After 18 months of heroic measures, death came last week for Arkansas Life.
Staffers of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s lifestyle magazine published its obituary last week. They had toiled in uncertainty since going to a subscription model early last year, cutting production of the print magazine to quarterly and putting out digital editions each month.
In January 2019, Chairman Walter Hussman Jr. of parent company Wehco Media Inc. threatened to shut down the glossy magazine if enough readers did not step up to subscribe. It has limped along since, with well-written features and “fabulous” photography, according to its competitors, but increasingly seeming like a luxury in a daily newspaper industry under siege.
Even before COVID-19, once-healthy local newspapers suffered a relentless wave of shutdowns, layoffs and an estimated 70% decline in advertising revenue during the past 15 to 20 years. For many papers facing closure or takeovers, the coronavirus shutdowns and advertising disruptions nailed shut the coffin.
The McClatchy Co.’s 30-newspaper chain nationwide — including the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star and the Sacramento Bee — was in the news last week. After 163 years of family ownership, McClatchy is selling in a bankruptcy auction to the New Jersey hedge fund that owns the National Enquirer.
Born into a different media universe in 2008, Arkansas Life was delivered free until last year, aimed at upscale audiences coveted by competitors like Inviting Arkansas, AY and Little Rock Soirée, a sister publication of Arkansas Business.
A dozen years ago, targeted audiences were seen as a silver lining in the darkening newspaper business, but Arkansas Life’s content mix was a bit too broad to fit the narrow and specific niches mined by successful titles like Hooten’s Arkansas Football or Crain’s Chicago Business.
Hussman told Arkansas Business last year that Arkansas Life never made money. “We’ve depended primarily on advertising support to pay the bills,” Hussman said. “Unfortunately, that business model has proven unsustainable in the digital age.”
Democrat-Gazette President Lynn Hamilton said last week that the current issue of Arkansas Life will be its last, and that the staff was let go. “A purely financial decision,” he told Arkansas Business. “We were very proud of the content, but just couldn’t find a way to make Arkansas Life pay for itself. Four staffers were dedicated to the magazine, and all those positions were eliminated.”
“This year’s virus-related problems proved too much to overcome,” Hamilton told his own paper for an article last Tuesday. “The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is making a lot of hard decisions these days in order to ensure the survival of our newspaper. The termination of Arkansas Life is one of them.”
The Democrat-Gazette spent 2019 shifting its weekly newspaper to a digital replica edition designed for reading on iPads provided by the paper, or on computers and iPhones. The physical paper is still printed and delivered on Sundays, but digital subscriptions pay the freight.
Arkansas Life started its evolution into a mostly digital platform after decorated feature writer Jordan Hickey became editor in 2018; he’d served the magazine in various editing roles since 2013. Arshia Khan, the gifted photographer who is married to Hickey, also lost her job, along with Creative Director Emma Devine and Associate Editor Wyndham Wyeth.
Hickey, after “a bellyful of panang curry from Chang’s Thai and a good night sleep,” reflected on the magazine’s work last week.
“There are a few [highlights] that stick out over the years — the investigative piece into C&H hog farm penned by a former industrial hog farmer; the feature on the separation of MLK and Robert E. Lee Day that was two years in the works; the entire issue we devoted to the Arkansas Delta.” He credits Katie Bridges, the editor from 2012 to 2018, for leading a 2017 redesign that also transformed the title from sort of a high-society publication into a lifestyle and culture magazine.
“In truth, I’m grateful, enormously so. … [T]his magazine was generous — not the company, per se, but the way in which this tightly knit publication did so, so much for those of us who spent much of the past decade working to make every issue better than the one that came before. I don’t exaggerate when I say it changed my life,” Hickey said.
It was at Arkansas Life, after all, that Hickey met Khan, and was enchanted by her first approach. “Dogs or cats?” she asked, seeking a preference. His response? A noncommittal “Uh, both.”
It took him three years to muster up the nerve to ask her out for a steak. Two years after that, they married at Joshua Tree, in the California desert.
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