Eldorado weekly breaks story on polygamous compound

The Eldorado Success sits in West Texas in Schleicher County, which just slightly more than 3,000 people call home. But the county grew by a few dozen reporters last month when a storm of national media descended on Eldorado.

Flora Jessop, a children’s rights advocate, arrived in town with media from three states in tow to protest a 1,371-acre compound being built on Eldorado’s outskirts that she says has ties to the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, a polygamous group based in and around the Utah-Arizona border but not affiliated with the Mormon church.

Success owners Randy and Kathy Mankin found themselves playing host to the media while trying not to become part of the story that they had spent a long and hard week researching and were the first to break March 24, a day before the daily Salt Lake Tribune.

Their goal was to report the facts and to dispel the rumor mill that had been floating around the small town and for a 1,010-circulation weekly the reporting is thorough and fact-filled and could serve as a model for other small newspapers faced with reporting on real estate development.

The Success went to the county courthouse to peruse deed records and eventually identified the property owner. Then the newspaper culled the Secretary of State’s Web site for incorporation records to find the business name and organization papers.

“There are public information records available. All you’ve got to do is avail yourself of them,” said publisher Randy Mankin, who also is a Texas Press Association board member.

With research in-hand, the newspaper called other sources to confirm the story. The newspaper contacted a media attorney for advice before running an aerial photograph of the compound.

The newspaper also interviewed Jessop who told of being raised in the FLDS group and her years of sexual abuse at the hands of relatives.

The 12 television trucks and handfuls of print and broadcast journalists who came to Eldorado for Jessop’s press conference left soon after but the whirlwind gave the Success a center stage in the story.

Randy Mankin said he learned a lot about how to handle the media attention from a crisis management seminar TPA put on at the 2000 Midwinter Conference. Current TPA President Willis Webb was one of the session speakers and he gave an emotional account about how The Jasper Newsboy and the town of Jasper handled the racial dragging murder of James Byrd Jr.

Mankin added this advice for other community newspaper publishers who get requests for interviews or assistance from national media during local crisis.

“Be courteous. Help them when you can but remember you’re also working on a story too,” Mankin said.