Goodbye, from the Coping Chronicles
I’ve been thinking a lot about beginnings and ends. Partly, that’s because after 16 years at the Houston Chronicle, I’ve taken another job. And partly, it’s because of the pandemic.
For me, Tuesday, March 3, 2020, was the last day of the Before Times. Houston wasn’t entirely clueless then, but we were close: We’d dimly heard of “the novel coronavirus.” We squirted ourselves with hand sanitizer and tried not to touch our eyes. “WASH UR HANDS,” commanded the graffiti over I-45.
In the entire U.S., fewer than 50 people had been diagnosed with COVID-19, and none in Texas. The coronavirus felt far away — a thing having to do with China and Spain and that one nursing home in Seattle.
March 3 was the opening
day for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. More than 64,000 unmasked people passed through the gates that day. (Remember how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn’t recommend face masks until April?) That night, for the stadium concert by Midland, the crowd sat elbow-to-elbow.
March 3 was also Super Tuesday. At the polls, unmasked politicians bumped elbows with unmasked primary voters, laughing and spewing droplets at each other as they marveled about how strange it felt not to shake hands.
I’m not a medical reporter, but I’d started to worry about the distant new virus. So that morning, for the first of what would become many times, I interviewed vaccine researcher Peter Hotez. His Baylor/Texas Children’s Hospital team had developed a vaccine for SARS, a different coronavirus, and he’d devoted his life to preventing infectious disease.
There was no reason yet for Houstonians to change their daily lives, he told me, but the city would very likely see an outbreak.
“The big question,” he said, “is when will it start here?”
That evening, Fort Bend County officials announced that a man in his 70s had tested positive.
A more innocent age
Now the big question is, when will COVID end here? Or, alternately, will it ever end?
For this goodbye column, I wish I could proclaim that today is the first day of the After Times, the beginning of the end, that we’ve vaccinated our way out of the scourge. I wish I felt certain that there’ll be a 2022 Rodeo.
I hope that someday, we’ll get our lives back.
But right now, we’re not even out of the delta surge. Our hospitals — even the children’s hospitals — are still full. Doctors, nurses and paramedics are exhausted. Too many people are still unvaccinated, still being hospitalized, still dying.
More than ever, I admire the scientists and medical professionals who’ve stuck with the fight.
Heroes
I also admire the journalists I’m leaving behind. I started at the Chronicle in 2005. For local newspapers, that was the end of the Before Times. Sure, there was talk that the Internet (we still capitalized “Internet”) would be the future of news. But it had yet to lay waste to our business model.
Sunday papers still landed with a whomp on every driveway in the cul-de-sac, and print advertising still paid the bills. But then Google and Facebook and Craigslist sucked away those ads, wiping out jobs, beats and entire publications. Though online ads pay some of our bills, that revenue isn’t nearly enough to support a newsroom. The Chronicle’s staff is now a fraction of the size it was when I started.
When will that shrinking end? Or, alternately, will it ever end?
I hope so. Houston needs a big, fast newsroom to uncover this area’s problems, to explain solutions, to make us laugh and cry and tell us where to get the best boba.
Even COVID, a global pandemic, is in the end a local story.
We who live in Houston need to know what’s happening here: how our hospitals are holding up, which schools have outbreaks, whether the governor will continue to block the mayors and county judges. We want to know what Hotez, our hometown hero, thinks.
So here’s to you, subscribers.
Thank you for paying my salary all these years, and please continue to stand by this paper. Astoundingly, despite everything, it’s a better news organization now than it was when I started: smarter, faster, more diverse, more ambitious. And more than ever, its work — so crucial to this city — depends on you, the people who pay the bills.
Keeping local journalism alive is going to be a long, hard fight — way harder than I once expected it to be. You’re heroes for sticking with it.