In the past year, Street has
tried many ways to trim costs
and increase revenues, with
mixed results. Last April, he
discontinued a separate local
edition in Marathon (53 miles
west in Brewster County)
because it was losing money. He
also began charging people $34
a year to view full stories on the
paper’s Web site – the same as
subscribers pay for the printed
paper. But a move to increase
the newsstand price to $1 from
50 cents was quickly reversed
after Street found that he was
losing too much business.
Finances got so bad that
Street wrote a July 24 column
headlined “Is it all over?” about
coming to the painful decision
to close his little newspaper. In
the days following, officials with
the county, the local school dis-
trict and Sanderson State Bank
met with Street and committed
to increasing their advertising.
As long as his health holds up,
Street said he no longer has any
plans to shut the paper, though
he would consider selling it.
alpine
Cindy Perry warmly greets
a visitor to the offices of the
Alpine Avalanche. She is the wife
of Mike Perry, the editor and
publisher.
The couple met when they
both worked their first newspa-
per jobs at the San Angelo
Standard-Times in the early
1970s. They moved to Alpine
three years ago to take over the
operation of the Avalanche and
fulfill a long-held desire to
move to the area.
Within a few minutes, Cindy
receives a visitor: a high school
journalism teacher bearing a
disc loaded with photos he took
of a high school volleyball game.
“Thank you! Thank you!” says
Cindy, giving the teacher a hug.
Unpaid contributors help make
small-town papers like the
Avalanche possible.
Founded in 1891, the
Avalanche is the region’s oldest,
largest (18 to 24 pages, weekly
circulation of about 3,000) and
only full-color paper. It has four
full-time employees – “and half
of the staff lives together,”
jokes Mike, age 63.
Bucking industry norms, the
Avalanche has enjoyed improved
business of late. Buoyed by a
state university, a smattering of
retail and cultural amenities,
Alpine has grown to an esti-
mated population of about
6,300 at a time most of the
region’s other small cities and
unincorporated areas have lost
population. Despite the U.S.
recession, the paper had a
bump in revenues and in circu-
lation in 2009, and the num-
bers have improved for several
years running.
“It’s a better paper than it
was,” Mike Perry explains. “It
was not a very good paper.
With four people it’s hard to
put out a great newspaper. We
put out a good newspaper
occasionally.”
The Avalanche is owned by
Granite Publications, a Taylor-
based newspaper company
that also owns the Fort Stockton
Pioneer. It is the only one of the
six papers that is not locally
owned. Mike insists that the
owners have very little say in
the local news or editorial
product. “They’ve never told
me what to do – other than to
make a profit,” he says. “Their
main guidelines are to make
more money this year than last
year. And that’s fine. It’s a busi-
ness.”
Mike does a bit of everything
– writing a regular column, cov-
ering high school sporting
events, shooting photos, laying
out pages. Occasionally he has
run afoul of advertisers – a well-
known occupational hazard of
small-town newspapers.
Last year, five advertisers
pulled ads in protest over an
editorial Mike wrote advocat-
ing for passage of the federal
health care reform legislation.
Though he said most readers’
reactions were favorable, some
criticized Mike for being a
“socialist” or sent hate-filled let-
ters. All but one advertiser has
since returned.
Despite such conflicts, Mike
says he has grown to savor life
as a small-town newspaper-
man. There is a close contact
with the public that he never
had when working at big metro
papers. Here, he is ever accessi-
ble. Residents engage with him
in his office, in the stands at a
high school football game or in
line at the grocery store.
“You’ll probably work hard-
er than any other place you’ve
ever worked and for not much
money,” says Mike. “But it’s
incredibly gratifying. It’s the
most fulfilling and demanding
journalism I’ve been in.”
Marfa
Robert Halpern is on the
phone at the Big Bend Sentinel’s
sunny offices on Highland
Avenue, the main thoroughfare
in Marfa. With him are his two
other full-time employees:
Rosario, his wife and the com-
pany’s chief financial officer,
and Sterry Butcher, a reporter
who has worked at the paper
for more than a dozen years.
Halpern, 55, has built a rep-
utation as perhaps the region’s
top local newsman. A native of
Alpine, he graduated with a
journalism degree from the
University of Texas at El Paso
and worked at dailies in Odessa
and El Paso before returning in
1988 to join the Marfa paper at
the urging of then-owner Bob
Dillard, a long-time Big Bend
newspaperman.
In 1993, Dillard sold the
Sentinel to the Halperns. In
1994, the couple purchased the
weekly in Presidio, on the
Mexico border in south
Presidio County.
The business is much the
family affair. The Halpern’s
daughter, who lives in Spain,
translates stories via e-mail
each week for the Spanish-lan-
guage pages inside the Presidio
International. Until recent years
before heading off to college,
their two sons worked for the
business. His brother and sister-
in-law handle distribution,
picking up the paper each week
from the press in Monahans,
130 miles away. In addition,
Halpern uses freelancers and a
retired advisor to the Sul Ross
student newspaper to produce
the paper.
He is proud of the hard-hit-
ting reporting his team has pro-
duced. Among the stories he
cited were the U.S. Border
Patrol’s program starting last
fall to regularly release hun-
dreds of illegal immigrants
captured in Arizona at the
international
bridge
in
Presidio, exposing the program
at Big Bend Ranch State Park
to kill wild donkeys (a practice
stopped after the newspaper’s
Quilts
Etc.
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continued on page 26
Cenizo
Second Quarter 2010
17