Category: Newspapers

R.I.P., Dave Mitchell

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments
David Mitchell. Pic by Bob Albano, lifted from The New Mexican.

My last boss in the newspaper game, David Mitchell, has gone west. He was 90.

Dave found me roaming the streets back in the summer of 1988, about six months after I got laid off by a chain of weeklies in the north-Denver metro. I was one raggedy-ass mutt back then, but he must have seen some potential I didn’t realize I had, because he hired me to work the copy desk at The New Mexican and afterward gave me the run of the newsroom until he himself got the shove in 1991 for pissing off the big boss, owner Robert McKinney.

I was running out of options and unemployment compensation when Dave summoned me to Santa Fe for an interview. A job I thought was mine at the Ventura County Star-Free Press in California had gone to somebody else, and while New Mexico was short on ocean views, I was in no position to be picky about locale, or much of anything else.

So I was decked out in my best looking-for-work kit when I walked into Dave’s newsroom, coat, necktie, the works, hoping to make a good impression. He was clad in Santa Fe casual, gives me the up-and-down, and says, “You didn’t have to get all dressed up for us.”

Well. Shit. Lost dog comes home.

Dave wasn’t just a newsman, he was a “news” man. As in “Fuck a bunch of features, bring me the news.” Old school. Tough but fair, and hard to impress, especially when he had one foot on your chair and was leaning over you like a ton of bricks getting ready to fall, daring you to feed him some weak line of bullshit.

I think I managed to impress him exactly once, when I was still on the copy desk. A story about a potential school-superintendent hire seemed oddly familiar to me, and then I remembered where I’d seen it before.

“This is from a Marx Brothers movie,” I told the city desk. The city desk didn’t believe me. The library was just down the street. I was right. A school-board member was having our reporter on. Dave gave me a $50 bonus and another long look, the kind that you’d give to a little green man who just stepped out of a flying saucer parked on your lawn.

When the Ventura paper got back in touch to offer me that job I’d been so sure was mine, until it wasn’t, I said thanks all the same, but Dave Mitchell pulled me off the breadline when I had nothing in my pockets but a pair of hands, and I’ma dance with the one what brung me.

I eventually escaped the copy desk and just sort of wandered around the newsroom, working for Pancho Morris on the sports desk, and Denise Kusel at the weekend arts magazine Pasatiempo, dusting off my reporting chops to write some cycling copy, taking some snaps with a camera Pancho laid on me, even helping with a redesign of the newspaper that introduced me to the wonderful world of Apple products.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was slowly working my way towards a whole new career, as a freelancer. And shortly after McKinney sacked Dave over a series of stories looking into environmental hazards at Los Alamos National Lab, with my mom slipping into dementia up in Bibleburg, well … I got right after it. Herself and I had been married less than a year, the publisher had been asking pointed questions like, “Are you still here?” and I figured it would be best for all of us if I were not.

I was already freelancing cartoons and copy to VeloNews in Boulder. Bicycle Retailer and Industry News came next, co-founder Marc Sani being a Santa Fe riding buddy. These steady gigs lasted for a lot longer than they should have, and they led to other work too, like my stint with Adventure Cyclist, whose editor Mike Deme brought me aboard not for my touring expertise — I didn’t have any — but because he liked the way I wrote.

So, thanks, Dave. I don’t know where I would’ve wound up if you hadn’t taken a chance on me way back when. But it sure as shit wouldn’t have been here, happily married, safely retired, and with a couple bucks in the bank too, typing up some memories on a Mac in New Mexico.

Invasion of the Circulation Snatchers

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
A little trip down Memory Lane to The New Mexican, circa 1991.

Since I’m not road-tripping this holiday weekend, what say we do a bit of time-traveling?

Shortly after I joined The New Mexican in 1988, publisher Robert McKinney reclaimed that paper from the soulless zopilotes at Gannett. He’d sold it to them in 1976 on the condition that he would retain editorial and managerial control, but just two years later took them to court, alleging breach of contract.

It took a while, but McKinney beat them like a chicken-thieving mutt, returned as publisher in 1987, and in ’89 reacquired the paper he’d first bought in 1949 for a cool half-mil’, but this time paying a slightly higher price: “his remaining Gannett stock, then worth about $33 million,” according to The New York Times.

Today The New Mex remains one of the rarest of birds — a locally owned newspaper. McKinney’s daughter, Robin McKinney Martin, is the big boss.

And once again a McKinney is getting set to throw some hands with Gannett — this time, down south, where those bandidos own and operate the Las Cruces Sun News.

Now, I’ve not read that paper in ages. I do look at its website now and again, and every time I wonder why in hell I bothered.

This is what the American daily newspaper looks like in The Year of Our Lard 2026: the journalistic equivalent of the walking dead. A zombie, full of canned “news” from elsewhere, edited and printed out of town, far from its readership, if any. Check the “contact us” page: Just three staffers listed there — a news director, a news reporter, and a sports reporter.

Now check the contact page at The New Mex.

One name you won’t see there is Julia Gentin. She’ll be joining The New Mex in July to work in Doña Ana County — home of the Sun News — as the Santa Fe paper’s first bureau journalist for southern New Mexico.

“Yes, we’re growing our newsroom and expanding our coverage area,” writes executive editor Bill Church.

It’s an ambitious project, and I’ll be interested to see how it shakes out. Santa Fe and Las Cruces are very different places, and The New Mex is not the acme of perfection. Neither is the Albuquerque Journal, likewise locally owned. No newspaper is.

And speaking of zombies, I wonder whether McKinney — who died in 2001 — might be suiting up for the battle from The Beyond.

Some Gannett drone once called him an “old coot” in a memo. Which was accurate. But I don’t think he liked it.

Tempting fate

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Uh oh. …

To a journalist, one day looks pretty much the same as any other.

There’s someone getting knifed, and someone doing the knifing, and someone writing up a short for the Metro page off the police report. Possibly you.

You work odd hours — say, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., or maybe 1 p.m. to 10 p.m., or even 4 p.m. to whenever the press runs if you’ve gotten tired of writing up shorts for the Metro page and moved over to the copy desk, where almost nobody wears a tie and everybody drinks lunch. Your days off will be something like Tuesday and Wednesday, and odds are that you will clock in for at least 60 percent of the major holidays.

“So, it’s Friday, huh? Who gives a shit? I need art for the Metro page. Did the cops give up a mugshot of our slasher?”

Oh, wait: It’s not just Friday. It’s Friday the 13th.

Nobody really knows how Friday the 13th came to give everyone the willies bad enough to justify a dozen slasher flicks that grossed $908.4 mil’ at the box office. Wikipedia says maybe Loki being the 13th guest at a gods’ dinner party that went sideways had something to do with it, but that sounds like Martha Stewart pitching a project to Marvel Studios, and what great good fortune for the cinematic arts it would be if all the superhero franchises went to hell with Jason and stayed there.

Anyway, I decided to try my luck today and went for a trail run (13-minute miles), followed that up with three sets of 13 reps of each of the inconsequential resistance exercises I perform irregularly, and finally took a 13-minute shower. And what happened?

Herself and a visiting pal came back from a day of estate sales and lunch with three fat slices of cake — carrot, coffee, and chocolate cherry — to chase the remains of the pozole verde I made yesterday.

Looks like I’m forked.

Just another ink-stained retch. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments
One of Your Humble Narrator’s clips from The New Mexican, circa 1991.

I suppose I should be raving about what’s happening to The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and just about every other newspaper or magazine in this misbegotten country.

But hey, if we’re going to be dumb enough to elect a venomous orange man-baby as the Pestilence of the Benighted Snakes — twice! — I guess we deserve to be pig-ign’ant of what he’s doing, too.

Anyway, the only thing raving about shitty newspapers ever got me was an invitation — more than one, actually — to leave the one I was raving about and drag my surly ass off to some other shitty newspaper, posthaste, s’il vous plaît, don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya, etc. I managed my final escape from The New Mexican in 1991, one step ahead of the publisher’s spike heel, and that was that.

You regulars know the story. I had joined that paper in 1988 as a copy editor, then cycled (har de har har) through a number of gigs — assistant sports editor, assistant features editor, and finally features editor, doing a little cartooning and cycling reportage on the side — before taking it on the Jesse Owens in ‘91 to do as a freelancer what pretty much every Damon Runyon character did on Broadway, to wit: “the best he can, which is an occupation that is greatly overcrowded at all times. …”

Boy howdy.

Still, 15 years of newspapering set me up pretty well for freelancing, because while I wasn’t exactly great at anything, I had learned to be OK at a number of things: writing hard news, soft features, and commentary (and fast, too); editing other people’s work and proofing pages; drawing cartoons and taking photos. I would try just about any old thing for any old crook who could spell my name right on a check and remember to mail it while I could still remember what I did to earn it.

So there I was, just doing the best I could and plenty of it, because freelancing paid less than newspaper work, and the kind of newspapers that would hire a hairy pain in the ass like Your Humble Narrator didn’t pay shit. If you wanted to get a raise, you had to move to another newspaper, and without being kicked, too.

Or maybe that was just me.

Happily, freelancers basically pioneered the concept of “remote work,” which kept my pain from manifesting itself daily in various editors’ asses. For a while, anyway. I developed a long reach. Nevertheless, I managed to log 30 years as a freelancer, twice the time I spent raving my way through a half-dozen Western dailies and one weekly outfit, and only had to move four times.

And newspapers taught me how.

I liked newspaper work, when I wasn’t hating it. The people were smart, except for the ones who weren’t, and you could try your hand at damn near anything unless you wanted to get paid more for it, in which case nix. The shift was basically hours of fuck-all peppered with seconds of cardiac arrest and/or stroke and we had to remake the entire fucking product every fucking day.

And no do-overs. Once your mistakes were off the press and soiling the readers’ greedy little paws they were yours forever, like misspelled tattoos.

God, it was fun. Except when it wasn’t. But sometimes even then, too. Plus it fed and housed me for 15 years, and set me up for the next three decades.

So fuck Jeff Bezos anyway.

‘Thank you for this new day. …’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
The Supervisor, the M-Dogg, and Your Humble Narrator gear up for a 63-mile ride from Santa Rosa to Hopland in August 2006.

Looking back over some old training logs I was smugly congratulating myself on what I thought was a strong start to this, the Year of Our Lard 2026.

“366 miles for January,” sez I to myself, no one else being handy. “Wrapped it up with the first 100-mile week of the New Year. Not bad; not bad at all.”

And then I checked in with a couple old velo-newsie bros. No, not fellow refugees from that once-storied journal of competitive cycling — rather, fellow refugees from the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. Like Your Humble Narrator, they also ride bicycles.

The Supervisor and the M-Dogg both live in Northern California now, and it’s been nearly 20 years since the three of us last saddled up together. I’m the only one who’s fully retired, in part because I’m the only one who has a wife with a job of work, which for an old slacker keen to skip his pulls into the wind is like drafting a UPS truck on a summer day.

Anyway, there we were, chatting away via text, and the M-Dogg mentions that he just wrapped a 49.6-mile ride with 2,020 feet of vertical.

Yow.

I mentioned having done a leisurely 3-mile trail run, explaining that I got a late start and didn’t feel like kitting up for a ride.

“And here the M-Dogg is already cranking out the half-centuries,” I added.

“Mo, tell him your January mileage,” says The Supe.

“760 in January,” replies the M-Dogg, “only possible in a very dry January.”

That’s 760 miles. Not kilometers, furlongs, cubits, rods, or whatever the hell it is that Californicators use to measure the distance between organic vineyards and fair-trade java shops. And here I was, cackling over the little 366-mile egg I laid last month, which was even drier here in the Duck! City desert.

“Comparisons are odious,” they say. Ho, ho. When When John Fortescue wrote that shit he was probably on the short end of a miles-gobbling contest with Henry VI, who covered a lot of ground during the Wars of the Roses.

“Better luck next year, Forty old chum! Oh, dear, here comes Edward, with that ‘Oo’ d’ye think is the bloody king around here, mate?’ look on his face. Right, I’m off. …”

Which brings us to this poem from James Crews, “Winter Morning,” from which our headline comes. Unwrap your gift and be grateful for whatever it is you find inside.