The big news

EDITORIAL

First, and most important, welcome to Rock-dale and Milam County, Bitmain. We are ecstatic and grateful you decided to locate your business here. The giant bitcoin mining operation going in at the former Rockdale Operations smelter is exactly what this community needs after the well-documented closings of Alcoa and Luminant. We are confident Bitmain and the Rockdale area will become, and remain, great corporate and business friends and neighbors for decades to come, and we can’t wait to meet all of you and learn more about this exciting new venture. Speaking of learning, some explanations are in order about The Reporter’s front page story this week, more or less announcing what a growing number of people in our community have known for some time—months in fact. Economic planners, quite understandably, kept the Bitmain story quiet for as long as possible. Obviously they didn’t want anything to go wrong before it became a reality. But after actual work—lots of it, on a grand scale—started, the story just became too big. It’s like trying to hide Montana. Somebody was bound to notice. We certainly did and have made a number of inquiries directed at “the powers that be.” We’ve known the basics for weeks even if nobody felt they could speak to us for the record. And still don’t. We understand the desire of economic developers to manage the news. But news isn’t here to be managed. The Rockdale Reporter is the ultimate Rock-dale booster. We’ve been a team player with this community for well over a century. We want only the best for our town and we prove that 52 times a year. But The Reporter is also something else. It’s a newspaper, it’s a good one and reporting the news is what we do. We have 17 plaques from the largest regional newspaper organization in the country—and one from the press organization that covers all of Texas—sitting on our lobby shelves stating that we’re somewhat better than good. You don’t get those by sitting on what must surely be one of the handful of the biggest stories to hit Rockdale in the past 146 years and waiting for someone to grant us the authority to proceed. We’ve already got that. It’s called the First Amendment. So there it is. We are absolutely delighted to be the bearer of such wonderful news. We’ve had to report way too much bad stuff in the past few years. And we will continue to report the good and the bad, as fairly and accurately as we know how, with or without the permission of anyone. We work for you, our readers. You deserve to know. And, man, do you ever deserve to know this!— M.B.