As one Arkansas newspaper ended a 121-year publishing history last month in Ashdown, the dogged statewide daily — the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette — reported strong sales for its future-driven model: a digital replica newspaper on iPad and a printed Sunday paper.
The Little River News of Ashdown announced it was suspending operations in mid-November, with Publisher Mica Wilhite hoping publicly for a buyer to step forward to rescue the paper, as happened in the case of papers in Helena and Stuttgart. The Helena World resumed publication as a weekly after it was shut down by GateHouse Media Inc. in August and sold to a pair of local entrepreneurs shortly afterward.
The Stuttgart Daily Leader, also closed by GateHouse in late summer, has been slower to resume printing after its purchase by Arkansas County Broadcasters Inc., a subsidiary of East Arkansas Broadcasters of Jonesboro. EAB Chief Operating Officer Scott Siler told Arkansas Business last week that staffing discussions have begun, and that a timetable for print resumption is likely after the first of the year.
The Democrat-Gazette, which lamented the Little River News’ fate in an editorial, noted that the Ashdown paper, owned by Wilhite and Bob Palmer, had been publishing since 1898. Wilhite and Palmer will continue to publish the uniquely named Jefferson Jimplecute in Marion County, Texas.
The Little River News is the latest of more than a dozen Arkansas papers that have shut down in the past few years, including The Times of North Little Rock, the Hope Star, and the Daily Siftings Herald of Arkadelphia.
Keeping the Ashdown paper going, Wilhite told Lori Dunn of the Texarkana Gazette, would have required “a stronger alignment between revenue and cost.” Journalism has never been an easy-money industry, but the digital-age migration of readers and advertising dollars to Facebook, Google and YouTube has utterly wrecked the general-interest newspaper business.
So Democrat-Gazette Publisher Walter Hussman Jr. threw a Hail Mary, gradually stopping print delivery in the outer reaches of Arkansas and winding down weekday printing everywhere by 2020.
He figured he could keep a newsroom of more than 100 employees covering news statewide if 75% of his subscribers could be recruited as digital subscribers at about $35 a month.
To sweeten the deal, he threw in an iPad for use as long as readers keep up their subscriptions.
The paper’s president and general manager, Lynn Hamilton, told Arkansas Business last week that the statewide conversion rate had reached 73%, and that the Heights and Midtown areas of Little Rock exceeded 100%. He also said that despite some confusing signals, the subscription rate will be $34 a month for central Arkansas customers and $36 for subscribers out in the state.
“This applies whether or not they accept an iPad,” Hamilton said. “People who paid in advance just before receiving an iPad will take longer to move to $34. Everyone should be there before the end of 2020.”
He said the conversion rate had reached 106% in the Heights and Midtown, 80% in southwest Little Rock and above 90% for all of Pulaski County. “We are acquiring new subscribers, but also some former Sunday-only print subscribers who are now converting to daily and Sunday,” Hamilton said. “The percentages we show are based on the number of former daily and Sunday print subscribers.”
At a 200th anniversary banquet for the Arkansas Gazette last month headlined by former President Bill Clinton, several Democrat-Gazette employees reported good newsroom morale and growing confidence in the business model. (A truly worthwhile video presentation of the banquet is at Arkansasonline.com/200.)
“We’re up to 73% today,” Hamilton said, with numbers rising. That may be enough to return the paper to profitability and preserve statewide journalism. But smaller papers, like the Little River News, lack the scale to adopt that approach.
As U.S. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Calif., wrote last month in the Columbia Journalism Review, local journalism is disappearing even though studies link local coverage’s decline to less-competitive elections, increased local government costs and corruption, not to mention a far lower sense of civic engagement.
“A full 38% of Americans do not often access any local news at all,” he wrote. In a fragile democracy, that is beyond disturbing.
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