The debut issue of Next Door magazine features Wyndi Ratliff on its cover.
After about 75 years of combined publishing experience in north Arkansas, best friends and business partners Angelia Roberts and Kay Tharp of Melbourne have made themselves a home, Next Door.
That’s how the two former newspaperwomen christened their new full-color glossy magazine based in their hometown. Melbourne, the Izard County seat, is about 30 miles northwest of Batesville, where the partners spent a chunk of their careers with the Batesville Daily Guard.
The first 1,500-copy press run of the local events and lifestyle magazine rolled out in May, “and our first month was not in the red, so we were happy with that,” Roberts told Arkansas Business.
The startup is a two-woman show. Roberts, formerly the Batesville paper’s managing editor, sells ads and covers events in Izard, Fulton, Sharp and Independence counties. Tharp does all design and layout work “and everything else,” Roberts said. The magazine is printed by Kopco Inc. of Springfield, Missouri, and the second issue is scheduled to come out this week.
“We started with 1,500 copies, but we’re upping that by several hundred this month,” Roberts said last week. “We started by finding people of local interest who had a story to tell, and we’re going to give those stories the recognition they deserve. From the start, it resonated with people. The response really has been overwhelming.”
Roberts shopped the magazine idea around to potential advertisers, and they surprised her with widespread support beyond the debut issue, she said.
“We started out totally honest: that we had this idea and needed advertising to move forward. When we asked advertisers, many of whom had worked with me before from my newspaper jobs, they jumped in even with just the idea, no product. When the first issue appeared, they wanted to be a part of the second.”
Tharp and Roberts started in the industry together, working for Paxton Media Group, a Kentucky-based chain, at Areawide Media in Salem, the Fulton County seat. “A lot of people called it the Salem News [one of its print products], but the company was Areawide,” Roberts said, and Tharp was general manager under Paxton. Areawide News was subsequently sold to Rust Communications of Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
Roberts and Tharp took their talents to Batesville together, and Tharp was the special sections editor. “But when the corporate deal happened, her position was one that was eliminated,” said Roberts, who said she had already been considering a new late-career direction.
In a plot twist, the buyer in that deal was none other than Paxton Media, which acquired the Guard just over a year ago. It had been the last family-owned non-chain daily in Arkansas, owned for eight decades by the O.E. Jones family of Batesville. Paxton, a private family-owned company based in Paducah, has about 50 papers in several states.
At Next Door, Roberts and Tharp hope to offer community authenticity, feel-good coverage and a break from the daily political harping Roberts says tired her out in newspapering. “We’re involved in our community in a way that’s uniting.”
Roberts says she’s just glad to still be doing a fulfilling job. “Deep down I’ve always been a writer, and Kay knew that. If you’re doing what you love, your day’s a little better. I came from a background of people first, money second. While that is the direct opposite of corporate mentality, I’m hoping to prove that wrong by giving people a product they love and something our advertisers believe in.”
Guthrie On Guard
Meanwhile, the Batesville Guard has a new editor, veteran writer Bruce Guthrie, previously sports editor of the Paxton-owned Searcy Daily Citizen. A Piggott native who attended Ouachita Baptist University, Guthrie is a former Fox Sports Arkansas general manager and promotional writer for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The husband of Dana Guthrie, a Saline Courier reporter in Benton, Guthrie has been on the job in Batesville about three weeks.
“My vision is to be valuable to this community,” said Guthrie, whose 6,000-circulation paper serves a 11,000-population city that’s been growing for decades and is expanding its business base. “We want the paper to be something people are proud of, as local as possible, showing off the area. With two reporters, plus “a sports guy and a news clerk,” Guthrie “is not complaining,” considering today’s challenged daily news industry.
“We’re going to do feature photography and seek a balance between hard news and features,” he added. “We’re going to be in the government realm, too. Our goal is to listen to as many people as we can, and to serve each and every reader every way we can.”
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