Walter Hussman Jr., chairman of Wehco Media Inc., in his office at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Three profound revolutions have transformed communication since humanity developed spoken language in prehistory, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Publisher Walter Hussman once told Arkansas Business.
First was written language, about 5,000 years ago, a development that preserved messages across distance and time. Next came printing, in the 15th century. The movable-type press reproduced messages in bulk, introducing mass communication.
Last was the internet, just decades ago, which allowed sending content “to anyone or to everyone,” Hussman said. “It essentially gives everyone a printing press. That’s a significant thing for a guy like me who owns a lot of presses.”
As chairman of the private chain Wehco Media Inc., Hussman is feeling the internet’s disruptive power like never before, but he’s also working to harness it.
He still owns a lot of presses, and as he put it in a 2016 interview, his fortune is not the $890 million that Arkansas Business estimated it to be in 2001. “Whatever my net worth is today, it’s a lot less than it used to be. I’ll put it this way, the value of newspapers has gone down significantly.”
Hussman now confronts an existential crisis.
His flagship Democrat-Gazette, once a quite profitable statewide paper, is losing money. On Sunday, it celebrated the bicentennial of the Arkansas Gazette and pointed to the logical destination of a two-year retreat of its print delivery area. Soon, customers won’t get a paper outside central Arkansas and the northwest, province of the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a sister paper. Operations will be mostly digital, and a Sunday-only print edition is conceivable, Hussman said.
No firm plans are set, but Sunday is now the print paper’s only profitable day, Hussman told his High Profile Editor Rachel O’Neal, who produced a deep profile and history of the Hussman-Palmer publishing family.
Hussman has bought $12 million worth of $800 iPads to lure digital subscribers to keep paying close to $400 a year for their subscriptions, and he figures the Democrat-Gazette can be profitable at current news staff levels (leaving aside jobs in printing, production and distribution) if 70 percent of subscribers keep paying for the digital product.
Hussman has faced annihilation before, and triumphed. He moved to morning publication to battle the old Arkansas Gazette head-to-head in the 1980s, then fiercely fought its deep-pockets buyer, the Gannett chain, with innovations like free want ads, front-porch delivery and vast quantities of news coverage — not to mention a fiery editor named John Robert Starr. He prevailed in a federal lawsuit the Gazette filed alleging unfair business practices. Once the clear underdog, he claimed his prize in Little Rock’s great newspaper war in 1991 when Gannett shut down the Gazette and sold its assets for $68.5 million to the Arkansas Democrat, which immediately became the Democrat-Gazette.
As his longtime friend and lawyer, Philip Anderson, put it, “Walter worked very hard, and thoughtfully, to keep that newspaper going.”
Later, Hussman protected his product with a pay wall, demanding subscriptions to see content that other papers made freely available online. But the migration of readers to internet news and ad search platforms that made classified advertising obsolete eventually took their toll. Circulation and advertising numbers at all midsize American dailies have cratered, and the Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that nearly 1,800 U.S. papers closed between 2004 and 2018.
Hussman gets respect from news industry veterans for keeping staffing and news coverage at the Democrat more vigorous than at most comparable papers, but jobs in virtually every department have been reduced, a strain on morale.
Going mostly digital would let the paper cut jobs in printing, production and delivery, the top expenses outside newsgathering. But the long-term profitability of delivering printed news every day, much of it weather, sports and national and world news readily available elsewhere, faces growing doubt. Weekly and niche publications are faring far better than general-interest dailies, which onetime newspaper booster Warren Buffett has declared. Readers and advertisers have fled, and employing the hundreds of people needed to gather and package the news, print it on expensive paper and deliver it individually to thousands of buyers every night is no longer viable.
And older readers, some of the Democrat-Gazette’s most loyal subscribers, have reported a reluctance to turn to iPads for the paper’s content, according to former employees privy to customer surveys.
As one Little Rock media executive put it, anonymously, the very variety that turned readers into newspaper subscribers generations ago can work against general-interest papers in an age when consumers know that stock market results, sports scores, weather forecasts and big headlines are a Google search away.
“It’s hard for me to conceptualize what the future is for general interest information, news, features, sports, etc. Information you can get everywhere has so little unique value,” the executive said.
Wehco Media, the Democrat-Gazette parent, recently cut print publication of the Banner-News of Magnolia and the Camden News, Hussman’s father’s first paper, from five days to one day a week, Wednesday mornings. Hussman wrote a full-page letter to subscribers in February, saying that both papers were losing money.
The papers will “continue to produce a digital replica front page” Monday through Saturday, the letter said, adding that “time saved by the news staff from the physical production of the daily paper will allow more time spent on reporting for your Wednesday edition and each day with our digital editions.”
The Democrat-Gazette ended delivery in south central Arkansas in February, offering its iPad deal to subscribers. As pointed out by Mike McNeill, a former Banner-News editor who now publishes and edits the independent MagnoliaReporter.com, the 11,500-population town of Magnolia has had a daily newspaper since the 1930s. Wehco made no offer of iPads to Banner-News and Camden News subscribers, he reported.
“This is a sad development for South Arkansas journalism but not unexpected,” McNeill said at the time. “Publication cutbacks at newspapers are almost always coupled with employee cutbacks, usually in news departments.” He said he expected the same in south Arkansas.
Wehco had already ended printing operations in Texarkana, El Dorado and Hot Springs, shifting that printing work to its Little Rock presses and delivering the newspapers to outlying areas by truck.
Nevertheless, a Sunday-only print future for the monopoly newspaper in Arkansas’ state capital is a daunting prospect for those who champion the role of a free press in civic society. Max Brantley summed up that sentiment in the Arkansas Times:
“The survival of newspapers and other news outlets is important. And not just for a ready source for local obits and high school ball scores. Once in a while, the watchdogs catch some bad actors. And since no news outlet is perfect (and editorial opinions do differ) we like to think multiple outlets are better than one.”
Sign up for Daily E-news
