One year ends today, a new one begins tomorrow. For me and the San Antonio Report, one chapter closes, a new one opens.
I am excited to write that bigcitysmalltown, the weekly podcast all about San Antonio that I launched one year ago, will now enter into a collaborative publishing relationship with the San Antonio Report in a way that knits together our two audiences. The podcast audience grows by the week. We are bullish about its continued growth, and the positive impact its presence on the San Antonio Report site can have for both enterprises.
To focus on that new collaboration, this will be my last word in column format on the site.
So much for retirement, which I’ve tried more than once. I have other interests, but staying engaged in the city my family has called home for nearly 35 years has no expiration date.
I officially retired from the Report in 2021, a decade after retiring as the executive editor of the San Antonio Express-News. I continued to contribute a Sunday column to the Report every week, a tradition rooted in my time as the newspaper editor from 1997 to 2011, where I also wrote a Sunday column in addition to my other duties.
That’s 25-plus years hitting a weekly deadline. The looming freedom of life without that particular deadline is starting to feel really good. Yet I’ll still stay plenty busy.
For the last year, I and a small creative team working at Geekdom in the historic Rand Building on East Houston Street have been building bigcitysmalltown, my weekly podcast all about San Antonio and the people who make it go and grow. As our audience continues to expand, I look forward to devoting more time to weekly conversations with some of the most interesting and important people in our city and region.
I am especially excited about the prospect of collaborating more closely with Report editors on the podcast. Bigcitysmalltown guests and the work they do are a natural fit with the work of the reporting staff at the Report. All of us care about the city and highlighting its challenges and opportunities, its unique qualities and its persistent deficiencies.
Each week, readers of the Report will be able to read an article summarizing the latest appearance of a San Antonian or South Texan whose work merits recognition and coverage, and will be directed to listen to the full podcast on their preferred platform.
The bigcitysmalltown.com website is a portal to hearing from past guests. Looking back and listening, which I have been doing this holiday season, it’s remarkable how many of our guests and their impact on the city are timeless, as relevant today as they were on the original broadcast.
Listening to entrepreneur, former San Antonio mayor and HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros speaking on the podcast before a live audience at San Antonio Startup Week about this being the most opportunistic moment in the city’s contemporary history, Greater:SATX CEO Jenna Saucedo-Herrera on regional economic development, or Port San Antonio CEO Jim Perschbach talking about high-tech job growth and creative enterprises is a front row seat on city leaders who continue to make a big difference.
Listening to the Rev. Gavin Rogers, former head of Corazon Ministries, talk about ministering and meeting the needs of the homeless and immigrants in the city, or Uvalde native “Father Eddie” Morales describing life in his hometown as a Catholic parish priest during and after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022, invites listeners to peer through intensely personal windows into poverty, violence and seeking safe shelter.
Elizabeth Johnson, chef-owner of Pharm Table in Southtown, offers an especially articulate take on nutrition, health and sustainability, and food as medicine, while the San Antonio Food Bank’s Mitch Hagney talks about eliminating the inner city’s food deserts, the kind of humanitarian and community work that didn’t even exist a decade or so ago.
The San Antonio Report enters the new year building on another successful fund drive and 12 years of continuous publication and organizing civic engagement events in San Antonio. Its audience of highly involved citizens — people who vote, who are active in their neighborhoods, schools or churches, who support local nonprofits, is an enviable and important one.
“From the day that bigcitysmalltown launched, it was clear that this wasn’t just another podcast,” San Antonio Report Publisher Angie Mock said this week. “Our co-founder Robert Rivard’s mastery of interviewing, high-quality guest bookings and understanding of the issues that matter most to San Antonians are on clear display each week, and we feel that this podcast has a very real interest and value to San Antonio Report readers.
“This collaboration is the next step for both of our entities’ growth and is an example of the ongoing community service that only great local journalism can provide.”
Together we will explore ways to make each of our organizations more relevant in this important moment in this fast-growing metro area. We welcome your ideas for podcast subjects as our guest schedule fills up for February.
The new Velocity TX CEO Rene Dominguez, a former deputy city manager, will be our first guest in the new year. The episode drops Monday, Jan. 8, wherever you get your podcasts — as well as on the San Antonio Report website. Give us a listen, and by all means, keep reading the Report.
Happy New Year!
