Displaced Journalist Replaces “The Rocky” with ”Fit to Print” Life
Posted on | April 22, 2010 | No Comments
M.E. Sprengelmeyer is ”reporter/publisher” of The Guadalupe County Communicator, a 2,000-circulation weekly in the colorful Route 66 community of Santa Rosa, New Mexico.
M.E., as he prefers to be called, was Washington correspondent for the Rocky Mountain News when the Denver-based newspaper published its final edition February 27, 2009.
He was a displaced journalist, but not for long.
The 1989 graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism bought the Communicator in August of 2009. It’s not available online. Instead, M.E. is determined to prove that newspapers are not dead. If you want to read it, it will have to be in print. However, you can check out the paper’s Facebook page: Guadalupe County Communicator.
Sprengelmeyer, 42, had been a reporter for 22 years, the last 10 of them with the Rocky Mountain News, a highly esteemed newspaper that had won the Pulitzer Prize four times since 2000. During his career, he has covered stories in Mexico and the Philippines; he covered the Oakland Hills fires and the Northridge earthquake; he reported from the scene of the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, and the Pentagon disaster on Sept. 11, 2001.
M.E., as he prefers to be called, traveled with U.S. Marines in the earliest days of the ground war in Afghanistan in late 2001 and with the 101st Airborne Division’s 3rd Brigade during the initial invasion of Iraq in early 2003. He also covered the U.S. Congress, with occasional trips to the U.S. Supreme Court and White House, and in 2007 embedded himself in Des Moines, Iowa, for more than a year chasing Barack Obama and friends (not) down the “Back Roads to the White House.” (It’s a long story, but he also acquired Jack Abramoff’s pinstriped suits somewhere along the way. We’ll ask M.E. to tell us that some other time.)
When the Rocky closed a few weeks short of its 150th birthday, M.E. decided it would be pointless trying to find another corporate newspaper job as meaningful as the one that he had just lost. Instead, he sunk his entire life savings into buying a scrappy little newspaper in New Mexico — one where he hopes to learn lessons that can one day be applied on a much larger scale.
Below, we present to you a story he published in this week’s edition of the Communicator, because, you see, M.E. is about to appear in a rather important film.
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By M.E. Sprengelmeyer
Publisher, The Communicator
Santa Rosa, N.M., April 22, 2010 – No, it’s not a horror film.
Still, this week you might have seen a small documentary film crew running around downtown Santa Rosa, trying not to terrify the populace as they documented Santa Rosa’s little part in a big, national story.
Adam Chadwick and Derek Callahan are from the film “Fit to Print.” It gets its name from the New York Times’ motto: “All the news that’s fit to print.”
That’s no accident. Chadwick was working as a copy editor at The Times when he decided to begin chronicling the tough times facing newspapers all over the country. He watched from afar as papers like theRocky Mountain News in Denver and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed, and severe workforce cuts hit most other major newspapers, in one way or another.
He decided to begin chronicling the tough times facing newspapers all over the country. He watched from afar as papers like the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed, and severe workforce cuts hit most other major newspapers, in one way or another.
He started working on the project and, then, irony hit. He lost his newspaper job, too.
Perhaps 50 years from now, future Americans will look back at the Not-So-Great Recession as a watershed moment for the old school, ink-on-paper era of journalism.
These next few years will decide whether printed newspapers survive, and whether future generations will ever get the pleasure of having ink rub off on their fingertips while they’re sipping their coffee over breakfast and learning about the world.
Some might rush to say that the Internet is the future of everything. I argue that would be terrible for our country. The World Wide Web does expand our brains by letting us travel to far and exotic lands, but it lacks the physical presence and local connections to keep us grounded in the communities where we actually live, love, laugh and, yeah, cry.
I still believe that there’s a great future for newspapers that don’t give in to the doom and gloom, and instead try to make themselves more important to the communities they serve.
And, so, I guess that’s why the guys are here.
It has really been fun watching Adam and Derek running all over town. They live in the big, bright lights of greater New York City, and so it was hilarious taking them on a little tour of Santa Rosa after dark. We drove a couple miles past the airport, into the pitch-black stretch of U.S. 84. We turned out the car’s lights, parked, and as they stared into the brilliant, star-dotted sky, they sounded like every small-town resident who sees the blinding lights of New York’s Times Square for the first time. “Whoa! Amazing….”
They’ve been working at a frantic pace here in Santa Rosa, and I think they’ve learned as much about our lively little community as they have about our lively little newspaper.
We’re just a small part of the big picture they’re examining. Next, I think they’re on their way to interview philosopher Noam Chomsky about the media landscape, and they’ll be focusing on a bunch of journalists more famous, more interesting and more photogenic than me and Davy Delgado. (Even more, I mean….)
If you’d like to follow the progress of their documentary, go check out: Fit to Print They also have a fan page on Facebook, where they explain what they’re doing and provide all sorts of updates on the real life drama facing the newspaper industry.
I think it’s great that Santa Rosa and Guadalupe County are getting a little time in the spotlight.
These guys are tireless, and they haven’t been sitting still in our newsroom. They’ve been driving Route 66 and the back roads, popping in at City Hall and a whole bunch of other places. For them, the hard part will be taking hours and hours and hours of Santa Rosa footage and figuring out how to whittle it down.
Lord knows we have more colorful characters than you can fit in the typical Hollywood film.
Tags: Adapt > Career > Change > Community > Displaced Journalists > Editor > layoffs > newspaper > Print > Solutions > Ventures
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