That’s it for 2023

This week saw a busy Wednesday at the New Mexico Supreme Court, when the justices heard oral arguments in cases connected to two of this year’s thorniest issues: abortion rights and homelessness. The court did not immediately rule on whether counties and cities can pass ordinances that restrict access to reproductive health care in a state where abortion remains legal. Same goes for the city of Albuquerque’s attempt to get out from under a lower court order that temporarily forbids police officers and other municipal workers from shuffling unhoused people off public property and stealing their belongings. 

If you’d like some context on either case, New Mexico in Focus spent considerable time on both issues this year. We dedicated a full episode to abortion rights in New Mexico after the fall of Roe vs. Wade. And a good chunk of Senior Producer Lou DiVizio’s nearly hourlong June interview with Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller focused on homelessness. 

Lou followed up in October, hosting an in-depth conversation with the two civil rights lawyers whose case found its way to the state Supreme Court on Wednesday. We’re showing you that interview again this week, but we’ll all probably have to wait until 2024 to see how the justices rule on either of these important cases. 

New Mexico in Focus is also taking an opportunity to pause. We aren’t going off the air or anything, but over the next three weeks, you’ll see a collection of segments, interviews and field pieces we previously aired in 2023 and wanted you to see again — starting with Lou’s sit-down on the homeless encampments litigation — instead of our usual offering, in which we show you newly produced journalism each week. 

This will be the last edition of our newsletter for this year as well. 

It’s been a year of change for New Mexico in Focus. I joined the show in late March, and we said goodbye to longtime host Gene Grant in August. We’ve had a lot of new journalists and guests in our studio in 2023, and we hope you’ve enjoyed the new faces and formats. We’ve got big plans for 2024, too. 

For now, I want to say thanks for watching and reading this year, and we’ll see you on the air and in this space again in January. 

-Jeff Proctor, Executive Producer