When I walked into the offices of the New Mexico Independent in September 1971 to deliver my first column, I smelled smoke, and oily ink, and hot paper.



In late 1970, Mark and Mary Beth Acuff, and a few investors, had bought El Independiente and its flat bed press. Along with the equipment came a contract to sell legal advertising which kept the Acuffs’ cash flow going in good times and bad.



Along with that flat bed press came a pressman to run it. At the end of the press, a line of flaming jets sputtered as ink-heavy pages passed over them to dry. The paper often stayed too long on the flames and great cries of fire went up and everyone around frantically stamped out the burning newsprint.



In its heyday, the New Mexico Independent/El Independiente of the 1970s focused on state and city news as if Albuquerque and New Mexico were important enough to deserve dedicated, first-rate reporting and commentary. Which, of course, they do.



As an irreverent, alternative weekly, the Independent battled the media establishment, especially the Journal and the Tribune, and its business monopoly, poked fun at TV and radio news, took on City Hall and the county commission at every turn, and championed a visionary outlook about controlled growth, water management, alternative fuels, and what’s known today as sustainability.



It was a paper that knew what it believed and wasn’t afraid to say exactly what it thought. It had some very good years, and some hard financial times.



In the last decades, local coverage here has fallen on sad times. Obsessed with national news, national culture, national scandal, mainstream media here follows a trend of underfunding its own newsrooms and getting the cheapest, canned coverage it can buy. In fact, print media locally is looking more and more like television news. And when national stories with important facts are run, they tend to be hidden from view on the farthest of back pages. Traditionally, it wasn’t that way with the Tribune, but the Tribune is no more.



The old New Mexico Independent, irascible and cranky as it could be, was accused of being from time to time a shill for the Democratic Party. Certainly no friend of the class warfare waged against working people by the GOP, the Independent leaned more towards a green libertarianism, than standard liberalism. But its individualism was always tempered by a unbending emphasis on economic and social justice for all.



The Acuffs’ Independent saw the world through the lens of New Mexico. It understood that all politics is local and that all news is local too. A city and state can’t carry on meaningful public discourse without meaningful, in depth reporting.



How things have changed. The daily papers in Albuquerque used to try to be papers of record. They had seasoned beat reporters who mastered their subject matter, and had deep contacts and inside sources.



Now the old beats – including UNM, the courts, the cops, federal court, planning, City Hall, and politics - are hardly covered at all compared to the way they used to be. And when they are covered, it seems there’s a new byline every time.



The holes in reporting are vast. Take the state’s biggest environmental law suit in history – the State of New Mexico v. General Electric and more than a dozen others. The state asked for $4 billion to $6 billion in damages in federal court, claiming the defendants had ruined the ground water in the south valley near San Jose forever.



Far from getting the blanket coverage it deserved, the suit’s complicated environmental and legal issues went by almost unnoticed until the state lost the case and its appeal.



But there are beacons of great journalism these days. The science beat in New Mexico is covered brilliantly by the Journal’s John Fleck and the New Mexican’s Sue Vorenberg. Joe Monahan’s blog on New Mexico Politics is as good as it gets, great coverage and, most important, useful insight. The Weekly Alibi is doing more in-depth environmental stories with strong writing and reporting. Duke City Fix and M-Pyre online are always informative local reads.



Jeff Radford, editor and publisher of the Corrales Comment, produces what I think is the best local paper in the west, covering the issues of Corrales, and distinguishing itself as a major paper with its coverage of the bitter, ongoing dispute between Corrales residents and Intel over air pollution and the ill health of hundreds of Corralesaños.



Maybe the tough economic times ahead will stimulate more hard-nosed journalism online - here, of course, at the new New Mexico Independent - and on paper.

 

It never hurts to hope.