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My Back Pages

February 22, 2008

Take a piece of my heart

Posted at 10:18 am by Neal Pattison

I am getting on an airplane this evening to fly to a wake.

It’s not a friend or family member who has passed away. It is a newspaper.

The founder of the Albuquerque Tribune drew national attention to high-level corruption in the 1920s, reporting on something that became known as the Teapot Dome Scandal. And throughout its life, the Trib lived up to its early reputation as a champion of good government and populism.

Decades ago, the Trib’s parent company locked the newspaper into a contract that ensured its short-term survival – but guaranteed it would never gain market share.

But being the underdog in a two-newspaper town never dulled the Trib’s edge. It had a staff of journalists who felt intimately connected with the community, and the community seemed to return the feeling.

During the early ‘90s, while I worked at the Trib, one of its writers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice -- and in 1994, a Trib reporter won the prize for her in-depth stories about government experiments in which unsuspecting Americans were injected with plutonium.

At the Albuquerque Tribune, I witnessed firsthand the contributions journalists can make when they have a clear purpose: To strengthen their community by informing their community.

The corporation that owns the Albuquerque Tribune is headquartered in Ohio. In recent years, it has closed declining newspapers in Cincinnati, Birmingham and El Paso. Now the company has closed the Trib – which may have been the smaller paper in town, but could never be mistaken for the weaker one.

It is a good thing to know there are journalists working at newspapers all over the country who had a little bit of Trib rub off on them. And I hope I've brought some of it to Everett with me.