Small Town News

Satisfying to most readers

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We call this newspaper the Hays Free Press for several reasons. For the first half century of its 107 years of life, we were the Kyle News because founder Thomas Fletcher Harwell chose that rather commonplace moniker.

In the summer of 1955, convinced that the whole county was our oyster, the name was changed to the Hays County Citizen and we began struggling to make the newspaper a good citizen, committed to reporting news, good and bad, that occurred in and around Central Texas.

We even proclaimed for a while that we were "Independent In All Things and Neutral In None," which is a courageous and somewhat braggadocios proclamation for anyone to live by. We soon switched to a takeoff on The New York Times, changing one word to proclaim "All the News that's Fun to Print."

Then, the week after November 23, 1963, we gave up on that too. The assassination of Jack Kennedy didn't leave many folks with much taste for "funning" anymore.

We made another change in 1986, when we surrendered the "Citizen" moniker in a complicated business deal and shifted our operation to north of the Blanco River again, calling it the Hays County Free Press.

The choice of that name was twofold. First we wanted to honor Isaac A. Julian who operated The Free Press in San Marcos. Julian ran Hays County's best newspaper from the early 1870s until the Great Depression of the early 1890s turned him asunder.

Secondly, we fervently believe in "free" expression of ideas and try to practice what we preach. (We don't think it incongruous to charge 75 cents for a copy. That partially covers the cost of producing and distributing our newspaper.)

We limit opinion pieces to our editorial pages, which also contain a variety of individualistic columnists. We encourage letters to the editor, and welcome provocative articles that challenge and sometimes infuriate some of our readers. We do require that letters to the editor be signed and we need a daytime phone number to verify the author.

This year our peers in the newspaper business have bestowed 10 separate prize-winning awards on this newspaper. They were for appearance, advertising excellence, news reporting, sports, photography and column writing.

It's the nature of the human animal to seek approval from its peers and we are no exception.

We are realists, however, so we accept as a given that we aren't going to please all of our readers from an editorial standpoint. However, we are absolutely certain that the other 85 percent of our newspaper is fair, accurate and, with some regularity, both fun and satisfying to peruse.

We'll settle for that.



Copyright 2010 The Free Press, Buda, Texas. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from SmallTownPapers, Inc.

© 2010 The Free Press Buda, Texas. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from DAS.

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