Five years ago, Rick Wamre asked me to help him with a new project: He wanted to start a monthly community newspaper in Lakewood and East Dallas.
“You’re crazy,” I said. “It will never work.”
Once again, my knowledge of journalism was surpassed only by my business sense. Rick has been proven right (something that happens with a legendary regularity), and his new project has become a fixture in the Lakewood/East Dallas and Lake Highlands communities.
There are dozens of reasons why Advocate Community Newspapers shouldn’t have worked – and we heard every single one of them, from every single newspaper wiseguy in the business. We were too small, too focused, too old-fashioned, too local, too infrequent, and too news-oriented.
The naysayers (myself included) had a point. What the Advocate does isn’t taught anymore in any journalism or business school; in fact, it’s probably discouraged in these days of media behemoths. If Disney is buying newspaper companies, what business do we have starting one?
The Morning News is supposed to be the future of the newspaper business. It’s a regional publication, heading a stable of smaller papers. It’s not only backed by massive amounts of capital, but it’s part of a larger media conglomerate, with sister companies in television, TV production, and the like.
Yet we’re still here, every prediction (mine included) to the contrary. We’re here for two reasons – Rick’s version, and the good sense of our readers, who appreciate what we were trying to do and supported us from the start.
Rick saw a need for the Advocate, saw that our readers wanted a place to read about their schools and their families and their neighbors. More importantly, he had the business and journalism skills to turn that need into reality. That’s not easy to do, as the newspaper wasteland that surrounds us proves. I have worked for six papers in almost two decades in the business; today, only one of them (other than the Advocate) is still in business.
Our readers have responded to Rick’s vision. Nothing proves this more than what happens when I go to the grocery store. I have had my picture in most of the papers I have worked for, including the old Times Herald, but Advocate readers are the only ones who have ever stopped me in the store to ask me about what I have written.
They read the paper, and they pay attention – and there is no greater reward for anyone who does what we do.
It’s one of the many things about the Advocate that I will miss. This is my final column, the 60th consecutive since our first issue was published in April 1991. That seems a fitting place to stop, and to move on to a number of other writing projects.
The trip has been well worth the ride, even when I wasn’t doing the column. I’ll never forget throwing the first couple of issues of the Advocate onto doorsteps from the back of an open convertible, or watching helplessly as our computer system crashed – repeatedly – just hours before the paper was due at the printer.
Nothing I did in the newspaper business gave me as much pleasure as writing this column, and few things made me prouder than contributing to the Advocate.
One of the reasons people go into the newspaper business is to make a difference. At the Advocate, I think we are making a difference, and we are leaving our neighborhoods a better place than when we found them.
