Arkansas Business

This story is from the archives of ArkansasSports360.com.

As I try to conjure the right words, and to say it all within the confines of the average reader’s attention span, the clock ticks ever so closer to this site’s final moments. I look at that clock like the condemned prisoner, knowing that they’ll flip the switch at 11:59 p.m.

They’ll flip the switch off, cutting the current, however; and I’m only sweating getting this in by afternoon deadline, and knowing I’ll have another day, at maybe another website, to ply my trade.

The last time I went through this, they (you know who “they” are) cut the power to the computers before we at the Arkansas Gazette had a chance to say any last words. It’s the winds of October and now early November that ever remind me of those strange days in 1991, when probably 700 people were cast aside by the ever-changing journalism business and commisserated our loss for weeks. I remember the gallant efforts of Max Brantley and others, in those waning days when we all knew the end was nigh, to try to interest investors into saving a great newspaper. I’ve endured a microscopic version of that lately as I hoped some white knight might ride in and save Chris Bahn and I and our other contributors, at least enough to write the final chapter on this football season and the hiring of a new Razorback coach.

It’s odd that this all happens again as a mediocre Arkansas football season winds down. I’m forever indebted to then-Razorback sports information director Rick Schaeffer for showing such class and reserving our Gazette media seats in the War Memorial Stadium press box the day after we had closed in 1991, when a big game with Texas brought out a huge media throng that actually were working (well, in my first foray at freelancing for a living, I had lined up a couple of gigs that Saturday to provide some game coverage, so I wasn’t just sitting with a idle typewriter).

Just a few days later, then-Arkansas coach Jack Crowe honored the Fayetteville beat writing crew, of which I was a part, with a game ball from that historic and rare win over Texas. I cherish it to this day.

I’m reminded of how long ago that was now when I realize that Chris Bahn was still in junior high. He’s a year older now (35) than I was when the Gazette journalists found the rug pulled out from underneath us. Bahn’s too talented a writer and reporter to stay unemployed too long. I hope he gets his wish to stay in sports writing.

This time around, I wish that for myself. It's been its most fun here at ArkansasSports360.com.

Twenty-one years ago, after riding the emotional rollercoaster of working for Gannett Corp. in the middle of one of the country’s biggest newspaper wars — and joining other unemployed writers from four other large daily papers in the southwest region that went under at about the same time the Gazette did — I didn’t mind trying another newspaper department in the interim — though I didn’t think that time away from full-time sportswriter would last 15 years.

When I returned, answering Jeff Hankins’ call to start up ArkansasSports360.com with a monthly magazine and website, many new readers of the state’s sports sections thought I was an entertainment writer. (The converse of this was that while I spent eight great, fun years at the Arkansas Times, readers who didn’t agree with my takes would diss me as being "a sportswriter." They could have also accurately described me as former business writer, daily news editor, freelancer and the like too.)

Our new, free monthly magazines — with an ESPN The Magazine-like look and packed with sports, yet difficult to sell to advertisers — eventually dropped to a handful of specialized magazines a year, including the successful golf and duck hunting publications. In recent years, we began focusing foremost on generating web content. I watched us grow from a trickle of readership in the summer of 2007 to enormous numbers here in Year Five. But, as readers already deduced earlier this week, the company that paid the bills and signed our checks found it too difficult to monetize it into profitability.

Those readership figures, analytically tracked by the large Internet companies and showing numbers that rivaled the statewide daily in individual readers of its print product, are enough to tell me that for content, we were succeeding. We’re not closing down because nobody read us. Rather, the numbers tell me that readers found us compelling on a daily basis and joined in on the discourse in large numbers as well in 2011-12.

If ArkansasSports360.com fails to rise like a phoenix in the coming days under new ownership, I can walk away from this knowing we, the writers, succeeded in our charge, and in a big way.