I read with great sadness last week that the Roswell Daily Record is ceasing operations after 123 years of publication. It’s the second daily newspaper in our state to announce plans to shut down this year because of declining readership, rising costs and aging equipment. The Gallup Independent announced late this winter that it was ceasing operations as well.
I had a lot of personal connection with the Record. When my father began his dedicated work as editor and publisher of the Ruidoso News in the early 1950s, he would regularly visit the Record and talk with its then editor Al Stubbs. I remember going with him on some of those visits, when the newspaper was located downtown in an old building that had those unique smells of a newspaper office. It was a memorable scent — ink, giant rolls of newsprint paper, wheat paste glue to post up dummy sheets, oil to keep the presses lubricated, and oily sawdust to clean floors and cigarette smoke from the reporters pounding away on their typewriters to meet a deadline.
Later, when I was state editor with United Press International, I was part of the process that encouraged then publishers Robert and Margie Beck to subscribe to the wire service’s new high speed news delivery network. I worked closely with then editor Jack Swickard to make sure that the state news content that they wanted was supplied by our two bureaus in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. It was a big moment for us at UPI because we had pushed out the competing Associated Press for the honor of supplying the paper with news from the state, nation and the world.
Roswell was the second biggest city in New Mexico when I arrived in the state, fueled in large part by the presence of Walker Air Force Base, which had grown from a World War II bomber training base to host one of the nation’s largest fleets of B-52 bombers. But in 1967, the base was closed largely due to increasing costs of the Vietnam war and a changing focus in the Department of Defense and United States Air Force.
What most people remember about Roswell is the famous UFO incident in 1947, in which the air base played a central role.
Walker officials said a rancher northeast of the city had discovered unusual debris on his land and notified the then “Roswell Army Air Field” about the find. An official news release issued by Walter Haut, the public information officer for the Roswell Army Air Field, claimed that the debris was extraterrestrial. The very next day, the Army retracted the story, saying the debris was actually from a shredded metallic coated weather balloon. The headline about that incident in the Roswell Record is iconic.
But rumor mills began spinning and continue to do so almost 80 years later. There were reports of alien bodies being discovered and autopsied. Numerous books have been written about the incident and the alleged coverup of the crash. A TV series grew out of the story.
Which brings me to wonder who will report something like this in Roswell in the future. Communities in our nation need reliable news sources — not just exaggerated or opinionated posts on social media. Local residents need to know why their school board banned a literary classic at the high school library. They need to learn that two county commissioners got big campaign contributions from a controversial data center planning to locate just outside the city limits. They need to hear good news as well — like when the high school baseball team wins the state championship. They need to hear about when a police officer rescued a woman and her baby from a burning car. They need to hear about a fireman who dragged a wayward fawn from a flooding arroyo to save its life. They need to hear about new businesses that are opening downtown.
As I’ve said before, our local daily newspaper, which used to be a robust publication, has been emasculated by cost cutting, corporate profit taking, declining readership and changes in attitudes toward the first amendment that guarantees us a free press. We have a good weekly newspaper that provides some of the needed coverage, but it doesn’t have the impact that a daily newspaper can provide. Area television stations in El Paso give only a glancing blow of attention to local news in Las Cruces. And many times, coverage from the Albuquerque Journal is our best source of up to date local information from almost 250 miles away.
Current owners of the Record say they will consider a sale or other options to keep the news flowing in that southeastern New Mexico city, but they “make no guarantees.”
My hope is that newspapers will survive as independent sources of news. But unfortunately there are now almost 220 counties in the United States with no local source of news. A lot of bad things can happen when no one is there to report on local governments, criminal activity and shady businesses. A lot of good things happening in communities won’t be reported on without newspapers. And you might just completely miss learning about the next UFO landing nearby unless you’re zapped by a ray gun.
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