Meet the Owner
Amanda Rodriguez, owner of the East Texas Banner since April 1, 2022, is a lifelong Jasper county resident. One of her first jobs was during her time at Kirbyville High School when she worked for the Kirbyville Banner under the ownership of Joe Herndon from 2001 to 2003. She was a typist, and proofreader, and cut and waxed articles to be placed on the boards for printing.
Rodriguez later went back to work for the Banner when she was in undergraduate school under the ownership of Danny Reneau. She left the newspaper business to pursue a career as a public librarian and has been a librarian for ten years.
After completing graduate school, Rodriguez was presented with an offer she could not refuse to purchase the Banner. She has changed its name to East Texas Banner in order to expand its coverage area and readership. She continues to work as a career librarian, as well as the owner of East Texas Banner.
Rodriguez is a 2003 graduate of Kirbyville High School. She attended Lamar University where she obtained a Bachelor of Business Administration in Management and a Master of Public Administration. Her specialties include Public Policy, state and federal constitutional law, public-private partnerships (PPPs), and leadership.
About East Texas Banner
According to the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), R. P. Allen of Galveston established the town of Kirby in 1895 when John Henry Kirby of Kirby Railroad planned to create a community to facilitate marketing lumber from his timber holdings. However, when postal officials established the Post Office, they discovered there was already a town named Kirby. Thus, Kirbyville was born. In less than 20 years, Kirbyville grew from a population of 300 to nearly 3,000 residents. In 1902 the Kirbyville Banner was formed.
Older than any of us, the Banner has withstood the test of time and hardship for 120 years, reporting local happenings and events that now serve as historical content and data to a once-thriving community. Even as recently as the year 2020, during the early, "unprecedented" days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Banner has endured – perhaps not gracefully – but it has endured, nonetheless.
As society has transitioned into the Age of Information, objectivity and fact have often been replaced with urgency and propaganda, leaving us all to question the credibility and truthfulness of media correspondence and reporting. Further, inaccuracies within historical reference material cultivate a future with no definitive history.
How do we, as a society, reverse the effects of inaccurate information and return to a world where subjectivity is left to opinion pieces? One impartial story at a time.
The East Texas Banner, formerly Kirbyville Banner, has two main goals. First, be objective in its reporting, regardless of personal preconceived ideologies and opinions. Second, to serve as a unifying force for the community by encouraging and uplifting its citizens, organizations, and businesses. We recognize that individual, group, and business success is not dependent on others' failures; instead, our neighbor's success fosters our community's success.
Although we plan to ask hard questions, the answers which will require transparency and accountability, respectfulness and objectivity will not be lost.