Local News in America: 'The West's Oldest Newspaper'

FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can be in the know in 30 minutes. Hosted by Fair Media Council CEO and Executive Director Jaci Clement, Fast Chat features notables in news, media, and business.

Hello, and thank you for joining us. I'm Jaci Clement, the host of FMC Fast Chat, and this is part of a special series that we're doing, one that looks at the state of local news across America. And we're doing this by going straight to the sources, the people who are actually covering the communities. And today our search takes us to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we have the privilege of talking with Ines Russell Gomez, who's the editorial page editor at the Santa Fe New Mexican. So Ines, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

Well, I understand that your history with the paper Goes all the way back to when you were a little girl. Is that correct?

Yes, it is. I grew up in a town called Las Vegas, New Mexico. And in those days, we were there before the other one, the original Las Vegas. And when I was little, we delivered the Optic, which is our daily newspaper. And there was a deal that if you could deliver the Optic and the Santa Fe New Mexican, which was an afternoon paper, you got a special price. So I delivered the newspaper.

Oh, wow. How long did you do that?

Just a little bit. My brother and I, it was our job, and, and he convinced me that it was a special reward to take the paper to the last house on the block.

I'm guessing he was an older brother.

He was. He was very smart.

Yeah, good for him. So now you've been at the paper for how long?

Boy, it's hard to remember. I think I came back The second— the third time around in 2007. In the '80s, I was a reporter and I covered the schools and the region. And then in the '90s, early '90s, I was city editor.

Okay.

And then I went away for different reasons, you know, every time. And then in 2007, I returned to edit the special sections. And then in 2011, I think it was, I became the editorial page editor.

Okay, so you've seen a lot of changes happening there. Throughout that course of time. Tell me a little bit about, um, today's paper versus when you first started there originally. A little bit about the staffing as well as how the paper itself may have changed.

Interestingly, the paper today is more robustly staffed probably than the paper I worked at, which is unusual given the circumstances in our industry. But when I worked at the New Mexican in the mid-'80s, it was owned by the Gannett Corporation.

Okay.

They had bought it for just a slice of time from our owner, Mr. Robert McKinney, who owned the paper for the most part since 1949. And then when he passed away, his daughter Robin inherited it. So Gannett was notorious, uh, rightly so, for keeping, let's, shall we say, a lean staff. And we always would have an opening among one of the 6 reporters and someone would be lent to USA Today. So there'd really be 2 or 3 openings.

Okay.

So we were very lean and we worked very, very hard. And then when I came back in the '90s, it was the good times. We were making a lot of money. We had a robust staff. The paper had started expanding coverage again. And then we actually had zoned editions for a time. This was after I wasn't here at the time, but let's say late '90s, early 2000s. We had a Pecos edition, a Pojoaque edition, an El Dorado edition. And now, of course, after the 2008 recession, you know, the loss of classifieds to all the internet things that have happened, the real estate market, etc., we are back to having a fairly lean staff, but I would argue probably bigger than papers 3 times our size because we have an independent owner who doesn't use the paper as her piggy bank. And who reinvests the profits. And, um, we keep going. We publish a weekly arts and entertainment magazine, which has a staff of about 5 people. You know, we have— I always forget the count— 7 or 8 to 10 reporters depending on the week or day. We have a copy desk still. We have designers and we have photographers.

Okay.

And then we also have a digital staff.

Got it. Now you are a daily.

Yes, we are 7 days a week. We have not cut back publication days as many papers across the country have done.

Yeah, true. And how do you handle the difference between your daily paper and the website?

Um, how do we— that's a good question. We have a digital editor named Henry Lopez, and he has a staff of both marketing people who are selling advertising and also providing marketing, um, abilities to people. Let's say I want to have a website, I can hire the paper to do that for me. I'm not necessarily advertising on the staff— I mean, on the website, but we provide all the services of an in-house agency, basically. Um, and then we have, uh, reporters that when a story breaks, they know that it goes on the web as well and an editor reads it.

Mm-hmm.

But we also have a guy who updates the web, who does web stories and photographs kind of thing. So it's kind of a independent but also melded together, and we all work together to make sure that anything breaking is happening, it's going to be on our website.

Yeah, it's interesting that you're still printing every day when others have cut back on the print product. Is there a particular reason?

I think there's a reason, uh, yes. I mean, for one thing, we have a great printing, uh, press, and one of the ways the New Mexican has stayed, uh, you know, healthy and robust is that we print almost every newspaper for miles around. We print the Albuquerque Journal. We print the New York Times. We print the weekly papers. We print the University of New Mexico's college paper.

Oh, wow.

So it's a, it's a profit center for us, I would say. But I think the owners of the paper and our senior management, you know, way above my level, understand that a daily newspaper is something that people invite into their home. And if you tell them we don't need you, We don't need to be there on Friday or Saturday.

Yeah.

I think they're gonna start saying, well, why do we need you the other days? So if we're, if we're a necessity, we need to be a daily necessity. We also live in a town where a lot of people, uh, like to, they like print.

Okay.

You know, they're, they're aging. Uh, they grew up with print newspapers. They used to read 3 or 4 back in the days when there were a million newspapers on every corner. And they like having a print product that they can hold and drink their coffee and not worry about spilling it on their, on their screen.

Fair enough. Yeah. Now, when you talk about your reader, okay, so they're a little bit older, but give me an idea actually to the geographical area that you cover with the daily paper.

So I asked our circulation area, uh, circulation guy that, and we cover, uh, Santa Fe, obviously the city and the county. We go to Los Alamos, to Taos. We still, uh, send papers to Las Vegas. So it's a decent, you know, it's an hour's drive, an hour and a half depending on where we go. And we have to look really hard to find people to deliver the paper now because gas has gone up and not a lot of people want to do that job. But we still do it. And we focus mostly on Santa Fe County and Santa Fe City.

Mm-hmm.

That's part of, you You know, having fewer people, but we still you know we'll do a story on on the little town of that's not a town, but a like a community of Eldorado or Poaque or any of the little towns around us. We do stories on them, and it's different from the days when the paper had like bureaus. Let's say in Española, which was is a big town in our region, or a bureau in Taos, or a stringer in Las Vegas. You know, we used to have actual people in those places. So now it's more either picking it up from our sister paper in Taos, which is owned by Robin also, as well as the New Mexican, or, you know, sending somebody out to cover something.

Okay. And tell me a little bit about your competition then. What other local news outlets do you have?

We have the Albuquerque Journal, which still has some presence in Santa Fe, especially during the legislative session. They, um, cover, you know, obviously they have 2, they actually have 2 reporters at the state house and we have 2 reporters at the state house, which I think is pretty unusual today. I don't know why that keeps ringing, but I'm trying to turn it off.

Because you're busy.

I know. And no one ever calls me either. And I took the phone off the hook. But, um, so, so the Journal is still a competitor. It's not the competitor it was. They used to have a Journal North section that was zoned for Santa Fe, and that has been folded into the newspaper. There's a weekly called the Santa Fe Reporter, which is owned by a company in Oregon. I always call it the out-of-state weekly.

Okay.

But that's just my little joke. But they're a very good alternative paper. And so they're here. And interestingly, New Mexico has several of the online public interest papers— or not papers, but news organizations. So there's Source New Mexico, New Mexico In Depth, Searchlight New Mexico, and a lot of them they cherry pick their stories, and they do great investigative pieces that one person works you know two months on, and then others are covering more focus. Let's say during the wildfires, Search New Mexico or yeah, no Source New Mexico did a lot of stories on the burning and interviews with the people. So they kind of take a little niche and they they carve it out for themselves. So it's a really robust market in terms of lots of people reporting stories. Yeah.

What about when it comes to local radio or TV?

TV is from Albuquerque, and they do have Santa Fe people and they cover stories in Santa Fe, but it's basically in Albuquerque. Radio, we have a public radio station also based at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. We have a local public radio station at our college, and then we have a couple of AM stations that do news reports or at least have news shows. So in the afternoon, you can listen to Richard Eads interviewing people, or in the morning, you can listen to Que Suave, and they'll be doing stories on local events.

Got it.

Okay. It actually does sound very robust, especially compared with other places that we've spoken to throughout the country. So why do you suppose Santa Fe is thriving when other places are cutting back so much?

I believe there's a couple of things that happened. In terms of the economy of the business, in that years ago someone decided we would do a weekly arts magazine.

Okay.

And that is a very— it's an excellent publication. It makes money. It covers the area in a way that I don't think any paper our size and most papers 3 or 4 times our size do. And that gives us, you know, another way of reaching readers. We have a specialty publication rotation through the year. That also gives us another way of making money and telling stories that other publications don't have. And beyond that, you know, we've been around since 1849. We have people in this town whose families have subscribed to the New Mexican for 3 or 4 or 5 generations. They've read it. They grew up delivering the paper. They worked here. Their, their grandpa worked here. So there's a connection to the community that I think a lot of people don't have. And then the people who've moved here from other places, tend to be readers. They want, as I said, a print publication. They also have this belief in the idea of local journalism as important to our civic contract, that, that we need to understand what's going on in the world so that, you know, citizens can make decisions.

Yeah.

You know, during the pandemic, when advertising dried up, our readers got together. They called and said, how can we help?

Really?

Yeah.

And it was like, well, we need money, of course. They would band together and they would buy full-page and half-page and quarter-page ads that said, New Mexican, we support you. We're here for you.

Wow.

I don't know that that happened many places in the country.

Yeah, no, that is amazing.

Yeah, it was. I mean, I would look at them and I would cry every time I'd see them because they knew that we were hurting and they were here to support us.

Yeah.

So I think we have a really special connection with our readers.

Yeah. Well, your history is amazing. And I would think— I do want you to tell us the history and how things got started, because I believe if my American history is correct, this was when the Gold Rush was going on in America, when, when your paper was founded. But I would imagine to be able to say you worked there is in itself a claim to fame.

Yeah, I remember when I left the first time. I was going to graduate school back east. I went to American University in DC. And, you know, we were a little paper. We didn't have a huge circulation. But one of the stories I wrote before I left is I got to write Georgia O'Keeffe's obituary because she died when I was here. And while they were fighting over how to present the package of her life and everything, I was calling people and getting a story together. And that led to me being able to cover the fuss over her will and what she had left to New Mexico and her family versus what she left to want Hamilton. So I had some great clips, you know, going off to school and then looking for a job after. And I always said, if you're in a little town of, you know, 30,000 or 40,000, whatever it was back then, you don't get to cover Georgia O'Keeffe's obituary.

Right.

But we did. And we had a prison, and we had a big prison escape the last summer I was here. So I got to cover that too. So Santa Fe was a place where lots of interesting things happened.

Yeah.

And as a young reporter, even though we were a small paper comparatively, we got great stories and people have heard of us, you know?

Yeah.

So that, that makes a huge difference when you go out in the world.

Yeah. Now you are the oldest in the Southwest or the West? What's the actual verbiage here?

I think it's west of the Mississippi, if I remember correctly. I think that's right. So we were founded in 1849, uh, and if you put You know, take the Gold Rush aside, that's happening. But what's happening here is that we just had the Mexican War and the United States basically conquered us. We did not come to the United States, you know, with a petition saying, can we join your great country? We were conquered. And that meant we became a territory. And the Santa Fe Trail had already been open for like 25 years. And Americans wanted to trade with the people here, obviously.

Yeah.

And once the war happened and the Americans took over in terms of the territorial government, you had a huge robust trading experience with our raw goods going back and their, you know, silks and cloth and all that kind of stuff and foodstuffs coming this way.

Right. Okay. Now today's community, I mean, every community we talk to, they have particular interests. Affordable housing is usually a big one. I don't know how it is there. I know when I did a ride across the country this past summer, the price of gasoline became much more important the further west I went. What are the big issues that is always on the mind of the people you serve?

Boy, Santa Fe, we're not as unique as we like to think we are because every place has its long-timers versus old-timers and newcomers kind of thing going on. It's just that here you have an old-timer whose family came here in 1598, you know, and maybe lived in the same place half of those years, you know, or half of those centuries. So that's a big— the changing nature of Santa Fe is an enduring story, whatever decade you're here.

Okay.

Whether you're talking about when the Americans came and all of a sudden not everyone was going to speak Spanish and there were Anglos, oh my gosh, you know, walking in the streets and you had to protect your wives and your children and your girls from them. To, you know, the artists that came in the '20s and the '30s, to the atomic bomb scientists that came in the '40s. And now we have a lot of retirees moving here. We have people who move because of the pandemic from other places.

Okay.

And every time you get a new wave of people, it changes the town.

Right.

So keeping Santa Fe true to itself and to its origins is always the biggest story, I think, in this place.

Okay.

And that plays out with affordable housing. I mean, we have some very, you know, what was the median home price? It's like $460-some-odd thousand in Santa Fe County. It's ridiculous. Um, people who grew up here are buying their houses 45 minutes away in Rio Rancho because they can't afford to live in their hometown.

Okay.

All of those things kind of bubble up together. Government is always a huge interest because we have the state capitol. We have city and county government. We're the seat of both. So we cover those and people are interested in them because they work in them.

Okay. All right. Is that a major employer, would you say?

Yeah, it's a huge employer. It's a huge employer. You know, peace efforts are interesting here because we have Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is where the atomic bomb was developed, and now they're expanding their plutonium pit production. Uh, perhaps. And, and that's, that's just a big issue, whether you work there and you want them to expand because you're going to keep having a job, or because you think, uh, it's going to pollute, or because you're against it because you think it's escalating the national, you know, the international arms race.

Right.

Okay. So all of those things matter here. Um, education matters. Uh, people worry about their kids' schools. They worry about New Mexico not doing as well as other states on national tests. Poverty. We're a poor place. We've always been a poor place. We continue to be a poor place, and how to change that is another one of those overriding stories that never goes away.

Okay, now you mentioned that you have photographers, which in and of itself today is kind of a rarity, but I, but I also kind of imagine you have them because you have such beautiful landscape there.

We do, and I think For whatever reason, we've always recognized that photography is its own journalism. It's not just like, oh, let's have a picture to go with this story. They are just as empowered as a reporter to go out and find stories and to tell stories, you know, through pictures. And especially Robin owns the Taos News, which is probably one of the few weekly papers in the country that has a free standing photographer, and that goes back years and years and years. And it has made that paper— it's always one of the best weekly papers in the country. And it's because I think it has such a strong focus on local people and showing their faces and showing what they're doing is part of that emphasis.

Mm-hmm.

But we do have beautiful landscape. That is entirely true. New Mexico is, is, is just gorgeous. And there's a real interest in New Mexico in preserving our public lands and protecting our environment. That's another huge Yeah.

And what about climate change?

That's, that's a big one because we're getting hotter, we're getting drier. We're in the middle of a drought, which weirdly we've gotten more snow this year than we've had in decades, even though we're in a drought. Um, and we're wondering what to do about water. Water is a huge story. Uh, the river's drying up, the Rio Grande. Um, we have, you know, ground wells that might go dry. We have water pollution from the lab and from, you know, past mines and different things. So you worry about all of those things.

Yeah. Okay. You do have a lot going on there.

It's a very active place. And then you just have the normal stories of, you know, crazy, you know, we have homelessness. How do you deal with that? How do you deal? I mean, the biggest issue in terms of, one of the biggest issues in terms of people writing to me is, They're mad because cars are too loud and they can't sleep.

Okay.

And there's racing up and down and the police aren't doing anything about it. It's like, I don't know what they're supposed to do, like stand out and catch racers and, you know, but, but we have a really wonderful businessman in town who every 3 months will write a column about how you could treat noise pollution.

Okay.

And we'll see if that moves and if we get some noise pollution treated. There's a cultural component in Santa Fe too that makes it interesting and makes it hard to cover and, and sometimes it hard to live here because you, you, you're dealing with, you know, basically the Anglos came and conquered, but before that the Spanish had conquered, and before that, of course, Native Americans had lived here since there was a history.

Mm-hmm.

And those groups have not always gotten along. We as a newspaper have not always covered it sensitively or well. And probably the biggest story of the last few years outside of the pandemic was that in the middle of Santa Fe, there is something called the Soldiers Monument, which is a tribute to Civil War battles in New Mexico. What many people don't know is that there were a couple of really important battles fought in this state against the Confederacy up from Texas that allowed them not to go to California and get gold, which would have kept funding their war.

I see.

So they call it the Gettysburg of the West because it was so important in cutting money off. So in 1868, they erected a monument saying, isn't this a great thing? We did this. And many Hispanic people of today had ancestors in those battles.

I see.

But at the same time, one of the panels was dedicated to the heroes who fought the savages in the Indian Wars. And that has been controversial probably for 50 years because savages is such an unacceptable term.

Right.

And, and it's, it's even more complicated than that because local Pueblo people fought with Spanish and Anglos against, like, more— not transient, but, uh, oh, the Indian, the ones that moved around, you know, the Comanche, the Apache. They didn't live in one place like the Pueblos did. So they fought against other Indians because they were getting raided all the time as well. So the savage doesn't necessarily refer to them, even though I think today's Pueblo people would say we don't like it and get rid of it. So anyway. In 2020, that was torn down during an Indigenous Peoples' Day.

Okay.

You know, we're in the middle of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. Well, that reflected in New Mexico and discussing, you know, what kind of monument should we have and should we pay tribute to, you know, Spanish conquistadores or Kit Carson, who was someone who took Indians on the Long Walk, the Navajo people. And they promised to get rid of it. The mayor of the— at the time promised that he would get rid of it. He didn't really have that power. And the people who wanted it gone said, well, we're not waiting anymore, and they tore it down. Really? Yep. And it's in— now we have a base covered by a plywood box in the middle of town, and everybody is furious about it, and they can't get rid of it. They don't know what to do with it, and they had a year-long process to decide what should we do next, and basically no one can agree. So that's going to be our big story going forward is how do we Honor these, you know, actual heroes of the Civil War, because people still live here and are proud of them.

Yeah.

Without, um, you know, having a monument to basically what was attempted genocide at the same time. And, you know, make everyone feel welcome in their town.

Yeah. Can you give me an idea of the racial makeup today?

Oh, I should know this better. It's, it's a majority minority town still. Um, we've always had a majority of Hispanic residents except for a brief time, like in 1990, when there was like 51% Anglos versus 48% Hispanics and 3% Indians. So I would, I don't know exactly what it is, but it's, it's mostly, it's a majority Hispanic, not like 70 or 80% like it was once upon a time. And then you have a good chunk of Anglos, then you probably have about 10 or 12% Native Americans. And those are people from nearby pueblos, but also urban Indians from all over the country who move here because we have a college, the Institute of American Indian Arts, that people go to school and a lot of them stay here after, or they move here to work at, you know, one of the museums or just because Santa Fe is a center for, you know, just a lot of Indian arts and culture and they like living here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You mentioned the influx from the pandemic. Those people that are moving in, is that mostly Caucasians or how's that working?

Yeah, it's mostly Caucasians. I'm sure there's some other groups. Um, there's, you know, we have more Black people probably than we've had in a long time and more Asian people. So there's different groups of people, but they're, they're basically affluent people who can afford to pay the prices that we charge because our housing is not cheap.

Yeah. So in addition to, to real estate, are— is the taxes also high? Is that an issue?

Property taxes are not as high, interestingly, as a place like Texas, which they get away with not having income tax because they have, they have taxes that are higher in other places, you know, ways. But our gross receipts, we fund everything by kind of, it's like a sales tax, but they call it a gross receipts tax. And that is fairly high. It's like 8 or 9%, you know, on the dollar.

I see.

And then Income tax is, is present. I wouldn't say it's hugely high, but it's, it's a bite if you're from a state where you don't have it.

Okay. And is the remote working, is that still in play there? Because I know a lot of organizations have started going back into the office, both in media as well as other industries. So how did your office fare during the pandemic?

We, um, It was such an interesting moment because you have the first indications that it's bigger than you think. And we had a meeting at which they said, we're going to have the copy desk, because they sit really close together, they're going to spread out all over the building for the next, you know, foreseeable time. So, you know, someone's going to probably sit in your desk, Inez, when you go home because we have to isolate them. So that was the meeting. And then like 3 days later, they basically said, you guys need to go home. So the copy desk, I think, stayed mostly here because our server couldn't allow so many people to be remote. And then there were 2 or 3 reporters who didn't have internet at home or a way to get internet because of where they lived. So they came in.

Yeah.

And then everybody— and the editor came in. He was like at the helm every single day, pretty much. And then everybody else was told to go home. And we couldn't come back, even like if you left your pen, they would say, I'll get it for you. Where is it? And Put it outside the door.

Okay.

So we were very remote and we, we worked, I think, really well considering the fact that it was all remote. Um, and we learned to do things, you know, with the Zoom and team meetings and all the different things. And we, I can't even remember how we came back at the time. We, we own a building downtown Santa Fe that we've been in for decades and, uh, We didn't need all the space, and they found a tenant right about the time— I can't remember if we, we came back to move, basically. So we rented the building, and now we have space elsewhere downtown that we're renting, but someone else is in our big building. So we came back to a different way of doing things completely.

I see. And downtown Santa Fe, is all the traffic back to how it used to be pre-pandemic?

It's pretty close. What happened once, uh, things opened up just a little bit, even though we were remote, uh, Texas of course, you know, didn't believe there was a pandemic and we just had tons of Texans visiting and buying things and, and, you know, keeping our tourist economy going.

Okay.

Um, as far as remote work, the state doesn't work remotely anymore. I think the city doesn't. Um, whether people who moved here and were, let's say, work for Microsoft or Google or one of those companies are still working remotely, I don't know. I think, I think those people might still be because they didn't have an office here anyway.

I see. Ines, give me an idea, like, what's a typical week like for you? Because as you're talking, there's just so many stories going on there all the time, and it just sounds like a fascinating place where even if it's not breaking news, you can always find a feature story or something going on. So just, you know, how much of your life is devoted to The process.

Boy, it's a lot. My, my job is, is kind of apart from all of the news gathering because I do the editorials. Um, and I write 5 a week. It used to be 6, but we've gone down to 5 because I'm supposed to be starting a podcast interviewing newsmakers in town, and that's in the process of getting worked out. But I write the editorial, so I have to come up with the topics, which I do with the help of the editor, uh, Phil Casaus and our owner Robin Martin. She always has good ideas for what she wants because, you know, the important thing about the editorials is it's not my personal opinion. It's the opinion of the newspaper. And by that, I mean, it's the opinion of Robin Martin, or it should be if I'm doing my job correctly, because she's the— she owns the presses, you know, basically. So we do that. Um, so part of the job is gathering the topics. Part of it is interviewing. Part of it is writing, but I also edit all the letters. I edit the My Views on Sunday. We have a section that is anywhere from 4 to 6 pages. It used to be 8 to 10 pages, but it's smaller now. But we have, you know, 8 to 9 to 10 pieces a week by local readers writing about what they think is important. So all of those have to be edited and, you know, fact-checked to the best of our ability. So my, my life is basically doing 7 days of opinion pages. And making sure that we get the best letters in, we get good cartoons, you know, all of those kinds of things.

Okay.

All right.

Do you have off the top of your head, like one editorial that really resonated with people either in a good way or a bad way?

Boy, that's a good one. Probably the ones— I don't know if it was the editorial or it was the topic, but the obelisk coming down, that's the other name for the Soldiers Monument, really has resonated. Throughout the time. So I'm home on pandemic time. I had had a letters assistant who worked 20 hours a week, and when the pandemic started, we trimmed the staff a little bit, the paper did. So I lost that person. So I'm home and learning to do everything myself in a new schedule, and George Floyd happens, and people just get like all hot and bothered. And then the obelisk— then they decide they're going to get rid of the obelisk. And people start writing. So we literally had like 2 full pages of letters on that topic. Then it got torn down. So we had 2 full pages of letters on that topic. And anytime I write about it, people respond to those editorials. And it's, it's a real complicated story because I myself, you know, I'm from a family that came here in 1598, my mother's family, not my dad. So I have roots here.

Mm-hmm.

The people who were protesting the obelisk were led by a collective of young women, and one of the young women leaders happens to be my niece and my goddaughter. So I have a, you know, complete conflict of interest there, which, you know, the paper knows, and I told everybody. I always tell people, here's my many conflicts. You know, my husband is a Pueblo Indian, so I am the mother of a Pueblo boy.

Mm-hmm.

So all of those things come together. And then my dad was an Anglo out-of-stater, not from here, just passed through kind of thing. So it is a very complicated story and you have to reflect all of those points of view while trying to lead the paper, use the paper to lead people to not a resolution, but to some ideas for solutions. Because one of the important things about the editorial page from Robin Martin's perspective is that it's not a place where people to shout at each other. It's a place to seek solutions.

That's nice to hear today, especially in the media world that we live in.

No, it's huge. And, you know, we write— for years we would write about ugly weeds, which people would say, that's so small and petty. And it is small and petty, but it's like an indication. If you can't cut your weeds, what other things can you not do in city or state government? Well, they hired more people to cut weeds and now the parks look nicer. So those things make a difference. And, and I can— I always know that people are reading letters because, because it's not just, you know, my ideas or the paper's ideas, it's the letter writer's ideas. And then like a month later, somebody in government will say, we're going to do X. Well, you can go back and find when it was in the New Mexican as a letter to the editor 6 weeks before.

Okay. All right. We actually have to wrap because we're at time and you've been great. Thank you for that. Um, but I do have one more question for you.

Yes, ma'am.

And it is just basically, you know, why do you do this?

Oh, why do I do this? Because I always wanted to. I mean, I was a little girl, uh, on 7th Street in Las Vegas with my little, uh, oh, the notepads and taking a pencil to ask, uh, people around the block— Miss Mays, Lucille at the beauty parlor— what happened today. And I would come back to my mother and tell her the stories. And I actually wasn't able to write then. But I thought I could, and I just always wanted to be a reporter. And that's— I started working, I was editor of my high school paper, editor of my college paper, and started working when I was 21. And except for a brief stint at Dairy Queen in high school, that's the only job really I've ever had.

Got it. Well, good for you.

I'm lucky.

You know, the passion shows and the commitment shows, so I do appreciate you taking the time to be with us today.

And thank you for shining a spotlight on local media, because if we don't have it, we'll get more George Santos elected all across the country.

The Fair Media Council is a 501 nonprofit organization advocating for quality news and working to create a media-savvy society. For more information about the Fair Media Council and upcoming Fast Chat shows, check out fairmediacouncil.org.