Who is killing the newspaper editors of Texas?

Well, not killing, exactly. But Lawrence pointed out to me a few days ago that there’s a trend…

First, Christopher Lopez quit as editor of the El Paso Times after close to three years on the job.

Next, Fred Zipp quit the Statesman after eight years as editor.

And finally, Robert Rivard quit the San Antonio Express News after 14 years as editor.

I don’t quite know what to make of this. I don’t follow either the El Paso or San Antonio papers regularly, but I know Zipp presided over a large buyout of Statesman staff before resigning. (I also know the paper was up for sale at one point, but the owners didn’t get any offers that they liked.)

(Hattip other than Lawrence: TSFKA “Romenesko’s MediaNews”.)

Edited to add 9/25/2011: Things just got even more interesting. Brett Thacker, who was apparently the second-in-command at the Express-News, is also leaving. And two of the paper’s top columnists also resigned. The South Texas Pistolero has a very good post up over at his site covering these developments; I commend it to your attention.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 23rd, 2011 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Clippings, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Who is killing the newspaper editors of Texas?”

  1. the pistolero says:
    September 26, 2011 at 5:33 pm

    Thanks for the link and the compliment!

    I knew the newspaper industry was not in the best of shape, but I never would have thought things would have happened so fast at the Express-News. Now that I think about it, it’s more than a bit odd that reasons were given for Clack’s and Stroud’s departures but not for Thacker’s and Rivard’s. That’s another thing that seems to give credence to the “consolidation with the Chronicle” theory.