What a Newspaper Should Be

A letter to the Fort Worth Weekly about Betty Brink’s passing, ends up telling you what a newspaper should be.

Kudos to the Weekly for being a real “news” paper.  The residents of Tarrant County salute you.  You too, Mrs.Brink.....

To the editor: I’ve read Betty Brink’s obituary a half-dozen times, and it’s hard to believe she’s gone. I can’t say enough about what a woman I never actually met meant to me.

My only regret is that I discovered Betty very late. She was on the cover of the Weekly, carrying on about the mayor’s desire to put the whole town of Handley at risk by mowing down an old roadside motel using a new method, unproven and untested, for asbestos abatement. Brink outed him, and the resulting furor ended his little effort to test the “Fort Worth method” on the people of Handley.

To say that Betty was the face of the Weekly is not incorrect. After that story, if there was a cover piece with Betty at the keys, I’d pick it up and read it, no matter what it was about. She loved outing corrupt government, public waste, and outrageous behavior by elected folks, usually subjects that had been largely left untouched. Mike Moncrief hated her and at one time told the city council that any employee found to be communicating with the Weekly would be fired. It didn’t have any effect.

Amazingly, the stuff she wrote about never seemed to be of interest to the local daily. She brought me to the newspaper at age 40, when I’d never been interested in it before. As I began to read other alternative papers and other dailies, I began to have a distinct opinion about Fort Worth Weekly: It’s like no other paper out there. They’ll tell you the rest of the story, about things nobody else seems to want to give space to. And it’s not yellow journalism at all. It’s added-value journalism, from writers like Betty who know where to find the bad apples.

I will miss Betty forever. We can’t replace someone like that, born and raised here with a voice that resounds through the community like an air raid siren. You have to build people like that, and they must have a natural desire to do that kind of work. I never expected to find the Weekly’s kind of quality in an “arts and entertainment” paper full of sex ads in the back. Boy, was I ever wrong.

Chris M. Waring, Hurst