Since 2020 when Lee Enterprises took over The Eagle and others of Warren Buffet’s giant media sources, it joined what today is the “family” of “nearly 350 weekly and specialty publications serving 77 markets in 26 states,” seemed at first to be a good thing to be in the family with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Omaha World-Herald, and nwi.com among other of their brands. And yet, it’s been a disaster.
Never mind the soap opera through the years but when The Eagle’s editor, Darren Benson, was laid off one month ago and Steve Boggs, the editor of the Waco Tribune-Herald took over as Regional Editor of BOTH the Waco Tribune-Herald and The Eagle, one promise was “The Eagle Media Company’s newsroom and advertising teams will remain at The Eagle and not oursourced to the Waco Tribune-Herald.”
It was just March 14 when I called the local number for The Eagle as I’d received an e-mail that my digital subscription renewal price of $5.00/mo to $14.07/mo with the explanation: “The new price reflects our value as the unmatched No. 1 source for local news and sports coverage of the city and surrounding region.”
I dialed and the person answered, “Waco Tribune-Herald, how may I direct your call?” I said, “I called The Bryan Eagle, I’d like to talk to them.” She said, “Yes, this is the Waco Tribune-Herald and we can handle your question.” I said, “For The Eagle?” and she said, “Yes.” I said, "I’d like to cancel my digital subscription to the paper because of the 150% price increase." She said, “Let me connect you with online subscriptions.”
“Waco Tribune-Herald,” the new operator said, and I repeated “I’d like to cancel my digital subscription when it’s up at the end of May.” She replied, “What’s your phone number and address?” I gave her those items, and added my name, not that she was interested. I had a minute to reread The Eagle e-mail’s list of promises for what they were “continue to” deliver in the new price structure:
• Breaking news as it happens • Award-winning photography and slideshows • New Podcasts and video stories • The latest food and dining reviews • Best-in-class coverage of your favorite sports teams
I shook my head to think that I’d stopped buying copies of the daily paper at $2.00/issue and then the Sunday paper at double that (at first before going up again) after they'd been $.75/issue and $1.25 on Sundays.
A five-minute negotiation session began when I simply asked them not to renew my digital subscription for $14.07/mo as I’d been paying $52 for the prior year’s digital subscription. From $52 to $168.84? She offered me three lower rates over the phone each time I did not agree to continue my subscription. She even took me back to the same rate that I had now as an offer for a year. I declined, noting that it was unfair to correct the bills of only those who called to cancel. Why not leave the rates as they were and try to build new followers at a similarly fair price? I was not contentious or sarcastic.
And, I noted they were not even a local accounting office to speak with. We’re the home community to Texas A&M University, by enrollment the second largest college in the United States, and we don’t even merit the regional office location? Fascinating. Today, on p. A11, Steve Boggs claimed that “in the Brazos Valley, they’d grown their digital customers more than 35% over the past 12 months alone!” That was before the big digital price increase. Let’s watch what happens to their numbers with today's announced price changes.
Waco’s population is estimated as 141.997 (the 24th largest city in Texas). Bryan’s population is estimated at 89,017 (46th largest) and College Station is 121,009 (29th largest) and together, B-CS is 268,248 people without students per the 2020 census. Check the math but it doesn’t make sense. Why is the regional leadership in Waco, not in Bryan-College Station?
Today, when the Steve Boggs’ opinion column (on p. A11) announced the new plan to print three days a week, deliver by U.S.P.O. vs. a friendly, longtime carrier who wakes up at 1 am to support their family with their route, a price increase of 150% over last year for the digital (you can’t blame this on the price of ink and paper as bandwidth isn’t that expensive), and what did, let’s Regional Editor Steve, promise? Not that we know Steve, have ever met Steve, or have even once seen Steve, because he neither lives nor works here; what did he promise?
He said, “They” are:
• “Still a team of dedicated local journalists who work for a local news company. • Still care deeply about our readers. • We live here, we work here, we are part of the fabric of this community. And. • We couldn’t do this vital work without you and your financial support of local news. • Every dollar counts—for you, and for our news organization—and your commitment allows us to sustain and grow local journalism in this community.”
Breaking news overnight will not appear in the morning’s paper unless it occurs on Monday, Wednesday or Saturday nights. But wait, that’s not really the case. Recently the way that funeral homes could submit obituaries to appear in the paper for families changed. They stopped staffing that office on weekends, so death notices and obituaries would not appear until at least Tuesday after the weekend unless you got it in before Friday. Good luck to those in the in-between gap periods. That’s just not right.
In fact, it was ridiculous, and every funeral home in town has been inconvenienced by that change, not to mention their ever-rising costs that the families have to pay for what used to be a public service at no charge. Wedding announcements and funeral notices used to be a courtesy—remember that? Remember when the publisher of The Eagle would grant amazing amounts of space to advertise upcoming fundraising events as community partners and media sponsors? It wasn’t that long ago.
Times change and prices change. That’s understandable. An online subscription to the Houston Chronicle is $20/month. The Dallas Morning News is similarly $20/mo. But they still have daily carrier-delivered newspapers, they have not wrecked their choice of comic strips, nor have they removed the all-important TV grid from the daily listings, three reasons we had to look forward to the paper. We’d already had the loss of the TV guide for several months now.
Forget saying happy birthday to the young athlete whose photo appears on the sports pages each day. KBTX-TV will still include that for you on the morning show. Forget looking for coverage of local sporting events on non-print days Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. They promise more “watchdog journalism” on their three print days—Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays and a reading experience “bursting with local news and opinions.”
Letters to the Editor, of course, will be hit or miss with spotty reading depending on your subscription path. Any chance to hold local officials accountable for decisions and votes might drift over to TexAgs or MyBCS or other new local bulletin board site for news that could pop up in weeks/months to come.
In my more than four decades of Eagle readership here as a community resident and citizen, no matter who has owned the newspaper before, I truly believe that everyone did their best to bring the news and reflect the community values of our special combined cities that comprise the entire Brazos Valley — until now.
This entire traumatic development did not occur overnight. It’s been particularly in the last ten years of the Warren Buffet-led demise. Buffet’s Berkshire-Hathaway bought The Eagle in 2012 with a circulation of 20,000 and close to 100 employees. At the time it had been an important community presence for the preceding 123 years.
In 2020, Lee Enterprises bought 30 papers from the Berkshire-Hathaway Media Group after Buffet had helped bail Lee Enterprises out of bankruptcy some years prior and then still retained a level of ownership in Lee Enterprises, though to a lesser extent. At the time TV station KXXV reported Buffet as saying he was a “lifelong fan of newspapers but …expects most of them to continue on their declining trajectory, save for a handful of national papers.” Sort of like throwing the candy wrapper over the edge of your boat while you’re sailing, you don’t care what happens to the water after you’re back on land.
The only employee that I can think of who has lasted throughout the duration of some three decades, whose presence used to identify The Eagle to the community is Robert Borden. Since October 1986, Robert Borden has worked at The Eagle; that’s almost 37 years, friends…he’s the Opinions Editor, you know him as head writer for the Sunday Arts Watch (after longtime staffer Jim Butler left), he’s on the Editorial Board.
That was the same editorial board where former colleague Margaret Ann Zipp once served with him and penned her fun “It’s Like This” column of local news in addition to being a copy editor—a position woefully long since forgotten, and finally, a reporter, who I won’t name, who had his home broken into and his hard drive stolen once while pursuing a local investigative story, but still stayed there and published stories anyway for another two years. He embodied free speech and investigative journalism at a time when it was not popular to criticize the university for fear of advertising dollars at risk.
Then, there was a young, determined reporter who took on early investigative stories and pursued them relentlessly, won awards, and ultimately became editor–Kelly Brown. She stayed for almost three decades before she saw the handwriting and jumped over to TAMU, and that was the end of hard-hitting stories in The Eagle.
And, my favorite former Editor and Publisher, Donnis Baggett, who wasn’t afraid to print stories that might not be flattering because they were newsworthy and relevant. He was good under pressure and he unnerved more than a few city officials back in the day when all the contracts and agreements saw the disinfecting light of day. So many people have forgotten those days because well...football, and Aggie Park, and well, football.
You know what all four of these named stalwart journalists had in common? You’d see them throughout the community, constantly. They attended the events we read about. They knew the leaders they wrote about. They volunteered countless hours of their own time across numerous key volunteer-driven nonprofits here. Each of us benefited from the work they did off the job as much as the work they did on the job.
Robert Borden, the last one standing, has written countless beautiful obituary tributes and reflections over key citizens in our community, noting with ease their achievements and things that were important to them, because he knew them, had more than just met them. He’s a champion of the Brazos Valley Symphony Orchestra and served in numerous leadership positions, he keeps people aware of the greatness of Brazos Valley Troupe and other organizations that don’t always have automatic audiences without a little help. He’s served on the board of the Brazos Valley Food Bank and countless other things you don’t see or know of. Most of all, he’s survived every administrative change that has been made in the past 37 years.
If things continue at The Eagle the way they appear to be going, with no one rising up as a private citizen to purchase it and set it back on a reasonable, normal course of operation, nor engendering community support vs. community disgust, it will undoubtedly be Robert Borden that writes the final opinion on the last day the paper appears in print. It doesn’t have to be this way. The story doesn’t have to end this way. You just don’t take something that has been “working” continuously since 1889 and project its demise and mumble that it’s just a darned shame things turned out this way.
Surely there is fire in someone’s soul to pursue fixing this problem. Those who believe in a free press, those who know the relevance of reporting the truth before someone like Elon Musk replaces Jack Dorsey and starts ruining everything about the platform his predecessors worked hard to build (and maintain at an appropriate level of oversight); someone must be out there to right this ship before we sing "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" again. Ask yourselves who it is that should oversee, and daresay protect, the public from one-sided journalism that just pleases certain elected officials?
Will it now be a mouthpiece of the wit and wisdom of say, Dan Patrick [aka Dannie Scott Goeb], sportscaster turned senior-citizen-intolerant, genius, who wants to upend Texas education by abolishing tenure at Texas state universities? That's a second disaster in waiting...when people who possess no postgraduate academic credentials nor have achieved tenure at a purportedly scholarly university start making decisions about how and when it should be applied or removed, folks, that's trouble in River City.
And, if The Eagle continues on its wildly erratic descent into oblivion, you certainly won't read the opinions of anyone who disagrees with dear old Dan and if you have a complaint, just call...Waco? Surely not. The Faculty Senate has tried repeatedly to point out the dangers, but you're not seeing a vast number of stories that truly bring to light what the genuine issues are and what it means in dollars, reputations, faculty retention, attracting the best and brightest students, and the true future reputation of Texas A&M University. Your most current and newsworthy reporting about this topic of tenure is on WTAW-AM and in its morning headlines in your e-mail boxes.
There is always hope. For those who care about our community and preserving the best of its small-town charm in an ever-growing culture of a once highly regarded academic institution, although it has always been beloved (there's a difference)—someone can make a difference. Asked “what can just one person do?” The answer is PLENTY. Hoping a few of you who are so inclined will band together to save The Eagle before it’s too late and we lose so many of our prestigious faculty who are unknown by name to most folks in town outside the campus. The issue means everything to the future of this university as well as all state universities.
Otherwise, soon the headlines will read: RIP The Eagle and "Texas A&M experiences sudden substantial faculty losses, drop in enrollment expected"
