The news: our job, your right

I hold down a number of jobs here at Endeavor News- everything from network administrator and publisher to sanitary engineer (janitor) and circulation director (delivery boy). And then the proverbial "everything in between."

It's a great way to learn a lot of stuff real fast and grow old in similar fashion. But it also keeps me intimately in touch with the product you're holding in your hand, how it's perceived and what we ought to be doing to improve it.

And even though I am part geek and part maintenance man, I am a newspaper man at my core.

In rural, meat and potatoes America, the kind of hard news that absorbs into the fabric of the community doesn't come along every week. In fact, it rarely comes around once a year. I don't know a way to cleverly or freshly say that the lack of that kind of news is a good thing, part of the reason a lot of us live here.

As reporters, of course, we believe there's big news every week, but it's rare when news is of the variety that interests everyone.

I offer no intellectual interpretation of why this is true, but the fact is most hometown newspaper readers could scarcely care less about what the commissioners do, unless, of course, they announced a tax increase. Ditto for school boards and municipal councils and boards.

But, there exists a kind of news that attracts us all, the kind of news that takes us out of our way to get it officially from a source we trust, a source that can verify or nullify what we've heard on the "mountain telegraph."

And when that happens, newspapers are reminded what their core business really is.

Now that we tread the unchartered and considerablycriticized, dual-county, news coverage waters, I am stopping short of saying our lead story from last week was without debate one of those kinds of stories for our readership, despite my absolute personal belief that it was/is.

This kind of omni-attracting news is almost always crimerelated because we very much want to know who among us may have violated those things that morally-bind a community.

Nevermind that it's good business, newspapers have an absolute responsibility to disseminate that kind of news. And because it is good business, we work even harder at reporting it.

But no matter how hard we work, we can't do a responsible and thorough job of reporting crime-related news in the absence of a working relationship with the county's top law enforcement official, the district attorney.

Notice the choice of words there because the two need not care about each other at all on any other level, but because what they do is critically important to the welfare of the community, they must have a working relationship.

When Paul Malizia invited the media to his office last week to announce that his office had filed murder charges against a local woman, it marked the beginning of what I believe will be a new level of honesty and responsibility in the district attorney's office in Cameron County.

It is a welcomed change.

For the past 10 years, and especially the last couple years, the district attorney's office in Cameron County was something of a mystery. Very little, if any, information was offered to the media by thendistrict attorney Tom Tompkins, and most often none was shared even when requested.

Tompkins refused to communicate with the media and would never indicate why. Instead, he would elude to the injustices he and his family suffered as a result of him being the DA in a small town and issue a flat "no comment" to reporters, or simply not take their calls at all.

Perplexed, we tried a new approach recently, drafting a questionnaire relative to a story we were working on that addressed the rise in drug use in the area. Tompkins refused to even take the questionnaire.

We took the high road, noting in the story only that he had "no comment."

But behind the scenes we were angry that we were kept from doing our job the way it ought to be done by someone who, many believe, was scarecely doing his at all.

That's why few people in Cameron County law enforcement found it to be coincidental that crime had reached alarming levels by the time the district attorney's office had a changing of the guard.