It’s Wednesday – meaning concerned locals have had the Red Phone on the run seeking answers where ever they may lay. Don’t forget if you dial up the Crimson Crusader to leave your name and address for Red Phone’s file, not publication, if you want your comments to be printed. Got a question, comment or concern about life in San Benito County? Call the Red Phone, always listening, always online, always at 635-9219.
Highly disappointing
A caller doesn’t like the weekly feature column High Society published in the Free Lance on Thursdays.
“I’m wondering if the High Society article is for real. It’s a Hollister paper but it has absolutely nothing to do with area and seems really out of place. The whole paper is so…not Hollister. I feel like I’m reading San Jose’s paper or something.”
True enough that High Society columnist, Mary Anne McCarthy, doesn’t know much about Hollister. Her focus has primarily been on events in Morgan Hill and Gilroy and that is the very reason why the features department has been searching for a society columnist in San Benito County. If you rub elbows with movers and shakers of San Benito and would be interested in contributing to the Free Lance call features editor Colleen Valles at 408-842-9505. We want a local society columnist, and we have been soliciting for one.
As for the Free Lance feeling like a San Jose paper, editors, and the Red Phone, couldn’t disagree more. On average, the Free Lance staff writes six locally-based news articles every day in the Free Lance, not to mention briefs, community bulletin items, letters to the editor, editorials, columns, obituaries, police reports and sports and features stories published each day. Plus the fact we publish five days a week means readers will see on average 30 stories focusing on issues, trends and people in San Benito County every week – you simply cannot find that coverage anywhere else but the Free Lance. For regional issues, such as the attempted development at Sargent Ranch and controversial Miwok Casino, we sometimes combine resources with our sister papers to north.
A quick search of the Free Lance’s online archive showed 48 news stories have already been published in October including today’s content, but not including the extra items listed above. And it is all written locally by the Free Lance staff. We doubt 50 stories about San Benito County show up in the metro paper to the north in an entire year.
If you took a holiday…
A caller thinks the lack of a Monday paper will result in fewer stories about holidays.
“One problem that we have with you not printing a paper on Monday is that Mondays are holidays and so it seems like the holidays are not written about. There doesn’t seem to be anything in before or after that Monday. So holidays are now left out whether it be articles, letters or anything else to do with that holiday don’t exist anymore.”
Assumedly the Red Phone caller is speaking about the lack of Columbus Day coverage in the Free Lance. Columbus, who revisionist historians label as the primary creator of triangular slave trade between the New and Old worlds responsible for the death of millions of native Americans back in the late 1400s, but that is another story. The Free Lance had no Columbus Day coverage because we knew of no Columbus Day events planned in San Benito County.
Thanksgiving falls on a Thursday, Christmas on a Saturday, Hanukkah on a Tuesday, Martin Luther King, Jr Day is on a Monday, St. Patrick’s Day on a Thursday, and so on and so on. The Free Lance will continue to cover major holidays just as it has in the past. This season be looking for the inevitable stories on Christmas shopping rushes, Thanksgiving preparations, New Year’s babies and everything else. We changed our publication days in response to our readers, but we didn’t change our approach to editorial coverage.
