The Wimberley View office is closing; however, the newspaper operations continue as usual.
While the office where The View has been located since 1988 has closed its doors, you can still reach us at the same phone number and email addresses. If you need to visit us in person, you’ll just have to drive a little further to the office of the San Marcos Daily Record. And don’t worry, we’ll still have journalists roaming the streets of Wimberley stirring up the next story.
After all, it is just a building, and this is a reality many community newspapers now face.It is no secret that many newspapers are struggling. We’ve been fighting the fight for years now. The combination of skyrocketing prices of newsprint and mail service meeting up with strong economic headwinds, while Google and Facebook take up a larger and larger piece of the advertising pie, has made for the proverbial perfect storm.
Sometimes drastic measures need to be taken, and this is one we must take. But I’m still hopeful there may be better days ahead, because of you–our community.
You see, I’ve committed much of my adult life to community newspapers because I believe they are one of the most important facets of building a thriving small town.
To this day, the best article I’ve ever written was breaking the news in January of 2015 that there was a company called Electro Purification that was going to try and pull more than a billion gallons of water a year out of the Trinity Aquifer. It took a flood, tireless work by public officials and volunteers, a change in state legislation, years of effort and millions of dollars, but in the end, the company withdrew.
The night of the flood, I was finally able to get across Cypress Creek around 3 a.m. I went to the fire station and Chief Czichos sat me down in the corner so I could update live. I remember seeing the list of hundreds of addresses on the whiteboard of 911 calls coming in and realizing his family’s property was on the list–yet there he stood continuing to do his job.
Ten years later, Teresa Kendrick led our anniversary coverage looking back on the people, like Czichos, whose courageous and selfless actions helped the community remember and recover.
She’s lived her own version of covering the same types of stories that impact the community. From two water bills that crisscrossed the state legislature before one passed–only to be vetoed–to an intimate three-part article remembering Cypress Creek Cafe when the historic facade came down.
We’ve helped track gunmen on the loose. We were there when Old Baldy was Prayer Mountain and set for development. We’re at State Championships–when we win and when we lose. We have sat through oh so many council meetings.
At bare minimum, we fight every day to be fair and report in good faith. We have a passion for informing our readers about the truth on topics that matter locally and for telling the incredible story of the Wimberley Valley. The bottom line is the overwhelming majority of the stories you read in the Wimberley View can’t be found anywhere else.
The New York Times or Austin American-Statesman isn’t standing on top of the memorial plaza at EmilyAnn taking pictures on Veterans Day.
Remember, the office is just a building. I’m more concerned with the verb–the act of building.
I don’t know what Wimberley would be like without The View, and I hope I never have to find out. That is where you come in.
If you find value in a source that shines a light on the activities of local governments, subscribe today. If you’re a business owner that wants to hang your grandkid’s picture on the refrigerator when the Texans go to state, buy an advertisement today.
If you want to know what’s going on in your community, take action today. Local journalism doesn’t survive passively. Together, we can continue to build this community one article at a time.
