Newspaper wars: A new front in El Paso By Ray Barrington News-Chronicle Out in the west Texas town of El Paso, there could be another front in the fight against bland corporate journalism. The New York Times reported this week on the activities of Osvaldo Rodriguez Borunda, publisher of El Diario, a newspaper in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso. Not surprisingly, there's a heavy Mexican influence in El Paso. (Remember those salsa commercials?) But Rodriguez told the Times you wouldn't know that from reading the local paper, the El Paso Times. So he is thinking of starting his own newspaper on the U.S. side of the border - an outgrowth of El Diario with bilingual content. Oh, and have I mentioned the El Paso Times is published by Gannett, the publisher of the Green Bay Press-Gazette and a few jillion other papers in the United States? Rodriguez has run articles and editorials looking at how the Times ignores Juarez and the Hispanic majority - 78 percent - in El Paso. The Times subscription rate is only 32 percent of the available households, a lower-than-usual rate that publisher Mack Quintana told the New York Times is because of lower education levels. There has already been sniping, even before ink has touched paper for an El Paso version of El Diario. The El Paso Times, three years before, reported Rodriguez had been arrested for threatening his son. It later reported the son said he was never threatened or assaulted by his father. Two years later, the Times repeated a report from a Mexico City newspaper that linked Rodriguez to a drug trafficking organization. The Times later published a clarification, and the Mexico City paper published a correction. The El Paso Times also reported when police arrested Rodriguez on suspicion of drunken driving. And it circulates some of its content and advertising in Juarez with Norte de Ciudad Juarez, a competitor of El Diario, whose publisher, Oscar Cantu, called Rodriguez "a gangster" in the New York Times. Economically, the El Paso Times and Gannett have fought as well. Rodriguez asked El Paso's government for $750,000 in tax breaks for his plan to open a newsroom and printing plant on the U.S. side of the border. The Times and Quintana lobbied against it, saying Gannett did not get tax incentives when it expanded in El Paso in the 1990s. Gannett has received incentives in other cities where it publishes, including Jackson, Tenn., the New York Times reported. Rodriguez said he had received offers from an El Paso suburb and the state of New Mexico to locate his plant there. A new newspaper would make it three cities where Gannett would face competition; here in Green Bay, of course, and also in Honolulu, where the Gannett-owned Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin have competed since the joint operating agreement there ended and Gannett's attempt to buy the S-B was blocked. Hmmm ... there were only 12 cities in the U.S. with separately-owned, competing daily newspapers. Wonder if it's any coincidence about the ownership in some of them? Barrington is a reporter for The News-Chronicle. His column appears here Fridays. Contact him via e-mail at [email protected] or call 432-2941.