University of Phoenix pollsters recently asked Arizona workers if they had their dream job. Only 14% said yes.
Autumn is a season for giving thanks, and as I send this fall edition of InBuckeye magazine to press, I’m thankful to be part of that coveted septile of worker bees who get to live the dream, day in and day out.
I’ve been making magazines for the last eight years — community news in Virginia, bridal and tourism in North Carolina, politics in Phoenix — but never did my work feel so needed as it does in Buckeye.
High growth market. Melting pot population. Thirst for local news. These were just some of the reasons why our team picked Buckeye.
This amazing community has gone without far too long. There are so many stories begging to be told — so many, in fact, my brain hurts a little when I consider the scope of it all, like when you try to conceptualize the size of the universe, or where we go when we die.
Buckeye hasn’t had a local news source for at least six years — how long it took to build the Burh Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper — and during that time, some 40,000 people have settled in Buckeye, making it their new home as we have. That’s a lot of disenfranchised might-be news consumers who surely, at times, want to know just what the heck what is going on around them.
We want to fill that void by telling the stories that matter to you — even the ones seemingly lost in time. That’s why “Past, Present and Future” was the perfect theme for this, the inaugural edition of InBuckeye magazine.
The late philosopher Robert M. Pirsig wrote in Lila: An Inquiry into Morals “the past exists only in our memories.” Counterpoint: It exists in a paper of record, for communities fortunate enough to have one. Cue our entrée.
I had one of the most gratifying journalistic experiences of my career working on this edition’s centerpiece, A legacy worth farming for, with Phoenix-based investigative reporter Hanna Ghabhain.
It’s the past, present and future, the voiceless and the powerful, all rolled into one. It is a vivisection on what is perhaps Buckeye’s most topical storyline, a balance of legacy and futurism told through the lens of complex characters coping with change and learning to accept failure without fault.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading the piece as much as I enjoyed writing it. There are many more stories for you to discover in these glossy pages.
Before I go, a quick anecdote: My friend D’Metrid James is a local real estate agent and a third-generation Buckeye resident. We met in the Arizona Cardinals fan community.
It was something he said to me in September that reassured me we’re doing something right at InBuckeye.
Looking back on his childhood in Buckeye, when James used to ride horses and hunt small game in the desert that today stands as a sea of houses and apartment towers, he said, “The fact that we have an NFL team where we didn’t before is a really big deal.”
He added: “Same with having a newspaper.”
InBuckeye October 2024
