Jim Hightower, A Texas populist with liberal leanings as big as the Lone Star State, can pack a lot of truth in 300 or so words.

Hightower’s column that ran Friday on the Bulletin’s Think page is a prime example.

It talked about how corporations located far, far away have hollowed out the heart and soul of local newspapers that they have snapped up over the years.

Businesses, including newspapers, have to make money in order to exist. There is nothing inherently evil about that.

But in words that Hightower might type, corporate ownership by and large tends to be a horse of a different color.

The Bulletin — along with the Turlock Journal, Oakdale Leader, Ceres Courier, Westside Index, Gustine Press-Standard, Escalon Times, Riverbank News, and 209 Magazine — are owned by Hank and Kelly Vander Veen who live in Ripon.

Their company — 209 Multimedia — is also in a partnership that launched a weekly newspaper called The Westside Express that serves Los Banos, Dos Palos and Firebaugh. That is on top of having a printing press here in Manteca  and not relying on a large corporate facility in the Bay Area where the Stockton Record and Modesto Bee are now printed.

Our press also prints 15 other newspapers that are locally owned publications in places such as Dixon Gridley, Carmichael, West Sacramento, Citrus Heights, Rancho Cordova, Madera, Rio Linda, and Calaveras County among others.

Every penny you spend on a newspaper subscription or an advertisement stays in the communities we serve. Those people — press crews, delivery people, inserters, advertising representatives, reporters, editors, paginators that build pages, support staff and even the publishers — all live here.

Not only do they spend their money here, but more importantly they have roots here. 

And while having a local impact economically was a part of Hightower’s point, it was only a sliver of it.

Highwater was zeroing in on content.

Having worked on newspapers — all locally owned, by the way, except for a side gig with Associated Press covering the Sacramento Kings for over five years during the past 51 years — I’ve gotten an earful of what people think about what I do every day and what they read in the pages of their newspaper.

Some good, some bad.

Sometimes feedback comes via a phone call but most of the time its when I’m shopping at places like Target or Food-4-less, dining at El Jardin, walking my dogs, attending a community function like a parade or when I’m volunteering with an event like the community Thanksgiving dinner that I missed this year due to a conflict with work.

We are invested in the community not just because of our jobs but because we live here as do people we care about. They run the gamut from family and friends to neighbors and those we come across during the course of a day that live or work here as well.

That concern is reflected on the pages of the Bulletin.

Friday’s edition is an example.

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is about as slow as you can get for news.

Yet there were stories about:

*The City of Manteca’s long range plan for the mess that is South Main Street between Woodward Avenue and the 120 Bypass that was buried in a 150-plus page environmental document.

*Plans for another 210 apartments in Manteca.

*The need for major repairs for the iconic Knights Ferry Bridge.

*A builder wanting to  construct 16 townhouses in Ripon.

*How the community as a whole is doing when it comes to conserve water.

*How new state traffic laws impact the local community.

*The passing and lives of Annie DeGroot and Henry Charles Long.

*How high school sports team from Manteca, East Union, Lathrop, Ripon Christian, and Ripon fared the day before.

*Manteca’s past that provides a bit of perspective of how the city got to where it is today.

On the Think page we shared thoughts on the directions Manteca is heading as the city moves toward 100,000 residents.

There were also letters from your neighbors — Stephen Breacain, James Sith, and Clarke Marek — weighing in on issues.

You will also find non-local columns that don’t fit some dictated corporate view. On Friday, for example, we ran Tim Graham — a conservative columnist if there ever was one — and Hightower who is at the opposite end of the spectrum.

And, yes, there were non-local stories.

The year-end slow down isn’t exactly the best representation of what the Bulletin strives to do.

But we make an effort to make sure story selections that have the greatest relevance to the community starting with those in the region, followed by California and Sacramento news that can impact lives here directly or indirectly and then the West, United  States and the world in that descending order.

If you happen to subscribe to the nearby dailies that are corporate owned — the Modesto Bee and the Stockton Record — you might notice a thing or two that make them different than the Bulletin.

It is extremely rare to find a front page in the Bulletin that isn’t 100 percent local. That’s not the case with the Bee or Record.

Sometimes we have more local stories just on the front page than either have in their entire newspapers.

This is not a criticize per se, but that decision was made by how the corporations that own those newspapers  chose to operate them.

The Bulletin will often have non-local news you may not see in either of the other two papers for a day or so if ever. And in terms of non-local sports, you can find much more extensive coverage that happened the day before when you open our sports section.

This is possible based on decisions made by local owners that didn’t decide to outsource the building of pages to Kansas City or Hong Kong or to get rid of the printing press to reduce costs and increase their profit margin.

Both the Record and Bee go “to bed”, or send their pages to a press facility, a good six hours or so before the Bulletin does.

It makes a difference in not just what you get in local and professional sports as well as general news but also local events. You can pick up the Bulletin the next day after a council meeting to see just exactly what is being done with your tax dollars as well as decisions being made that may eventually impact your life.

That fact that can be done is because we are not only locally owned but have publishers that are committed to the concept of local journalism and not focused on squeezing the proverbial turnip for every last cent they can in profit to please Wall Street hedge fund investors.

We are not riding the high horse because of how the world has evolved when it comes to newspapers over the last 20 years plus.

Instead, we are simply riding the same horse that others who have worked delivering community journalism have done since the first edition of the Bulletin was published 113 years ago.

Our world is Manteca, Ripon, Lathrop and the other communities we cover.

It is not Wall Street, Sacramento, or Washington, D.C.

This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com