Sparsely, Sage and Timely
Giving up my desk"Journalism is a contact sport," I told columnist Gaye LaBaron of The Santa Rosa Press Democrat back in 1994. (Two Highway Patrol officers had roughed me up after an assistant director didn’t like my photographing Nicasio School students being used as extras in Village of the Damned.)
My remark to LaBaron was offhanded but prescient. When my former wife Cathy and I bought The Light in 1975, I was 31. I’ll turn 62 in three weeks, and while I’ve gotten better at verbally fending off the CHP, I no longer have the energy to work past midnight three times a week and spend time in the newsroom on many weekends.
I’ve always been busy enough just being an editor, and this year as a publisher, I for the third time in 28 years had to oversee The Light’s recovery from the verge of financial disaster. I’m not sure I’m up to that again.
So this week I sold The Light corporation’s stock to a journalist who has the energy I started out with here: Robert Plotkin, 35, of Bolinas.
Plotkin, his wife Lys, and their young son Max are the type of folks I always felt should end up with The Light, a West Marin family – not a newspaper chain. More than one newspaper broker, however, assured me that:
• Buyers such as Plotkin are seldom, if ever, found.
• A newspaper chain would pay 50 percent more for The Light than an individual. The Light may have lost $30,000 last year, a significant amount for an individual, but if The Light were owned by a newspaper group, a $30,000 loss would be considered "breaking even."
Nonetheless, I feel like an old quarterback who’s had a string of good seasons but now needs to make way for younger talent.
The Light’s won more than 100 state and national awards while I’ve been here, but the relentless reporting that led to some of those awards is what I most fondly remember.
Editorially, I’ve tried to make sure the "little guy" isn’t crushed by the powers that be. In recent years we’ve campaigned against Park Service destruction of historic buildings and ecosystems. And just this week the Marin County Civil Grand Jury said it has taken up The Light’s request that it look into the county government and San Francisco Regional Water Quality Control Board proceeding with a cleanup plan for Tomales Bay without first using modern science to determine what needs to be cleaned up.
The Light’s news staff has gone wherever necessary to cover West Marin events. Two years ago, we sent a reporter across Guatemala to find out about a family that had been supported by an undocumented immigrant here until he was beaten nearly to death in Bolinas.
In covering the five waves of historic immigration that have washed over West Marin, we’ve sent reporters to Ticino (the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland), Croatia (in the middle of its civil war), the Irish Republic, Northern Ireland (before the ceasefire), and the Azores (Portugal’s islands in the mid-Atlantic).
Two times in the 1990s, we sent reporters to Jalostotitlán (in southern Mexico) to report on immigration to West Marin from that small city and the towns around it. Last week, news editor Jim Kravets returned from a third trip to Jalos. Mexican immigration to this coast is continuing but changing in character, as you’ll soon read.
Some readers may wonder how a paper that is constantly short on cash can afford to send reporters overseas. Part of the secret is not having other stockholders to complain; at times, I simply cut back on my own income to subsidize the trips. The other part is the reporters themselves. News editor Kravets and reporter Peter Jamison are underpaid by newspaper standards, but when given the choice, both said they’d prefer smaller raises – with a foreign assignment every other year – to larger raises.
As for me, I’m sad to be leaving the editor’s desk. I’ll keep on writing this column, but I’ll miss covering Sheriff’s Calls and fielding a team of reporters.
This has been the best job that I or any other newspaperman could ever hope for. Not only is West Marin a beautiful place to work, newspapering here has never failed to be interesting. The job requires constantly learning more about this region and meeting fascinating people.
But I am also looking forward to semi-retirement. From now on, someone else will have to worry when a blackout hits at deadline.For a while at least, I’ll still be occasionally out and about with my camera and notebook. Old reporters, like old soldiers, never die; they just fade away.