We’re Making A List (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

This is the last regular issue of Arkansas Business for 2018. My last column of the year. The last installment of Whispers, which you may view as a disappointment or a relief. Subscribers — and there are more of you than ever — will receive a valuable product on the 31st: the 2019 Book of Lists, a 100-page compilation of dozens of the industry lists that we compiled and published throughout 2018.

Lists, as subscribers are certainly aware, are a regular part of what we do at Arkansas Business. There is something about the human brain that likes to see data organized and ranked in an objective way. We have a crackerjack researcher named Roxanne Jones who sends out surveys and then torments laggards because we really do want our lists to be as correct and comprehensive as possible.

It would be fair and accurate to say that Roxanne makes lists and checks them more than twice.

This week, we have several more of our annual lists, starting with the top 10 business stories of the year. This list is not ranked objectively, the way we do our lists of banks or hospitals or law firms. These are issues and events, not just a single article, that the reporting staff considers to be the most important to our particular audience, which is the business community in Arkansas.

Some of them — like the No. 1 story about breathtaking corruption in our state government — have so many moving parts that this format cannot possibly do them justice, but we gave it a shot anyway.

We also list the individual stories that drove the most traffic to our website, ArkansasBusiness.com, in 2018. This is an objective ranking, but we know that online traffic is not necessarily the same as importance. The most popular online stories are generally those that have an audience in addition to our typical subscriber base, what I sometimes call “crossover hits.”

And in an act of sheer indulgence, the staff picks out what we think are the best quotes that appeared in our pages during the year, and we make up “best and worst” categories just to remind readers of notable anecdotes that we reported.

For me personally, 2018 has been a year of highs and lows.

My husband, Rob, and I checked something off our personal wish list. We spent a week in Jamaica, where he was born, in celebration of our 30th wedding anniversary, which will actually arrive on New Year’s Eve. We shared our vacation with his brother and sister-in-law, who were celebrating their 25th anniversary. And in August, his parents celebrated their 65th anniversary. (The Moritzes are stubborn, that’s for sure.)

But I spent entirely too many days this year horrified and agitated by the state of self-rule in our country. I’m horrified by each new revelation of just how dirty the Trump campaign was — even if, in the most optimistic case, Donald Trump himself was so incompetent and disengaged that he didn’t realize that his campaign was being run by “volunteers” who were compromised by their financial ties with a foreign government that was using resources to assist in his election.

The list of Trump associates who were criminally dishonest or merely unethical is long and growing, which is made worse by the fact that Republicans are still overwhelmingly supportive of this presidency. I despair of ever again having a rational, respectable conservative party.

I also get angry every time I think about how many Arkansas legislators were receptive to the bribery and kickbacks that were apparently Rusty Cranford’s stock in trade. Sentencing hearings shouldn’t be on my list of the happiest days of 2018, and yet they are.

When you get the Book of Lists next week, you might want to write your name across the cover with a fat marker. The sales leads in there — not just rankings, but names, mailing addresses, email addresses, etc. — are worth the price of an annual subscription, and that’s a fact.

My publisher would probably also want me to mention that the list data can be purchased in spreadsheet form from our website, ArkansasBusiness.com/Lists.

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.