An unlucky 13 years ago local news editor Bobby Horecka swung through Lavaca County as part of a larger statewide drought story he put together while working for the Texas Farm Bureau in March 2009. The video story shown here, would later air as part of the bureau's regular programming on the RFD-TV Network. Stories were also crafted for the bureau's print publications, its radio news programming and, combined, those stories helped launch a website that became a clearinghouse for all things drought-related in Texas.
This video news story, its complementary magazine story from Texas Agriculture, and the drought website would earn Horecka three of the four national media awards he claimed that year for work done with the bureau back then. As we embark on several similar multi-media-styled projects as a local news organization in coming weeks and since it sure seems like those dry times may well be taking root once more, we thought it might prove interesting to revisit a few things folks shared with us back then.
One of those sharing happens to be local cattleman Mike Helller, who granted us an interview back in 2009, just a stone's throw from our Hallettsville news office doors today. There during one of his Tuesday sales at the auction barn, right out front of the Hallettsville Livestock Commission Co., we visited for a good long while. Although his interview appears near the end of this story, Heller was the first person we talked with to begin this crazy, two-day ride across Texas back then.
Horecka captured all images used, both video and still-frames that ran with the print version. He organized the travel/interview schedules, he conducted the interviews, and he later wrote both the stories and scripts used for this story and others done which incorporated various elements of these stories.