D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
March
2009
Stopping the Presses
As a retired newspaper editor/publisher now living in Las Cruces, I enjoyed reading your column concerning the demise of the industry (Editor's Notebook, February). Another retired publisher residing up the street and I have frequently talked about how we never thought we'd see the day when the newspaper industry was in peril.
I have commented that the day they shipped off the Las Cruces Sun-News' press to Farmington, the paper was doomed, and that it is now only a subsidiary of the El Paso Times. The Times' newspaper racks are appearing more and more in Las Cruces, and stories with El Paso interests printed in the Sun-News. I predict the time will come when the two papers are merged into one, especially since the Sun-News' existence is a bank or two of computers. Already you have to talk to people in El Paso on circulation issues, and I assume the paper is put together in El Paso besides being printed there.
Dave McClain, the immediate past publisher, and I worked together years ago. He told me how the Sun-News was going to build a new building. No way. That is but a dream now, unless they build a small one and sell the one they have — a building just large enough to hold some computers for classified and display ads, and for the relatively few writers/editors.
I could go on concerning the changes among the papers back in Nebraska, where I worked, but it is enough to say I enjoyed your column and sadly shake my head over the direction newspapering is going.
Daryl Hall
Las Cruces
I am a 62-year-old woman who is going to respond to your editorial regarding newspapers going out of business. I am responding as a simple reader who has not read a newspaper for at least 25 years! "Why?" you all say with surprise. Because I was sick of the content — I can get depressed enough with the daily goings-on of life without reading a newspaper every morning that just focuses on the negativity in this world. And I will not even go in the direction of the trees that will be saved. The sad part of this will be the jobs lost.
However, I believe this country and possibly the world are headed into a new phase of life and change is always hard for some people. I can remember in 1972 I was a receptionist at an insurance company when they brought in and filled a whole room with what they called a computer! I knew immediately this was something I needed to learn. My gut told me this was another new phase, just like when the black-and-white TV was replaced with color! I believe progress has its casualties like so many other things that have to go to the wayside. Just ask anyone of those journalists if they would like to go back to their typewriters.
But I rarely go to my computer for the news, either. You ask, "How do I know what is going on in the world?" Have you forgotten how quickly word spreads in town? But I do not want to belabor that subject, either — I believe newspapers have not kept up with what the reader wants.
I would read a paper (I do read local free newspapers) if it were not so damn depressing! And we wonder why this country feels so panic-driven and scared. It's the old doomsday theory — the chicken with "the sky is falling." I say STOP! I want to read about companies who are doing well or at least trying new things to do better. I want to read about someone or some business that says "uncle" first and lowers its prices or takes a pay cut rather than lose a business that employs hard-working, taxpaying citizens. I want to know who has achieved something wonderful and that that is a possibility for me or my children or grandchildren — not who has ripped us off again.
I know that information is important, too, BUT that is all the newspapers print anymore. I listen to readers and how frustrated and deflated they feel after reading a newspaper! I believe that the newspaper world has stopped listening to the reader and what they want and so here we are closing newspapers right and left. I believe the newspaper world writes what it thinks best for the reader to know, not what we the reader want to know. You cited the Watergate scandal — yes, that was important for us the readers to know, but I really do believe that kind of journalism has also gone by the wayside, caught up with the quest to write a sensational story rather than an informative story.
We need encouragement in these times of bank bailouts, automobile billionaires taking tax dollars for bonuses and a war that does not seem to end. These are just my simple thoughts in these troubled times.
January Roberts
Truth or Consequences
Lightcap Lesson
As a conservative, I want to say that I totally agree with Henry Lightcap in his February article ("Winds of Change"). What I learned from the last eight years and from the last election is that everyone needs to be more involved in their party's nomination process and that your primary vote is just as important as your vote in the main election. If you put nothing into the process, then that's probably the type of nominee that you'll get.
Bill Taylor
Silver City
Tuning Out
Every so often I have to write an "I was until" letter. I was a fan of David Fryxell until I just now read he watches TV (Continental Divide, February). He not only watches it; he thinks it is essential. Looking at the list of TV-watcher categories, I find I would be an amoeba. Fryxell didn't even conceive of the possibility that someone still exists who doesn't watch it at all — well, at least not anything on the airwaves.
My wife and I haven't received TV, cable or otherwise, for over 20 years. God, our house is peaceful! On rare occasions, we've turned a TV on in a motel. What a frightening experience. No one talks slow enough to be understood anymore. And stories no longer have plots. We own one. A pretty modern one. We use it to watch movies on videotapes and DVDS. Do you know how nice it is to be able to stop a show if you need to go to the john? Or get another glass of wine to enhance the mood? Or maybe to just get a moment of silence? Oh, blessed silence. We watch movies on our TV. Nothing else. In our bedroom. In fact, my wife has said she isn't sure she could watch a movie fully dressed anymore. Takes me back to drive in-theaters and Plymouth back seats. But then, I date myself.
Note that I'm writing this comment via email, so, even if I'm a Televamoeba, I'm not a Luddite. In fact, I actually check a couple of news pages online each morning to see who might be in charge on any given day.
Anyway, David, know that I'm disappointed. I assumed that someone who could consistently produce anything as classy as Desert Exposure in the wilds of New Mexico had shed all the evil trappings of modern decadence and was sitting home each evening reading (shudder) a book! Or even (shudder again) an online tabloid entitled Desert Exposure, which has the audacity to allow people like Fryxell, Larry Lightner and Henry Lightcap to write in the same publication. Do you want to confuse your readers? Or, perhaps, have you just assumed that they are all watching the Super Bowl in search of the ultimate form of enlightenment?
Harley Shaw
Hillsboro
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