The Texas Press Association held its annual conference this weekend in San Marcos. One of the presentations at the seminar was by Craig Garnett, publisher of the Uvalde Leader-News. He has been the publisher in Uvalde for decades. Recently facing the decision to retire, he was unable to do so, because of how much he cares about the community he covers. He couldn’t leave his town in a time of such need.
In a powerfully emotional question and answer session, he spoke about how his team handled the news coverage of the shooting at Robb Elementary School. He explained the decisions they made in the face of such tragedy from the moment the police scanner sounded to the investigation that followed including how they dealt with one of their own reporters losing her daughter in the massacre. Kimberly Rubio was pregnant with her daughter Lexi just after she started working at the Uvalde Leader-News a decade ago. The loss of life of every child is unconscionable, but word of Lexi’s death was devastating to the news team that watched her grow up.
Beyond the tragedy, Garnett also spoke of the impact of the national news descending on his town. Much of the discussion reminded me of similar instances the night of the 2015 flood and the coverage in the weeks to follow. I sat in the fire station that night reporting live online what I could at 3 a.m. with my mother, whose home had just washed away, sleeping in my car outside. I didn’t realize quite how national the news coverage would be until a few days later I was getting shooed to the side by NBC’s Lester Holt for an interview with Governor Greg Abbott.
