Matt Jenkins is a terrific writer who understands water issues in the West very well. Here’s his profile of Bob Rawlins the owner of The Pueblo Chieftain: Here’s an excerpt:
The Chieftain is printed out of a squat building on western 6th Street in Pueblo near the railyard, where downtown’s brick buildings give way to the lazy meander of the Arkansas River. Rawlings runs the newspaper from a suite with several well-stuffed chairs and a lighted globe. The most high-tech thing inside is an IBM Selectric II typewriter.
For a man with such a fierce print voice, Rawlings is surprisingly amiable. He is nearly deaf — a result of his time aboard a submarine chaser during World War II — so he follows conversations with unusual attentiveness. In person, he rarely utters phrases more blasphemous than “I’ll be doggone.”
One wall of his office is home to what he calls “the Rogues Gallery”: a collection of photographs of himself glad-handing practically every politician who’s passed through Pueblo. But a far less ostentatious memento hints at Rawlings’ true passion. On the coffee table lies a small, gold-painted skillet engraved with the words:
GOLDEN FUTURE
FRYING PAN
MORE WATER FOR
THE ARKANSAS VALLEYIt’s an emblem of the role that the newspaper and its publisher’s family have played in securing and defending water for the valley, an enterprise that stretches almost as far back as Rawlings’ own life.
HCN and Mr. Jenkins are also runnign a short article about my friend and mentor, Chris Woodka. Here’s an excerpt:
…Woodka, 57, is Colorado’s sole remaining full-time water reporter. He has worked hard to separate himself from the Chieftain’s editorial slant, and has built a reputation for his fair coverage of an extremely complicated and contentious subject. “You kind of make your own luck,” Woodka says. “Your sources have to be good, and you don’t burn them.”
Steve Henson, the Chieftain’s current managing editor, serves as a deliberate editorial firewall between Woodka and the publisher’s suite. “I kind of make my own assignments,” Woodka says. “Steve will let me know the publisher’s concern, and what the publisher would like to see in the story.”
“But,” he adds, “that’s not always the story that he gets.”