SAN ANTONIO – As an East Side community newspaper since 1995, the San Antonio Observer has not only covered events like Juneteenth.
It has also taken on politics, controversies and news of interest to its expanding readership.
“The website has exponentially increased our readership and the way we are able to deliver the news,” said its owner Waseem Ali, whose father, the late Hussein Ali, started the San Antonio Observer in the family garage.
He said it had catapulted the small weekly, which is free at newsstands, even further into the East Side community and beyond.
“It’s designed to open everybody’s minds to give you a different perspective,” Ali said.
Ali said he and his wife, Stephanie Zarriello, its editor and publisher, built on his father’s business model.
Unlike other small newspapers at the time with stories about accomplishments by community members and school and church events, Ali said, “Nobody was talking about what was really happening as it affected the African American community.”
He said the San Antonio Observer has published local, state and national stories about voting rights, affirmative action, social and justice issues, public safety and more.
By being “a little more controversial,” Ali said, “I think that was what differentiated us from everybody else.”
Historian and longtime community activist Mario Salas is a regular contributor to the San Antonio Observer.
Salas said historically, newspapers like the Observer became “the voice of the Black community.”
He said they reported on segregation, lynchings, police brutality, Jim Crow laws, and “any injustice.”
He said its predecessor, the San Antonio Register, first published in 1931, held a mock election for “sepia mayor because Black people couldn’t run for mayor.”
Salas said there was also The Inquirer, which criticized the execution of 13 Buffalo Soldiers who were initially buried along Salado Creek, and later re-interred at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.
They were among 63 convicted in the nation’s largest court-martial after racial injustice triggered the 1917 Houston riots.
He said although the newspaper was small, “They fought really hard for the rights of Black people to be treated like human beings.”
Without Black newspapers, Salas said, “Where would we be? Probably not where we should be or even close to where we should be.”