The Brownsville Herald Fails Again

By Diego Garcia III | Editor of The Brownsville Beacon



Brownsville's newspaper is a shell of the shell it used to be.

The once proud daily newspaper was published and printed in Brownsville across the street from the Old Cameron County Jail and a stone's throw from Downtown and the new Cameron County Courthouse.

The printing presses would chug all night as distributors would fill the parking lot waiting for their bundles of newspapers to deliver all around town.

The offices have been boarded up and the behemoth printing presses have been shipped to Mexico long ago.

The Herald is now printed in McAllen along with The Monitor and the Valley Morning Star. Most days you'll find the local stories written by authors from McAllen or Harlingen.

The Brownsville "office" is a room in the refurbished VentureX Building. Probably the same room where they store the mops and the Fabuloso.

Their Facebook page is riddled with grammatical errors and misspelled words. I'm sure you will find a grammatical error around here, but I'm not a professional news reporter or editor. I'm not getting paid to do this unlike my "professional" counterparts at The Herald.

We can now add misinformation and confusion to their resume of professionalism.

On December 31st, Laura Martinez posted an article to the Herald's Facebook page. It was about the curfew being reinstated in Cameron County. The article and it's headline read the curfew and its accompanying restrictions would take effect on 12:01 AM Friday, January 1st. This meant the curfew would take place one minute after New Year's Eve. 

We'll save the County Judge's poor decision and planning for another article. As I write this, the neighbors are still popping fireworks and Mana's Oye Mi Amor and Me Vale are blasting in the background at one o'clock in the morning.

The point to this is The Herald's article was wrong. The writers and the editors didn't learn how to read a clock (or the County Judge's order, for that matter), since the order, along with other local news outlets, reported the orders will take effect one minute past noon on Friday, January 1st.

They confused PM (post meridiem) with AM (ante-meridiem). Meridiem is Latin for midday (noon).

The Herald left the incorrect headline and article up for hours before changing it. 

How many people read the article and believed the misinformation was true? For better or for worse, people depend on reputable, accurate information. They expect their newspaper to be right. It really shouldn't be too much to expect The Herald to do their job correctly.

Or is it?

It is no wonder why the great beat writers and editors of the past have moved on and retired. I'm sure they laugh or cringe at what The Herald has become.

It would be nice if someone would start up a smaller, independent newspaper that published Brownsville news. Or, at the very least get rid of the staff and bring in some people who actually care about the quality of their work.

Or maybe they should get some high school journalism class kids to write, edit, and revise the articles published under the Herald name.

They certainly can't do any worse than the "professionals" already do.

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