NAME: Karen Tumulty | AGE: 52 | HOMETOWN: San Antonio | QUALIFICATIONS: Thirteen years at Time, the past six as a senior writer and national political correspondent.
• Washington has a tendency to be an echo chamber. If you don’t talk to people outside the city, you can miss what it is they really care about. Sometimes you can lose the real emotion of an issue.
Several of this month’s letters to the editor, responding to our September issue, fall into two categories: those from angry liberals and those from angry conservatives.
Several of this month’s letters to the editor, responding to our September issue, fall into two categories: those from angry liberals and those from angry conservatives.
Butcher, born in San Marcos and raised in Fort Worth, has spent most of the past fourteen years as a reporter at the Big Bend Sentinel, a weekly newspaper in Marfa with a readership of three thousand.
IN OLDEN DAYS, John Young would have been horsewhipped or shot in the back for the stuff he writes two or three times a week in the Waco Tribune-Herald. You don’t razz right-wingers in what Young has labeled “Bush-by-God country”—not if you value your kneecaps. An otherwise ordinary 54-year-old who wears wire-rim glasses and has a trim mustache and a receding hairline, Young is the rarest of a vanishing breed of Texans: the unapologetically liberal newspaperman.
I want to begin by telling you a story that may make me look small, but which, I believe, is instructive. In 2003 I was asked to sit on a panel to interview the three men running for mayor of Houston: Bill White, Orlando Sanchez, and Sylvester Turner. The other two members of the panel were a former political reporter for the defunct Houston Post and Dan Patrick, then as now a drive-time radio talk show host.
Evan Smith: Molly, I feel like it’s fitting to talk about Ann Richards first.
Evan Smith: Greater competition than ever. Scandals in your industry. Massive consolidation and budget cuts. Tell me why it’s a good time to be the editor of a daily newspaper.
Evan Smith: So here we are in a Mexican restaurant on the ground floor of your apartment building in New York.
Liz Smith: Do you think it’s funny that I live over a Mexican restaurant called El Rio Grande?
ES: I think it’s appropriate. But what I’m stuck on is whether you can get good Mexican food in New York.
Everyone was dying to talk with Dan Rather. So how did Texas Monthly writer Gary Cartwright break from the pack of hungry journalists and satiate his appetite with a one-on-one interview? Common Texas roots, common friends, and common interests didn’t hurt. Now Cartwright talks about the strings he pulled, the lessons he learned, and the future flavor of broadcast journalism.
