HERALD CLOSING UP SHOP, SELLING LAND TO COUNTY

By Juan Montoya
A few years ago, Freedom Newspapers decided to abandon Brownsville.
The Brownsville Herald, which opened its doors since 1892, was a shell of its old rambunctious self. In 2012, Freedom Newspapers which had operated it for decades, declared bankruptcy and sold it, along with other newspapers in Texas to AIM Media Texas.
Its presses were sold long ago to a Mexican newspaper and most of its reporters were farmed off to either the Harlingen Valley Morning Star, McAllen Monitor or the shopper Coastal Current of South Padre Island.
It is not unusual for residents of the biggest city in the Rio Grande Valley to read filler from places like La Feria or Combes instead of reading what's happening in their town because the editorial staff has been decimated and the ones left are for the most part, cutting their newspaper teeth in their first newspaper job.
And so dies a newspaper, not with a headline but with a graph or two of filler.
What once was a watchdog is now a lapdog of economic interests. One of its stockholders is none other than IBC President Fred Rusteberg, the major proponent of the shadow government United Brownsville who we're sure wouldn't appreciate pesky investigative reporters digging into the group's schemes to hijack local government and raid its treasury.
This past Thursday, the Cameron County Commissioners Court heard an offer from the current owners who want to sell them the property located at 1135 E. Van Buren St. The figures thrown around as an initial offer are, of course, elevated probing. The county could use the space and the buildings being as it is short of real estate and parking in the more than three-decades old county courthouse.
Doubtless, the prices will be come down as the negotiations continue. We have heard of prices as high as $500,000 to $800,000 depending on who you talk to.
As someone who got his first newspaper job there after J school, it is with mixed feelings to write about what used to be a first-rate newspaper who saw the likes of James Pinkerton, Bob Rivard, Becky Thatcher, Ron Schade, Micky Torres, Brad Dougherty, Katherine Kase, Rey Vasquez, Greg Feig, Jerry McHale, David Handleman, David Crowder, wire reporters Mack Sisk and Ken Herman walk through its cracked marble floors to type out their copy on manual typewriters with triple carbon copies to before deadline. There were many others too numerous to mention like the late Dan MaClanahan and Jerry Urban and editor Lavice Laney.
Once 1 p.m came around, county and city employees could see a whole legion of newspaper vendors scurrying around town selling the news. At the head of the crew was none other than Pipe Solis, sometimes riding his bicycle.
Other followed including Bill and Becky Salter, Julio Lozano, Roy Hess, and, of course, the inimitable Emma Perez-Treviño. The halcyon days of the Brownsville Herald as a crusading newspaper are over. The presses that publish the newspaper are in McAllen and the skeleton crew of reporters can not manage the flow of information given the scanty resources available the editorial staff.
It is agonizing to see an old friend die a slow death, but that, in effect, is what has happened to this once-fine newspaper since the corporate moguls turned it into a cash cow.