Last night, as one journalism debate raged its way through the NBA Twittersphere, I found myself temporarily fixated on a completely separate media story of far more importance.
On Wednesday, The Austin American-Statesman, the daily newspaper in Texas’s capital, opted to publish a Spanish-language version of the Texas House committee’s 77-page report on the Robb Elementary School shooting that killed 19 children and two adults in Uvalde. The newspaper gathered a number of Spanish-speaking journalists to translate the document, which had been released in English by the state house earlier in the week. The Statesman is printing 10,000 Spanish-language copies of the report—which can be found here online—an incredible act of service journalism for the Uvalde community, of which half of the residents five years or older speak a language other than English at home, according to Census data.
No one would or should conflate the fact-finding mission in Uvalde with coverage of professional basketball, and I won’t either. But as I read about The Statesman’s act, it left me feeling grateful that, for all the complaints about the news media that exist, outlets can still do incredibly meaningful work that makes people, or specific groups of people, more informed. And that’s something we should all want with things we take a deep interest in.
