Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

Opinion: Regional papers worth reading

It was right about eight years ago when I first started working on an idea for a news service for the state’s independently owned newspapers, especially the small-town papers whose local owners must work without a net.

After the previous eight years running the Las Vegas Optic for its corporate owner, I left that “payroll job” and incorporated as Gazette Media Services. Then I ran around the state soliciting support for a statewide news exchange that, when launched in May 2013, became known as the New Mexico Community News Exchange, or CNEx.

It started with 11 newspapers and grew from there. At its strongest, it included about 20 media subscribers, but because of neglect (I went back to payroll jobs when money got too tight) and closings (three of CNEx’s original newspapers have since closed) and the news service is now back down to about a dozen contributors and subscribers.

That’s plenty for gathering up some good content, as I’ve been reminded over the past couple of weekends.

You see, the rest of my CNEx-related story includes me buying one of those small town newspapers that CNEx serves, so that now I’ve got the Guadalupe County Communicator in Santa Rosa, which keeps me plenty busy. So to offset the CNEx workload, I hired Linda Quintana — an experienced copy editor from back when Santa Rosa sported two weekly newspapers — to serve as CNEx’s copy editor.

She does it well, except for the last couple of weeks when she had the audacity to ask for a little break.

That placed me back in the copy editor’s seat and has reminded me just how busy our newspapers are. For examples:

• The Silver City Daily Press got busy covering the offensive behavior of a local resident who’s flying the “f” word alongside President Biden’s name. Jerks have rights too, you know.

• The Rio Grande Sun is breathing fire at the politicians who might want to use their power to redistrict this state according to their own party’s selfish interests. The Sun’s lead fire-breather, Robert Trapp, used the words of Merritt Allen Hamilton — whose column appears in The Independent (Edgewood) and is often distributed by CNEx — as a good standard for the redistricting task force she volunteered for. Both her column and the Sun’s editorial are well worth reading — and maybe you have, in your own hometown paper.

Those are just a few examples of what’s out there among New Mexico’s smaller newspapers, where real journalism still hits the streets every day. It’s my privilege to gather and distribute it, even if it does work me into the weekends every now and then.

Thanks, Linda, for reminding me of the pleasure of picking up the nuggets of news and other writings as they are scattered all over newspaper pages statewide. And thanks, CNEx subscribers, for making it all happen with the journalism you do so well.

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

[email protected]

 
 
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