was to create the Community News Exchange, or CNEx, a news-sharing service primarily for smaller weeklies around New Mexico.

I launched it on May 6, 2013, with 11 newspapers I had recruited from around New Mexico.

Through CNEx, I learned a lot about New Mexico, but I also gained insight into the newspapers themselves. Now there are 14 newspapers and a radio station “subscribing” to CNEx. It’s not as big I had imagined in ’13, but I still enjoy serving as its editor, and it generates some spare change in my pocket, so I can’t complain.

My business did OK for a while, in part because of a Knight Foundation grant through the New Mexico Community Foundation as seed money to support CNEx for a year. That support helped me grow the service, but setbacks came from outside market forces. Over these years I’ve watched in frustration as the Raton Range, Ruidoso Free Press and The Sangre de Cristo Chronicle and its satellite newspaper, the Raton Comet, all folded.

Newspapering is a tough business these days.

But there are other small-town publications still running strong. The Rio Grande Sun in Española, a fire-breathing newspaper if there ever was one, sells out just about every week, while The Taos News regularly wins national awards as one of the best weeklies out there. These are newspapers that defy the trends, in large part because of the people who run them.

Then there’s the dogged determination of people who keep their hometown papers relevant. Nick Seibel snatched the Silver City Daily Press from impending death and poured his time, money and talents into its revival, and ME Sprengelmeyer left a successful career as a reporter covering national and international issues to buy The Communicator and move to Santa Rosa, turning that newspaper into one of the best weeklies in the state.

I have a great respect for people like Scot Stinnett, who manages to produce the De Baca County News and the Clovis Livestock Market News from his humble desktop in Fort Sumner.

I may have created a valuable service for weeklies around the state, but I also expanded my own horizons. I love newspaper work and consider it an honor to work with the men and women who pour their hearts and souls into their newspaper and the communities that depend on them.

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

[email protected]