Over the past few months, we’ve heard from a number of people in Holbrook who feel like the paper hasn’t been covering the community as much as it should. I want to say upfront that those concerns are fair. This newspaper has covered Holbrook for nearly 117 years, and when I bought it two years ago, I didn’t do it because I wanted to change that tradition. I bought it because I believe in quality journalism for this region. I love our communities, the red painted desert sand flows through my veins and to the worry of my doctors probably also my lungs. But seriously, the goal was to enhance that long history of coverage, not drift away from it, and lately we haven’t been where we should be on that front.
The reality is that we operate with very limited resources. Like a lot of small-town newspapers right now, we’re a small team trying to cover a lot of ground, and sometimes that means certain places don’t get the attention they deserve. But that responsibility ultimately falls on me. I’m a Winslow kid, born and raised, for better or for worse, it shouldn’t show up in how this newspaper covers the communities around us. The Tribune was a solely Holbrook paper for most of its history, it wasn’t until the Winslow Mail closed in 2007 and other papers in the region followed that we slowly expanded to be more regional force of journalism.
Over the next couple of months I’m going to make it a personal priority to spend more time in Holbrook, attend more meetings and events and make sure we’re telling more of the stories happening there. The community deserves to see itself in these pages just as much as anywhere else we cover, if not more, and I want to make sure that happens.
I’d also really encourage people to reach out. Some of the best stories we publish come from tips from readers about events, interesting people in town, or things happening in the community that deserve attention. If there’s something you think we should know about, please send it my way at shawnwhite@yourtrib.com.
