I've been fortunate to have witnessed some of the landmark events in the history of the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
I remember the day in March 1986 when a federal jury in the court of U.S. District Judge William Overton ruled that the Democrat was innocent of allegations that it tried to run the Gazette out of business through unfair trade practices. In December 1984, the Gazette's owners had filed the antitrust lawsuit, charging that the Democrat's owners had "conspired among themselves and with others with the specific intent to monopolize" the newspaper market in Little Rock.
The trial didn't begin for almost two years. I was the assistant sports editor at the Democrat in 1986. The staff gathered in the second-floor newsroom of the Democrat building at the corner of Capitol and Scott in downtown Little Rock to hear our publisher, Walter E. Hussman Jr., describe what the jury's decision meant. It meant that we would live to fight another day in the Little Rock newspaper war.
Buttons were handed out that said "We won!" They were designed to improve the morale of a staff that had wondered just how long they would have jobs.
In October 1986, the Patterson family of Little Rock sold the Gazette to Gannett Co., the nation's largest newspaper chain. By that point, I had been transferred to Washington, D.C., to serve as the Democrat's Capitol Hill correspondent. I was told to cross the Potomac River to Rosslyn, Va., and hang out at Gannett headquarters. We had won the lawsuit, but now we would be David taking on Goliath in the form of Gannett. I wrote several stories that afternoon from my basement apartment on Capitol Hill (which doubled as the Democrat Washington bureau) while I wondered yet again how long we could hang on.
Despite investments by the Gazette's new owners, the Democrat continued to make circulation gains. By April 1988, the Sunday Democrat had a circulation of 192,000, doubling its circulation of a decade earlier. For the first time since the Hussman family had purchased the newspaper in 1974, the Democrat controlled more than 40 percent of the Little Rock newspaper market.
An additional boost to the Democrat came in May 1989 when Dillard Department Stores Inc. (now Dillard's Inc.) of Little Rock, the Gazette's largest advertiser, stopped advertising in the Gazette after an ad-pricing dispute. The department store chain had spent about $2 million a year with the Gazette.
Even more important to Arkansas readers was the August 1989 defection to the Democrat of Orville Henry, the Gazette sports editor for 46 years and the state's most famous columnist. Henry's move down the street from Third and Louisiana to Capitol and Scott was a signal to Arkansans that the Democrat was winning the newspaper war.
By July 1990, the Gazette had hired its third editor in as many years and the Democrat had surpassed the "oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi" in Sunday circulation for the first time since the 1960s. The Gazette continued to have more weekday circulation.
In August 1990, John Robert Starr, the Democrat's feisty managing editor, told Advertising Age: "There was no way the Democrat could have won unless the Gazette made all the wrong moves. I think they've made all the wrong moves."
In October 1990, another popular Gazette columnist, John Brummett, resigned. His columns soon began appearing in the Democrat.
Advertising Age reported in December 1990 that the Democrat was the fastest-growing newspaper in the country, while the Gazette was losing circulation the fastest.
By the time the newspaper war ended on Oct. 18, 1991, I was back in Little Rock as the editor of Arkansas Business. I ran the four blocks from my office to the Democrat building in time to walk with Starr to a news conference at the Capital Hotel. As I interviewed my former boss--the man who had given me my biggest professional break by sending me to Washington five years earlier--I couldn't help but notice how subdued he was.
Starr, a former Little Rock bureau chief for The Associated Press, had been hired by Hussman in 1979 to fight a newspaper war that saw head-to-head competition in the morning for a dozen years. Starr thrived on that competition. It's as if he knew that he had accomplished what he had set out to do and would soon be moving on.
Hussman announced at his news conference that the Gazette had ceased publication and that the Democrat would be called the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
On the front page of the newly christened newspaper, Hussman wrote: "Today is the first issue of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a combination of the 120-year-old Arkansas Democrat and the 171-year-old Arkansas Gazette. Little Rock and Arkansas have been served by over a century by what had become two of the best statewide newspapers in America. Beginning today, readers will get the best of both newspapers in one daily edition. Today is also the culmination and the end of perhaps the most intense newspaper competition ever known in the newspaper business."
In April 1992, Hussman hired Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor and nationally syndicated columnist Paul Greenberg away from the Pine Bluff Commercial. On June 23, 1992, Starr announced his retirement. Little Rock attorney Griffin Smith, who had been the newspaper's part-time travel editor while practicing law, was named executive editor. He served until April 2012.
I returned to Capitol and Scott in the summer of 1992 in the newly created position of political editor, supervising the extensive coverage of Bill Clinton's successful presidential campaign. I stayed in that position, overseeing the newspaper's Washington and state Capitol bureaus, until joining Gov. Mike Huckabee's staff on the day he took office as governor--July 15, 1996.
Yes, I had the privilege of being around for some historic events--I cheered in the newsroom when the Democrat won the lawsuit in 1986, I wrote stories from Washington later that year when the Gazette was sold to Gannett and I walked with Starr when the Democrat won the newspaper war in 1991. Two years ago, I returned to the newsroom (now on the third floor) to write this column after 21 years away. I believed that Hussman was publishing the last true statewide newspaper in the country, and I wanted to be a part of that effort.
Late on a Friday afternoon earlier this month, I was part of another historic event as Hussman stood in the newsroom and described to the staff why the Democrat-Gazette is beginning to focus on a digital product. He could have taken the route we're seeing elsewhere these days in the troubled newspaper industry, cutting the size of the news staff by two-thirds or more. That's not happening here. If enough people in Arkansas subscribe to the digital edition, Hussman says he might even increase the size of the news staff.
It's a bold, exciting experiment. And it's a gamble. But Hussman has gambled before and won.
The whole newspaper industry is watching to see if we succeed here in Arkansas. I turn age 60 in less than four months, and I feel energized. I would love to be in this newsroom when once more they distribute buttons that proclaim "We won!"
------------v------------
Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 05/26/2019