First things first: I'm delighted with the 2021 Texas Associated Press Managing Editors convention wins (minus the convention) in column-writing (first place) and editorials (second place), announced last Tuesday and marking my final year in the newspaper profession. The former award recognizes some 2020 columns I wrote on racial injustice, allegations of local police brutality and a massive essay on the steady erosion of white evangelicalism locally, statewide and nationally, collectively earning this from the judge: "Well written, thought-provoking and engaging columns. A diverse set of columns, showing not just incisive thinking but extensive research, interviews and relevant memories." The latter award recognized several editorials that I wrote on topics ranging from the fine line that the Texas Supreme Court drew on disabled voters being permitted to vote by mail to nagging questions over a public health director fired by the city of Waco in the middle of a deadly pandemic. That done and said, I’m also pretty damn sure such honors come my way largely because of the steady loss of so many worthy and far more accomplished colleagues. Many have left our misunderstood and oft-maligned profession because of crippling newsroom layoffs or because some journalists simply and understandably decided to pursue more reliable livelihoods in the best interest of their families and loved ones. Many newspaper companies no longer demonstrate a patriarchal sort of embrace of their employees, who after all work nights and holidays and weekends for modest pay and more recently have endured open castigation as “enemies of the people”; furthermore, latter-day newspaper companies (with rare exceptions) no longer undertake bold civic initiatives benefiting the communities they supposedly cover and serve. Which, among far more important matters, means fewer of us are left in the newsroom to compete for these annual journalism prizes. And as long as I've been in the business, the Texas APME awards have found us competing regularly with our considerable Texas peers — and learning from one another in analyzing and scrutinizing those stories and headlines and photographs that win.
Granted, like the Academy Awards or Pulitzer Prizes, state journalism awards come down to subjectivity, including particular tastes and biases of individual judges. For instance, I won first-place awards in both column-writing and editorial writing for work involving a Sunday afternoon 2015 rumble between two motorcycle "gangs" that left nine dead and resulted in the arrest of 177 others. (Most of my work actually involved extensive followup in how the local and state justice systems bungled biker arrests, jailings and the prosecution of subsequent cases.) Yet I won only second place as coveted "Opinion Writer of the Year" in the very same competition, confounding my editor. As one who thinks in a logically linear fashion (a major help during newspaper editorial board meetings, given my own leaps in drawing conclusions), he couldn't quite make sense of the seeming inconsistency. It defied all logic. (My column-writing honor garnered these remarks from the judge: "His entry stood out because of attention to the local, high-profile and incendiary issue of the biker arrests. This writer takes a stand, with some risk of reader push-back, and that sometimes goes unappreciated in journalism today. He also notes correctly that more attention is needed now that the big media has rolled outta town. Good job." The editorial garnered similar comments: "Powerful yet nuanced, well-reported and well-reasoned, and also rather courageous — standing up for due process for motorcycle gangs is not exactly a crowd-pleaser in most communities — these editorials are a model of what the editorial-writing craft should be." No comment accompanied my second-place win.) Yet these three awards also routinely involve different judges, each applying different standards and feelings and natural-born biases to everything from submission length to writing style to political sentiment in sorting out submissions for honor (if any is deserved). It could also reflect what they had to eat and whether what they had to eat is sitting easily on their stomachs. And in any case that year I considered coming in second to celebrated El Paso Times Editor Robert Moore an honor; after a celebrated career of some 38 years, mostly in West Texas and often devoted to picking apart overheated and often misleading rhetoric about exceedingly complicated Texas-Mexico border issues, Moore went on in 2019 to found El Paso Matters, a "member-supported nonpartisan media organization that uses journalism to expand civic capacity in our region." In short, the guy's doing something gutsy and innovative in his retirement years to reverse the decline of daily journalism in most cities. More power and honor to him!
Some of my Waco Tribune-Herald colleagues found amusement when a couple of years ago I jokingly grumbled during budget meeting one day how a former colleague of mine still laboring in the West Texas salt mines where I began my newspaper career beat me in column-writing with earth-shaking topics such as turning 60; the death of his mother-in-law; and an illness his local pastor suffered — all of which struck me as interesting but nowhere near as newsworthy as the hard-news topics I covered, all of which involved shoe-leather reporting and dogged research on my part. Yet, truth be told, I was happy for my friend, knowing the challenges he faces daily even now in trying to oversee a shrinking newsroom in a community in which the paper no longer commands the respect and awe it once did. And however unnewsworthy his topics might have seemed at first, he might just also be a better and more clever writer than I am. He might just demonstrate a keen ability to communicate with flair and wit. He might just grasp that each of us has a way of touching the public nerve. And my onetime colleague Greg Jaklewicz, now editor of the Abilene Reporter-News, is an exceedingly talented guy in news, features and sports in ways I'll never be. And when I next see him, the beer’s on me. (Incidentally, my colleagues suggested that I try writing a column about turning 65 and seeing if that works in the journalism award arena.) Incidentally, Greg scored well this year, leading his team in chronicling the local impact of former Texan George Floyd’s death, including calls for changing the names of four schools and the hiring of Abilene's first black police chief. If winning a first in deadline writing, a second in Opinion Writer of the Year and leading his team to a first in community effort wasn't enough, he scored a first-place honor as a sports columnist. The judge's comments on the paper's win for community service certainly demonstrate Greg's leadership: "There is an excellent balance of hard news and human interest news regarding what is happening in the local community. I also looked at the stories that surrounded the wonderful TAPME entries that depict the fabric of the community the publication serves. Really enjoyed reading those issues." I should note that my Tribune-Herald colleagues scored a first-place win for News Package of the Year, which Editor Steve Boggs touted to judges as something of a respite from a traumatic year involving a deadly pandemic and political anarchy: "In a world seemingly coming part at the seams in 2020, we decided to slow things down as the year came to a close. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, our news staff profiled a cross section of local artisans, a part of Waco’s burgeoning craft scene. The series, called 'Waco Makers,' examined local shops where handmade goods were forged and sewn from scratch. Each installment includes video."
I’m retired now. I divide time between the pursuits of deeper reflection that Cicero advised for those past a certain age: Lots of book-reading. (I recently finished military journalist Thomas E. Ricks' wonderfully insightful "First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country," Ty Seidule's confessional "Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause" and Carl Hoffman's alternately warm, crazy and disturbing "Liar's Circus: A Strange and Terrifying Journey into the Upside-down World of Trump's MAGA Rallies," which the author, fresh from studying jungle tribes, pronounces the "black mass of American politics." I've just started Capitol Hill legislative aide-turned-columnist-turned-TV commentator Chris Matthews' memoir.) There's been a lot of hiking and walking, allowing more time coincidentally to wander in my thoughts about the past, present and future. There's been a lot of contemplating about travel to other climes
— outings delayed and confounded by a retirement that began amidst the pandemic. And there has been writing, more than I imagined — occasional rambling blog pieces that few read plus some long-form essays and concise editorials for my erstwhile colleagues at the Waco Tribune-Herald where, after all, I worked the better part of the last two decades. The latter pieces remind people I'm still alive and can still stir things up. As for writing awards, they're nice but they're not why most of us toil in this profession. More often than not, they're relegated to a shelf in the closet. (Mine fittingly sit in the closet next to a foot-long trilobite fossil.) Some of us in this profession just like to write. Some of us in this profession just relish covering history in the making, if only to better explain it beyond the 60-second sound byte or now the reckless and misleading meme — if only to better understand it ourselves. Some of the most enjoyable aspects of my job the past dozen years have involved editorial board meetings with my colleagues — in recent years Editor Steve Boggs and then-publisher Jim Wilson. Somewhere amidst the humor and irreverence so characteristic of newsrooms, the three of us used this inner sanctum to come up with serious positions on complicated issues local, state and national.
To remind anyone reading this of what my newspaper colleagues still in the saddle face day in and day out — or perhaps just to remind myself some hopefully distant day of what so occupied my time — I list here what kept me so damn crazy busy in 2020. Here goes: Gauging local measures and protocols (and in detail) aimed at preventing police brutality while acknowledging local lapses in the broader quest for racial justice; appreciating the gains in racial equality pressed by late civil rights leader John Lewis with an able assist by locals who knew him (and who suggested to me that, no, his strides were not in vain — thanks, Baylor law professor Pat Wilson and former Waco congressman Chet Edwards, who counted Lewis as his closest friend on Capitol Hill); reflecting on the awful corruption of white evangelicalism under the spell of a charismatic libertine and the disturbing parallels with the apocalyptic cult headed by would-be messiah and rock guitarist David Koresh 10 miles east of Waco (with some divine guidance provided me from religion history scholars and evangelical watchdogs David Bebbington and Tom Kidd as well as newsroom colleague Tommy Witherspoon, who had the honor of getting caught in the crossfire between bumbling ATF agents and hellfire-bound cultists in February 1993).
Much time was spent championing and, yes, sometimes faulting noble efforts led by Waco's mayor (Kyle Deaver) and health experts (notably Dr. Jackson Griggs of Waco's Family Health Center and Dr. Marc Elieson of Baylor Scott & White Hillcrest Medical Center) to safeguard lives from a mysterious killer virus on the loose amid chaotic national strategies involving “leaders” who couldn’t resist politicizing a pandemic. This included reflecting on precious lives lost to SARS-CoV-2 while state and national politicians quibbled, dithered and even dismissed viral spread as a pressing public concern. Some time was also spent lamenting assumptions we draw about our neighbors’ scruples based entirely on political signs in their yards during the fall election season; respectfully but aggressively dissecting a moving defense of President Trump offered by a friend of mine (former federal judge and independent counsel Ken Starr) on the floor of the U.S. Senate during the 2020 impeachment trial; and highlighting growing Republican hypocrisy, radicalization and adoration of Donald Trump in several columns and Q&As involving a broad swath of candidates running for Congress in the 2020 Republican primary — a grueling but extraordinarily revealing exercise pressed by friend and Trib colleague Steve Boggs that political scientists will one day mine in analyzing what befell our nation. (That said, I absolutely dreaded the experience. Then again, in hindsight I see the significance of this carnival cavalcade of intriguing characters and misfits pursuing the congressional post, including a final candidate Q&A with arguably the most unprepared and most evasive candidate it has been my privilege to interview.)
There was also time for other occasions, such as the brief eulogy in memory local veteran Manny Sustaita, whose life after military service didn’t stop at tributes to fellow service members lost in Vietnam but focused on folks on the home front and their welfare and their rights as our nation teetered away from democracy and toward an American Caesar. And risking reader anger, some time and print were devoted to advising voters to demonstrate more care in whom they select for public office, given the sorry example of the state attorney general, elected twice to the post even though evidence of corruption and incompetence were evident at the very outset in 2014. (Since then, he has become further mired in corruption allegations.) And, yes, some effort, time and ink were invested, and on different dates, in pressing the president and federal lawmakers to remember their duty in prioritizing fit and up-to-date accommodations for our armed forces; safeguarding voting rights for "We the People" (long a priority for me as Trib opinion editor), including repairing the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and crafting, negotiating and passing long overdue reforms addressing police brutality and, more broadly, racial injustice in America — certainly all more relevant and timely than fights over Army fort names and making Juneteenth a federal holiday. (Note: I'm personally for jettisoning from U.S. Army installations the names of men who broke their oaths and took up arms against their country and the U.S. Army during the Civil War; on the other hand, I'm have some reservations about adding yet another federal holiday that most of us in the private sector won't get to mark and will costs millions of taxpayer dollars in a nation sinking deeper and deeper in debt.)
Such was my final year, some of it recognized by the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors Association. Such, too, are the loose ends I and others moving into retirement leave to watchdog journalists still in the harness. None of this acknowledges some of my greatest professional and personal joys, spent doggedly editing and advising and shepherding into print guest columns by community folks of all backgrounds, all perspectives, in the process showcasing the Waco Tribune-Herald opinion page as the public forum it was long before I happened along. My colleagues continue to maintain this forum, as critical to a thriving democracy as the watchdog reporting that former colleagues in Waco and beyond continue to provide.
