by JEN BIUNDO
Nearly seven years ago, one cold November night in downtown Austin’s warehouse district, a funny-looking guy in a bow tie and a bowler hat uttered one line that would change my life forever: “So, you wanna write some stories for my newspaper?”
As you can probably guess, I said yes.
My meeting with Hays Free Press editor Bill Petersen was one of those chance encounters that, though you don’t know it at the time, winds up marking a cataclysmic intersection in your life.
I was 24 years old, the ink getting dry on my undergraduate honors thesis from the University of Texas at Austin. For the past few months I had just enjoyed being finished with college, paying my bills by slinging lattes and bartending at a hip downtown café and lounge.
There was plenty of fun to be had as a young downtown denizen, but I was getting restless for the next big challenge. Working on the side copyediting electronic textbooks, I was trying to figure out how to get my foot in the door of the book publishing industry.
Over the course of a few weeks, as I sat at the café after my shifts, red pen in hand and working on my copyediting, I struck up a friendship with Bill, who, judging by his impressive collection of saddle shoes and bow ties, could only be a journalist. I’m still not quite sure what made him think a random barista had it in her to be a good reporter, but I’ll always be glad he gave me a shot.
As my early 20s gave way to my 30s, I learned the ropes of journalism, rising through the ranks to the position of senior reporter, then managing editor, becoming a mother and homeowner along the way.
On Wednesday, as this paper ships off to the printer’s, I’ll be sitting in my first graduate class at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. After so long covering public policy as a reporter, I’ve decided to give it a go myself. I’d be sad to leave behind a career that I truly love, but fortunately, we’ve come up with a way to keep me from going into ink withdrawal. The eminently capable and experienced reporter Brad Rollins is taking over the reins as managing editor, but I’ll be sticking around as a part-time reporter, covering the city of Buda and doing some feature writing.
At some point in the last seven years, journalism stopped being just a job and became part of my identity. It’s been a challenging, fascinating and rewarding career. Sure, there’s the workaday meeting coverage, the municipal revenue bonds and wastewater treatment plant expansions that occupy so much of a reporter’s waking life.
But there was also the exciting and dramatic news, like the intrigue and corruption at the Pedernales Electric Cooperative, a story we broke right here at the Hays Free Press. Then there were the tales of incredible strength that made me feel privileged to write them. Most recently, a rape and domestic violence survivor named Nicole Salomon trusted me to tell her story, courageously breaking the silence that so often cloaks abuse and sexual assault.
And of course, I got to cover our very own Hays County “news of the weird.” I’m still partial to the tale of the kid busted for driving down the interstate with a large marijuana bush cradled in his lap, and the story of the man who, after a presumably heroic night of substance abuse, decided that his girlfriend’s pet Chihuahua was possessed by the devil and required an exorcism in the baptismal font at Santa Cruz Catholic Church. You can’t make that stuff up.
More than anything else, my seven years at the Hays Free Press have made me truly come to appreciate the institution of community journalism. It’s not always glamorous and the pay sure isn’t great, but we small town reporters get in there and cover the news that matters to local residents. We’re independent-minded, hard-working and we genuinely care about our beat.
Newspapers small and large are trying to figure out how to navigate the rapidly shifting landscape of journalism in the 21st century, as readers move from a subscription and advertisement-based print to a free online medium. I don’t know how that question will get resolved or what journalism will look like a couple of decades from now. But I do hope that small town newspapers like the Hays Free Press keep trucking along covering their communities, and that readers and advertisers continue to support them. Community journalism isn’t something we should be without.
