Sometimes, I wonder if my grasp on the reality at hand is different from anyone else’s.
I know that everyone has their own views on things and analyzes those views through their own experience and biases – that’s just a fact of human existence.
But, at the same time, I feel like people ignore the facts of reality and exist purely on their own assumptions and skewed perceptions.
It becomes more apparent on social media platforms and I’ve made it my personal rule, not to mix much of my work and personal life online.
However, when it comes to flippant and opinionated criticism of the newspaper my parents and I have built through blood, sweat, and tears – I have a real problem with the person, group, or business behaving in such a manner.
In the past few weeks, I’ve had to correct numerous people on the realities of journalism and local newspapers at the moment – it’s disheartening and exhausting.
I think it gets worse when I hear people say that we should just print things off of Facebook at will – as if there isn’t work that goes into reading, writing, and editing those, too.
That work is amplified by the way our deadlines fall and if we have to attend meetings to get the facts and news to the general public.
We focus our news coverage on local events and don’t travel outside of Matagorda County for news.
But, a great example came late Thursday afternoon when we were notified of Virgil “That Mexican OT” Gazca playing as part of Bun B’s “All-American Takeover” event at RodeoHouston on March 12.
The caveat is that we weren’t notified by his management or promotional team, but by a local fan stating that Gazca should be recognized for representing Bay City at such a high level as RodeoHouston.
In the same breath, we were belittled for not covering his concert appearance as this fan deemed it more newsworthy than other events happening locally.
They cited that Gazca was from Bay City and therefore putting Bay City and Matagorda County “on the map.”
After that phone call, I had to spend some time scouring the web for professional references simply because I had never heard of Gazca before and the first three pages of Google search provided only music videos, social media posts, and other similar references.
I dug into a Wikipedia page about him and several articles from musical sources like Rolling Stone, Hype Magazine, and even The Washington Post – all dated in 2023.
What I learned is that Gazca was born in Bay City and at 25 had survived a variety of tragedies and had his love for rap music to keep him going.
However, last Tuesday night, Gazca was part of a 33-song set featuring other mainstream and well-known stars including Drake, Nelly, Rick Ross, Eve, Ying Yang Twins, and DMC of Run-DMC.
This was his debut on a stage with over 75,000 in the audience – and we don’t attend RodeoHouston because it isn’t in our coverage area.
But, I can say that we welcome submissions about local news and try to run them based on space available, reproduction quality, and timeliness.
Any given week you can find contributed photos, columns, and articles from local sources in our newspaper just like everyone else’s.
That’s the point of local news – we want to feature as much as possible but, as a reminder, newspapers everywhere are limited on time and space because of a lack of advertising.
