The Staff of Uvalde's Local Paper Cover the Worst Day of Their Lives

[Nevilledog]

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Chris Megerian
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A reporter at the Uvalde Leader-News lost her daughter in the shooting at Robb Elementary School. She asked the publisher if she could write the obituary.

newyorker.com
The Staff of Uvalde’s Local Paper Cover the Worst Day of Their Lives
The paper’s employees lost neighbors, acquaintances, and a daughter in a school shooting. Then they had to report the story.
12:11 PM · May 28, 2022

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/the-staff-of-uvaldes-local-paper-cover-the-worst-day-of-their-lives

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https://archive.ph/2be7x

The news, as it initially came over the police scanner in staticky bursts of information, was confusing. A shooting, a car crash, a man with a gun at Robb Elementary School. At the Uvalde Leader-News, the newspaper that has served this community in various forms since 1879, the first person headed to the scene was, as usual, the photographer and general manager, Pete Luna.

Luna, who is tall and solidly built and forty-five years old, grew up in Batesville, a tiny town twenty miles to the southeast, and graduated from Uvalde High School. He started working at the Leader-News in 2006. The paper has a full-time staff of ten and publishes twice a week. “I set up subscriptions, I build ads, I sell ads, I pitch ads, I do the layouts, I answer calls, I deliver papers—I do it all,” Luna said. “It’s not just me. We all do a lot.”

Luna dropped off his girlfriend, who is also the paper’s managing editor, Meghann Garcia, at her home, and headed to the scene with his digital camera and a handheld video camera. The day before, he had covered a serious house fire, in which, it was feared, someone had died. (A woman who lived there was unaccounted for, but, fortunately, she was not in the house when it burned.) Even as he drove toward Robb Elementary for what he guessed was some sort of domestic dispute, he was thinking of the fire as the big news of the week.

He parked his car a few blocks from the school, assuming that law enforcement would’ve set up a perimeter and he wouldn’t be able to get any closer. “Even though I’m the size that I am, I like to blend in,” he explained. “That means I’m not in the way, first of all. And No. 2, it lets you observe everything. They’re doing their job and I’m doing mine.”

*snip*

[Demovictory9]

1. Twenty-one Texas counties now have no newspaper at all.

Local news is an increasingly tough business. Twenty-one Texas counties now have no newspaper at all. When local papers fold, as happened in nearby Del Rio, the information void is often filled by Facebook groups of questionable reliability.