By SHERRY ROBINSON
All She Wrote
© 2026 New Mexico News Services

This week, after a conference of New Mexico Press Women, I’d like to turn the high beams on my own world – newspapers, reporting and journalism. Despite bad news and worrisome trends, I came away hopeful because the public still wants local news. That’s a reliable constant we newshounds can hold to our hearts.

But we’re in troubled waters.

The nation’s founding fathers considered basic freedoms of the press so important to the new democracy that they cemented them in place with the First Amendment.

“It was about accountability in a democracy,” said state Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, a retired law professor.

The First Amendment is under attack as never before by the Trump administration, including lawsuits by the president, rules on access at the Pentagon, and threats from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr.

“The FCC has become the tool of political censorship, and not for the first time,” said Eric Griego Montoya, a UNM professor in public administration, but “Carr has set a new low.” He adds that the United States is 57th in the world in press freedom, down from 17th in 2002.

Several speakers raised the question of who, exactly, is the press. I was once annoyed at a blogger’s insistence on sitting in an already crowded press gallery at the state capitol. He was invading “our” space. Now we have bloggers, podcasters, influencers and anybody with an opinion posting on social media. It’s easy to understand how the news-consuming public might be confused.

A journalist is trained in news gathering, interviewing and reporting with a large measure of objectivity baked in. It’s careful and deliberate. Nobody just sits down and pounds out a story without a lot of footwork, meetings, net searches and phone time. Nothing is published without review by an editor.

The so-called influencer didn’t sit in Tony Hillerman’s journalism ethics class. (The famous mystery writer was first a reporter and journalism professor.) Hillerman taught us that with the power of the press comes responsibility and an obligation to be fair.

Does your average doom scroller understand the difference between a trained journalist and a posted rant? It seems they do. Several speakers cited studies showing that journalists were more trusted than social media and local reporters top the credibility list.

To survive, traditional media outlets are learning new tricks.

“Newspapers can no longer just provide the news,” said Autumn Gray, a journalist turned marketer at the Albuquerque Journal. “We’ve had to reach out to readers in different ways,” including podcasts and social media. “It’s a challenge to reach different age groups. Older people don’t want to use their phones. Younger people only want news on their phones.”

Rural news organizations face bigger challenges.

Former Lt. Gov. Diane Denish, who writes an opinion column, said: “In rural New Mexico the threat is much quieter – the slow disappearance of local news,” she said. “The First Amendment doesn’t mean much if there’s nobody left to exercise it.”

But she’s optimistic. “There’s a lot of innovation. Papers are succeeding by staying rooted in their own communities” and finding local investors who support that mission. “The New Mexico Local News Fund and a new tax credit from the Legislature support newspapers to hire and train. 

The alternative is the news desert, a place without news media. Lacking news, people disengage, voter turnout drops, corruption goes unnoticed and civic engagement wanes. “Rural journalism in a state like New Mexico, we’ve got to fight for it,” Denish said.

Hovering over the meeting was the ghost of the Gallup Independent, which closed its doors in January. This was a gut punch for me. The Independent gave me my first full-time reporting job in 1975, and I ended my reporting career with them. It was a good, feisty paper that shined a light on its community and didn’t shrink from controversy.

In my last iteration with them I did investigative work. Publisher Bob Zollinger always told me, “Do what you do.” In other words, don’t hold back.

Days before the Independent shuttered we had a long conversation. Bob is a numbers guy who understood his business very well. The pandemic inflicted lasting damage. The Navajo casino drained dollars from a poor community and cut into retail sales (and advertising). Silver prices spiked – critical to a town full of silversmiths. Finally, tariffs on newsprint hit hard.

While we lamented this loss to the state, the meeting ended with Press Women honoring Carol Clark, founder and publisher of the Los Alamos Daily Post, as Communicator of Achievement. In 2012 Carol started her online newspaper and succeeded because she’s focused on local news. In the dark night of journalism, Carol is lighting the way forward.