Unsigned editorials going away, just like our editorial board

For decades, our newspaper has published unsigned local editorials.

That ends today, but not without one final defense of the way we used to do things.

Our unsigned editorials — under the Viewpoint headline — were unsigned because they were not the opinion of any specific individual; they were the opinion of our newspaper’s editorial board.

My conversations with readers often went something like this:

Reader: Who wrote that editorial?

Me: The editorial board determined the position and the writer reflected the board’s position.

Reader: Yes, but who wrote it?

Me: It doesn’t matter. The writer may not even agree with the position; the writer wrote what he/she was told to write by the editorial board.

The readers’ response that usually followed suggested to me that the concept of an editorial board made no sense to them, though it is a widespread practice in the newspaper industry.

Editorial boards usually consist of newspaper owners, or individuals appointed to the board by owners to reflect the owners’ opinions.

For most of the past 100 years, our newspaper was owned by Freedom Communications, whose owners and editorial boards always championed less government and more individual responsibility. The libertarian positions at Freedom’s papers across the country were not just suggested — they were required.

I can’t speak for every editorial writer this paper has employed in the past 100 years, but there’s a pretty good chance some of them opposed the positions they were required to reflect in their unsigned editorials.

In 2012, Gary and Sue Stevenson and Garry Ellis purchased our paper from Freedom. The Stevenson group neither suggested nor required its Clovis Media Inc. papers to choose any particular political viewpoint. But since the editor — me — and publisher at that time, Ray Sullivan, were actual, factual libertarians anyway, we continued to write local, unsigned editorials from the libertarian viewpoint.

In those days, our editorial board consisted of three people — Sullivan, me, and Sullivan. (He was the boss.) I can count on one hand the number of times he outvoted me, 2-1, and required me to write something with which I did not agree.

Four publishers have come and gone since Sullivan left in 2014. I’ve written all of our unsigned editorials since then, as part of a two-person editorial board, and we were always in 100 percent agreement. (If we disagreed on a topic, we didn’t publish an opinion.)

The editorials remained unsigned because they were not the opinion of any one individual so much as they were the collective opinion of the editorial board.

That brings us to last week, and the reason we will no longer publish unsigned editorials.

Publisher Rob Langrell has left eastern New Mexico for a publisher’s job in Mississippi. I am the new publisher. Kevin Wilson is our new editor. Wilson will continue to cover sports and direct three news/sports reporters, but he won’t be weighing in on the Viewpoint editorials.

That makes me an editorial board of one. And since I hardly ever disagree with myself, our newspaper will no longer publish unsigned editorials.

We will continue to publish other newspapers’ unsigned editorials at times, since many of them still have editorial boards. (See the long explanation above.)

But my name will follow my opinions. And my opinions will remain libertarian — less government, more individual responsibility.

— David Stevens

Publisher, Clovis Media Inc.