Richie Hinojosa & Allyson Kohler

By: Frankie Leal

Richie Hinojosa and Allyson Kohler are a young couple living in Jim Wells County. Hinojosa works as a detective for the County Sheriff’s Department while Kohler is currently studying to receive a degree in early childhood development and education. Both have lived in Jim Wells County their entire lives and graduated from Alice High School, Hinojosa in 2014 and Kohler in 2016.

The Echo doesn’t play much of a role in either one of their lives, and they both use social media as their preferred avenue to consume news.

“I don’t think anything bad would happen without the Echo,” said Kohler. “It’s not like Alice would come tumbling down. We get all the news on social media anyway.”

“For me it’s all social media, and Facebook is the biggest one,” said Hinojosa. “If the Alice-Echo posts something on their Facebook page that’s how you’re going to see it.”

Many local businesses and law enforcement chapters in Jim Wells County have their own official Facebook pages. With Facebook and social media, there’s no need for the police department to send information to the Echo when they can just put it out there themselves.

“For any news about criminal activity our police department or sheriff’s offices all have Facebook pages, so they’ll post it there first if they want people to know something,” said Hinojosa. “The Echo comes later and does secondary reporting because they follow up from those posts.”

“If someone posts something, it gets around fast because it’s a small community, so everyone is eventually going to see it,” said Kohler. “Like say the mayor posted something from her Facebook page. It would get shared, and most people in Alice would see it that way without really needing the Echo.”

With the Echo down to only a handful of subscribers, the group of people that rely on the newspaper is getting smaller and smaller.

“If you walk into any bakery or breakfast place in town early in the morning there’s always a group of old men sitting and reading the paper,” said Hinojosa. “But if the Echo wasn’t here, I think mainly the elderly would suffer. Most of us are fine without it.”

“If you want to be sentimental, I guess you could say it’s like a pillar of the community,” said Kohler. “But to me it doesn’t matter because I never read it anyway.”