As I was saying: Recapping TPA accomplishments in 2021

Whew … what a year 2021 was.
The good thing is if you’re reading this, then you survived and are still in business. Congratulations!
The night before I got elected TPA president last January through a Zoom call – which was a first for TPA and kind of weird in itself – I dreamed about Capt. Edward Smith on the bridge of the Titanic. And I sure was hoping we weren’t going to be steering TPA on the same course and that I wasn’t destined to go down with the USS TPA.
With the ongoing pandemic problems and all we’ve read and heard about how print journalism is dying, or in some cases already dead, and how some industry experts say social media is the final death nail in our coffin, (take a breath)…and it is just a matter of time before the presses stop rolling and we all close our doors for good, I wondered if that was a premonition.
Well, it is true that a lot of newspapers have folded up their tents and given up the battle. According to our good friends at the Washington Post, about 2,200 local print newspapers have closed since 2005 and the number of newspaper journalists fell by more than half between 2008 and 2020.
Not great news, I’ll admit, but we’re still here. We still show up to work each day and cover the news in our communities and we keep our local governments on their toes. We also help sponsor the local events and activities while we work seven days a week, usually 12 hours a day, and we work all Monday holidays because the press schedule waits for no one.
I’d like to report that the TPA is moving full steam ahead, dodging political icebergs in the Austin waters.
This past year we hopefully have come up with a solution for the state legislators who want to move all the legals and public notices from our print pages to online websites. Our solution starts with signing up with Column.
A TPA committee studied this issue and held several Zoom meetings with two vendors – Column and Gannett. After weighing all the pros and cons of each and getting some contract changes we chose Column to handle our online public notice needs.
Column will create and maintain a public notice website on a cost-free basis for TPA and offer access to public notice tools to all publishers in the TPA network.
We hope this move will give legislators what they have been demanding – a robust online presence for public notices – and they will redirect their energy to the real issues and stop taking aim at newspapers.
This past year I had one-on-one talks with the Texas UIL about some problems some TPA members encountered at various state-run events, like the 2020 state football championship. Like others, I had complained for years about how the UIL runs its events. They appeared not to be media friendly.
After several conversations with TPA members, I took their concerns to the UIL and was assured the UIL wanted the media to be a partner and would work harder to keep the lines of communication open and relax some of the COVID-related rules.
I guess the discussion worked, because I had a team in the 2021 4A state high school football championship game and we had far fewer problems than in the previous year. And I didn’t hear of anyone else having major issues.
So maybe we made some good progress in our UIL/TPA relationship. Time will only tell. Meanwhile, if you have issues with the UIL please let me know and I’ll call our  contact there and see if we can get it resolved.
As for the postal problems we are all having, I thought I had made some local headway after the Postmaster General promised to look into our delayed delivery issues during an NNA-sponsored call with Louis DeJoy.
DeJoy had the regional plant supervisor in Shreveport (where my mail goes before coming back to East Texas) call me and we worked to fix the three-week delivery time to go 30 miles in East Texas. The supervisor quickly discovered the problem was an operator error with one of his workers pushing my mail bags to the bottom of her work stack and then leaving when her shift was over even though my mail bags hadn’t been worked. He actually spotted her doing this one night and was surprised.
She was transferred to another department and the very next week my mail went from three-week delivery to three-day delivery.
Now I wish I could say that vast improvement continues, but it only lasted for about three months. Now we are back to my paper taking two weeks to go 30 miles.
But I haven’t given up hope and I encourage all of you to keep charting when you receive exchange papers. And please let me know what those timelines are so I can share that information with the postal officials. They tend to respond better when I give them proof. I send photos of papers with the receiving date in red ink next to the issue date.
I am proud to announce we were able to set up online newspaper contests for all five Texas regional press associations in 2021. So far three of the regionals have jumped onboard and will no longer have to physically pull and ship marked up entries to be judged. We expect this will streamline the whole process and keep boxes of contest entries from being lost in the mail. If you’ve run a regional press contest, like I have, you know what a pain in the neck the old system was. Hopefully by the end of 2022 all five regionals will be on the same page.
I have not been able to get the printing apprenticeship program up and going yet, as I mentioned at the convention. I have printing plants willing to participate, I just haven’t found the money to help pay for half the salary. But I still have six more months left in my tenure as president and I hope to get it rolling before I hand the gavel over to Leonard Woolsey in San Marcos on July 30.
Keep your fingers crossed.
I hope everyone has a great 2022. Keep the faith and keep your doors open and presses running.
Those outside our industry don’t realize what all we do. They just know we are always there and always the go-to source for 99% of the things in our towns. And if you think no one cares about the newspaper anymore, just don’t show up at a city council or school board meeting or a ribbon cutting and see how many calls you get asking if everything is OK. At least that’s how it works for Suzanne and me. People count on us being present – everywhere. And if we aren’t, then it’s like a family member is missing and people in Gladewater check up on us to see if we are all right. That’s really pretty nice when you think about it.
May your 2022 New Year be filled with success, good friends and just enough laughter and sleep to keep you going.