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Coming full circle

It’s 6:30 on a recent Sunday morning. I sip sweetened coffee from an orange dollar-store cup decorated with a hand-painted saguaro. I sit on the cool, polished steps of my casita’s side door, facing west towards the city’s heart, contemplating the recently re-named BOB stadium, the changing downtown Phoenix skyline, and the transient nature of things.

I am content. My new space is the western half of a Territorial-style bungalow duplex built in 1925. I discovered it through a synchronistic convergence of my teen-age son renting his own apartment and me yearning to grow with a transforming city center. The place hadn’t even been put on the market when I spotted the For Rent sign.

The whitewashed, trimmed-in-Mexican-blue bungalow is a one bedroom, one bathroom that still has its original claw-footed tub, a front porch, and a side garden leading to a back yard. I envision a short walk to First Fridays in the arts district and regularly tackling the hyper-sized burritos at nearby La Tolteca mercado.

My casita also is a couple of blocks from the Phoenix New Times building, where I started my writing career decades ago. Primed by early morning caffeine clarity, I sense a circle has been completed.

When I came on as this magazine’s editor in May of ‘05, I did so with the exciting realization that Latino Perspectives Media was in the vanguard of an important media trend. This new brand of community-based yet independent journalism the company espouses is called "new ethnic media" by industry observers.

Simply defined, new ethnic media is journalism defined by and for emerging ethnic populations, in our case, Latinos. "We can do great journalism, serve our community and still make a good profit," is a phrase often heard around Latino Perspectives offices.

We all feel we did "great journalism" with our two-part special report on immigration in May and June. Part I, Citizen Latino, elicited comments like "…this is a topic a lot of Latino journalists are afraid to write about…"

Representatives of organizations both supportive and critical of undocumented immigrants said they were distributing the edition to their staffs and networks around the country. Even when Congress approves immigration legislation, change will not come overnight, and this magazine will continue to intensively cover immigration issues.

During the project I was able to split editor and writer duties. Again I became a street reporter, much like my days with New Times, when I wrote gritty stories about Chicano gangs or the horror of crack dealing in Phoenix neighborhoods. The experience made me thirst to be free of the prison my editor’s office, roaming Arizona streets and backroads for stories.

At the same time, because Latino Perspectives Media is growing and birthing new media presences in publishing, broadcasting and on the Web, transitions were recently proposed to maximize the talents of our small but effective human resources.

Again in my life, a synchronistic convergence has occurred. Beginning with the July edition, I am freed from my editor’s cage. In what our team describes as a win-win situation for the company, our staff, and particularly our readers, Latino Perspectives has re-organized.

I’m unleashed from administrative duties in order to search for stories that are relevant to our readers. Publisher/COO Jim Diaz will temporarily take on some additional duties as executive editor, and assistant editor Anita Mabante Leach assumes more responsibilities.

For me, with new editorial and creative freedom come new responsibilities and obligations. The LPM standard of writing and reporting rises yet another notch. Look for more in-depth, slice-of-life, behind- the-scene articles in politics, education, media, arts and culture. Expect more investigative special reports.

You can take the writer out of the streets, but you can’t take the streets out of the writer. I will search for and find those stories from our past that prompt readers to recall who we were, and those inspirational stories that remind us of who we aspire to be. I will introduce our readers to places and people they may never know, but will never forget.

I am excited as a cub reporter about the world out there that waits to be written about. Yet again, a new circle begins.