A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO A BLOG POST....

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

On Tuesday, as local viewers were watching a City of Brownsville City Commission televised meeting, we received a tip from a source that the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in Austin was one week away from voting on a resolution that would swap part of the Boca Chica State Park for a larger piece of land near the Laguna Atascosa NWR.

Busy as we were with a running issue in this blog, the misdeeds of the board members of the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation (GBIC) and the Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation (BCIC), we concentrated on the meeting that resulted in a vote to replace the two miscreant entities with the Brownsville Municipal Development District. We labored to gather background on the story, among others, and published the post early the next morning.

Later, we found out from a narrative in the link that was emailed to us that a somewhat misleading notice had been published in the local newspapers (AIM, the Brownsville Herald, Valley Morning Star, and McAllen Monitor) at least three times for about a month and that everyone had missed it, including us. Who reads hard-copy newspapers anymore?

When we got to closely examine the lead sent to us next day (early Wednesday, January 17), we realized the import of the story and got enough background on the lead sent us to publish a post at 9:51 a.m. 

At the time we posted it, we checked the local social and newspaper websites – as we always do, our old newspaper competitive nature dictating –  we saw that no mainstream or social media had published anything on it before our post appeared. 

It was only after we posted that within half an hour there was a sudden proliferation of almost identical posts (and the same TPWD photos) on local media like KRGV, KGBT, and MyRGV, the AIM Newspapers.

That's why we were surprised that a post appeared on the KRGV.com under the byline of a Christian Von Preysing that stated that it had been "environmental advocates" who had finally seen the notice Tuesday in the Monitor that first alerted them to the proposed swap. His publishing time, as can be seen in the graphic below, was 10:18 a.m. Wednesday, 29 minutes after our post. His was the first post on the issue in any other mass or social media outlet.

Von Preysing disingenuously started his story saying:

There's something almost funny in Von Preysing's assertion that "environmental advocates" had seen the TPWD's notice in the Monitor classified ads Tuesday, January 16. If that had been true, then the past notices running for weeks before had gone unnoticed by these same "environmental activists" and by the Monitor (and Herald and Valley Morning Star) reporters who toil in the newspapers where the notice had been running for weeks and they had missed it, as, by the way, so had we.

Modern communications are not like newspapers that had to wait until next morning to publish in hard copy. They are instantaneous. Had we been better practicioners of our craft (some of us are retired with more, to us, important things to do like protect our mom's plants from the freeze, etc.), we should have published a post immediately after we received the email Tuesday evening.

Didn't the "environmental activists" alert the Monitor about the proposed swap on Tuesday? And if they did, why wasn't something published before our Rrun-Rrun post? Or, since the TPWD notice had appeared in the classified ad pages of the three newspaper for the past month, why hadn't those newspapers' reporters jumped on the story way before we posted?

News spiral and are cumulative. If someone plants a seed of a story, other media practicioners follow up and dig for other angles to give the reading public a full context of the issue. Witness the "GrubGate" story on Mayra Flores that spread like wildfire after an Austin blog initially discovered she had been lifting photos of alleged Mexican cuisine and passing it off as her own, attesting to her supposedly close cultural nexus with folksy local Hispanics.

Von Preysing describes himself thusly: 

"I cover stories about wildlife, the environment, border walls, human smuggling, SpaceX and anything else in deep South Texas.

I have experience working on wildlife documentaries. Stories about science and nature are my passion. I have deep background knowledge on ecosystems, pollution and climate change. I'm an enthusiastic science communicator."

All those qualifications and then to have a lowly blog run by a retired old-school newspaperman scoop him and break a major story dealing with the environment, SpaceX, and science and nature before he did in his own backyard is probably galling.

But it shouldn't be. We're both – mainstream and social media – merely conduits to keep the public informed. It's not about us. It's about the story. And the people's right to know. What if someone hadn't sent me the lead on this issue of great local, and state, if not national, import? TPWD would have easily rammed the swap forward in Austin before "environmental activists" became aware of the proposed swap and mobilized to prevent, or at least delay it. We both, perhaps belatedly, performed our duty.

By the way, if people want to have a say-so on the matter they still can;

The notice states that the public will have an opportunity to comment on the proposed transaction before the Commission takes action. Those interested in providing comment must reach out to project manager Trey Vick at trey.vick@tpwd.texas.gov prior to the meeting.

Saludos, colega!