STANTON STREET WEEKLY NEWSPAPER
My early publishing career led me to El Paso, TX, to work as the Managing Editor with a talented group to publish "The Village Voice of El Paso, Stanton Street Weekly News."
Below is an part of an interview I did recently with Mother Jones that describes the project and my role.
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The Inside Story of Beto O’Rourke’s Short-Lived Alt-Weekly
How running “El Paso’s Village Voice” kicked off his political career by Tim Murphy
Tucked inside the first print issue of El Paso’s new alternative weekly newspaper, Stanton Street, in January 2002 was a warning shot from its 29-year-old publisher, Robert F. O’Rourke.
His late father, a county judge and writer who had died in a bicycle accident just a few months earlier, was “the inspiration behind this venture,” O’Rourke wrote. But the letter moved quickly from a memorial to something like a stump speech. His target was the city’s only major English-language newspaper, the Gannett-owned El Paso Times. “Too often we have heard the lament of our fellow El Pasoans who feel neglected and uninspired by the daily paper, beholden to a corporate board that meets in McLean, Virginia, where they don’t know the word adelante and they’ve never heard of Pat O’Rourke.”
Click here to read the full story.
Design and Photography credit of Citizen Colonia cover: Grace Madden