Community news – Texas Center For Community Journalism

BY: Lizzie Guajardo

Local news in Lindale is not going away any time soon.

An Irving based non-profit media company operated by John Starkey is now operating the weekly newspaper there.

The Lindale News and Times announced last month it would be closing after 124 years of serving the community.

That’s when Starkey swooped in.

His company, Rambler Texas Media, boosts a non-profit structure will tie the newspaper more closely to the community because it will be owned through community sponsorships.

Two weeks after the closure announcement, the rebranded Lindale News rolled off the press and onto racks and mailboxes once again.

“Ultimately, it creates an overall business model that helps everybody,” Starkey said. “That’s what we are trying to do when we donated our paper, we took on a mission of trying to make it everything. An improvement for the whole community, the whole newspaper industry.”

This is not Starkey’s first non-profit newspaper project. He is working with two other newspapers that moved to the non-profit model to keep their doors open.

Starkey owned and operated The Rambler in Irving for 20 years before making the change to a non-profit model in January 2023. He then used this same tactic six months later to save the Ozona Stockman.

Rambler Texas Media serves as the non-profit management company of the three imprints.

Starkey is always looking for ways to better this program and apply a non-profit model similar to those used in other industries, such as radio.

“For the local small community, the newspapers are desperately needed to be saved,” Starkey said. “It starts with rescuing the newspapers that are in the most jeopardy. For us, that’s the ones that are closed or are closing.”

Starkey says he is aware of three other local newspapers that could be closed by the beginning of next year. His goal is to create a non-profit business model that can be used by community newspapers to keep them open, so they can continue to consistently publish positive news about their community that is available not only locally but worldwide.

“If we can pull this off in Lindale, it would mean that we have started to form a system that can walk into a small community newspaper and do a revamping of it in a matter of week,” Starkey said. “This would be the second one we have done.”

As Starkey continues to work with newspapers, he wants to test practices to see what works best and then share them in the industry. His hope is that the next generation of journalists will come in and continue to change the newspaper industry for the better.

I am entering my second decade at the helm of the Whitesboro News-Record.

Granted, I’ve left a few brief times and come back, but all roads have led us back here. This January will mark the 11th anniversary of my first being named the editor and a lot has changed for me in that time.

We have one more child than we did back then and the twin babies we had back then aren’t babies anymore.

I managed to earn a master’s degree along the way.

We were able to buy a house.

I am the only face in this office that was here when I first started more than 10 years ago.

Time marches on.

I thumb through the archives each week and see the faces of people we’ve lost over the past 10 years. I was blessed to have known them all.

I think ahead another 10 years and choke up at the number of beloved community members we hold dear today who won’t be there with us then.

The community newspaper does a few things: We report on births. We report on graduations. We report on marriages. We report on deaths. We report on all the highlights in a person’s life. We tell the stories of the people with whom we share our corner of the planet.

We do all these things together with you. We live, love, grieve and grow together, as a community.

It is these connections that keep me in this business.

It is these relationships I hold so dear. Life is short and we must cherish each other.

I was reminded of this last Wednesday when the police scanner reported a seven-car accident on Hwy. 377.

It was pouring rain and we hadn’t gone to print yet. I knew what I needed to do.

I’ve covered too many of these scenes, but never one quite like this. It was dark, and wet, and cold. There was wreckage everywhere and I couldn’t make sense of it.

Over the years I’ve developed a habit when walking onto an accident scene where I know someone has lost their life.

I find a first responder I know well— a familiar face— and I ask, “Is it anyone we know?”

Too often, it is.

This is where the lines of objectivity in responsible journalism can get skewed by emotion.

And this was the case last week. There was a man declared dead as a result of this massive pile-up. I found out later I knew him.

Albeit, years ago, but I knew him.

He was a high school boss. I hauled hay for him and fed his cows on occasion.

I even once sold him a piece of furniture I had built.

It’s times like these covering the news in your community hits home.

It’s certainly not the first time it’s happened either.

As community journalists, we sometimes must report events that are the absolute low points in someone’s life. And it is often people we know.

I hesitate to offer examples about each and every one of these experiences in the course of my career— in the spirit of not reliving them, but they are plentiful and they are hard to deal with.

This job can leave you feeling physically beaten at the end of a day.

The degree of tragedy in which you encountered with a given story can correlate to this beating.

I have been left feeling like I’ve literally been kicked in the gut more than once.

Maybe I internalize the pain of others too much. Maybe I feel guilty about having to make news of their sorrow.

Maybe I wish all news was good news.

Last Wednesday was one of these times.

After we put the paper to bed that night, I couldn’t rest my thoughts.

I took pen to notebook and jotted down a few words:

“And just like that, the emergency scanner goes off. Seven car pile-up on the highway. At least one deceased. Calling for the jaws of life. Not enough ambulances available. Bystanders pitching in. Performing CPR. And the community newspaper is there to document it all. The hard work of heroes and the sorrow of families. Seven lives changed forever and at least one life ended. I’ve been doing this a long time and it will never be easy.”

That last sentence got me.

“Will this ever be easy?” I asked myself.

Almost immediately I answered myself, “It can’t be easy. I can’t let it become easy.”

The day this becomes easy is the day I’ve lost empathy for people in times of sorrow. The day we lose empathy is the day we need to be doing something else. We can’t serve our communities properly without proper empathy.

No matter your line of work, no matter your passion — we all have an effect on the people we serve. Our community. Our tribe.

No matter your work, you serve. We were put here to serve others.

The day we lose our empathy is the day we cease to serve.

Don’t lose your empathy. Service is not supposed to be easy.