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| The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Weekly Newspaper |
| ABOUT
US |
The Point Reyes
Light is one of the few weekly newspapers to ever win a Pulitzer
Prize. In 1979, when the paper's circulation was only 2,750,
it received the Pulitzer gold medal for Meritorious Public
Service as a result of a series of exposès and editorials
about the Synanon cult. The cult was not only abusing its
tax-exempt status, it had also turned to violence in an attempt
to silence critics. The violence culminated in October 1978
when Synanon members tried to murder a lawyer by planting
a 4.5-foot rattlesnake in his mailbox. The lawyer was bitten
but survived, and The Light was the first to reveal that cult
leaders had orchestrated the attack.
The newspaper, which takes its name from the famous lighthouse
on Point Reyes, was founded in 1948 as The Baywood Press;
it changed its name to The Point Reyes Light in 1966. Located
in Point Reyes Station, a town of 675 people 40 miles north
of San Francisco, The Light serves 13 small towns in a dairy-ranching
region known as West Marin.
THE
NEW EDITOR: ROBERT PLOTKIN
Please allow me to introduce myself, I am a former prosecutor
and graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism. I have
been published in The Jerusalem Post, San Francisco Chronicle,
New York Observer, New York Times, Miami Herald and The Chicago
Tribune. I have interviewed tank commanders surrounding Arafat’s
Ramallah Compound, witnessed a suspected collaborator being
shot in Jenin, and interviewed a Hamas leader in Gaza.
My political awakening took place during the Iranian hostage
crisis of 1979, when I was a nine year old in San Diego. I
felt trampled, abused, and impotent. Then, riding across the
political chaparral, came a man with a jaunty pompadour and
John Wayne worldview. I worked on the Reagan campaign and
began a subscription to The National Review. My reading of
William F. Buckley Jr. was syncopated with head nodding and
cursed mutterings.
This went on until the eighth grade. It was then, after exhorting
my fellow students to support the mining of Nicaraguan harbors,
that a teacher forever changed my life. She walked into class
and plopped a copy of Mother Jones onto my desk. Inside there
was an article on Salvadoran death squads beheading villagers.
There were families with heads cut off. It was a moment of
intense clarity that instantly shattered my ideological force
field. I began to read Mother Jones along with The National
Review and then took up The Economist and The Nation.
Most of my political positions today would be characterized
as liberal, but I never hew to a party line, never swallow
a party platform whole. Ideological rigidity is not a virtue;
nor is the inability to disagree civilly. Opening yourself
to other viewpoints is not a weakness. Failure to do so ossifies
the political animal until, over time, he becomes maladapted,
still hunting for jungle prey long after the jungle has been
clear-cut.
My boyhood home was modest. I think of it as pre-Vietnam War.
The green, shag carpet was worn. The largest holes were covered
with mismatched throw rugs. The deck had a foot-size hole
in it from the jumping jacks of a weekend guest. The coffee
table was the color of coffee, a selling point for clumsy,
coffee drinking people. It permitted no boast, no sweep of
the hand. It mocked pride.
My summers were spent with my grandparents in Israel. I would
bring a suitcase of clothes and a suitcase of books. In sneakers
and surfer shorts, I proclaimed my nationality among the sandals
and Speedos.
Women with hairy moles pushed me out of bus lines. Chicken
came from the butcher, bread from the baker, and medicine
from the government. My grandparents helped me catch the comet
tail of Yiddish. My contemporaries spoke Hebrew, so I conversed
with the wizened and imported. Evenings were spent filtering
English language news broadcasts from Tel Aviv and Beirut.
News was balkanized and parochial. The pretense of objectivity
was refreshingly absent.
During my college years I studied Third World economic development
in Malaysian tin mines; Islamic Fundamentalism in Kashmir;
poverty in the slums of Caracas. In Beijing, I took photographs
that caught the unwanted attention of a Chinese intelligence
officer. He forced me to mount the handlebars of his bicycle
for a ride to a guard shack. I sat on the floor while Mandarin
was shouted above me. It was there on the floor that I decided
that, some day, I would be a foreign correspondent. Then I
escaped.
After college, law school, and a federal judicial clerkship,
I became a Deputy District Attorney for Monterey County. Essentially,
my job was to read and evaluate police reports. If interminable
negotiations failed, the file became a loose script for jury
trial (i.e. several days of improvisational performance art).
In a prologue of frenzied activity, addresses became three
dimensional, victims gained smell and patois, police no longer
served as interlocutors. My experience was unmediated. Unfortunately,
this represented a sliver of my time. Otherwise, I sat behind
my desk and read police reports or mechanically attended to
the banal.
This is why I left for Columbia Graduate School of Journalism,
where I spent two years learning journalistic ethics that
ill-served me in the world of commercial journalism where
editorial timidity often prevailed. Public relation firms
controlled the news cycle, and I did not.
So I brought my wife Lys, and son Max to Bolinas in order
to pursue a career as a freelance foreign correspondent. Once
here I discovered The Point Reyes Light and met Dave Mitchell,
its valiant editor. I found this mighty-mite of a paper, with
Pulitzer pedigree and low coffers. After a great deal of my
plaintive wooing, Mitchell agreed to sell me The Light. He
has deemed me worthy to carry on his extraordinary work, which
– second to my wife agreeing to marrying me –
is the highest compliment I have ever received.
Editor/Publisher Robert Plotkin in the paste up room with
his wife Lys and son Max.
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