Atkins Chronicle Is Back, Living Month to Month

The office of the Atkins Chronicle, as it appeared in 2014.

Reports of the Atkins Chronicle’s death, it turns out, were exaggerations.

Last July, Outtakes lamented the end of the 123-year-old weekly paper, the oldest operating business in the town of 3,000. Longtime publishers Van and Ginny Tyson had turned the operation over to Arkansas Tech University professor Billy Reeder and his wife, Paula, but they lost about $5,000 in a single month and decided to shut down.

Four months later, former circulation manager Beverly Davis jolted the Chronicle back to life as an odd creature, a monthly newspaper.

“It’s doing surprisingly well,” Ginny Tyson told Arkansas Business last week. “Our fifth monthly edition is coming out, and people are really glad to see it. They missed having the obituaries, seeing their kids’ pictures in the paper, those sorts of things.”

Davis, a part-timer for the weekly, still works part time, but she’s doing it all. “She’d never written stories or sold ads, but she is now, building pages,” Tyson said. The first Wednesday of each month now brings out 600 papers that are sold in racks in Atkins, Pottsville and Russellville. They’re a dollar a copy, or should be. (Unscrupulous readers have swiped a few extras.)

“Beverly wanted to try it,” Tyson said. “We said we didn’t want to fool with it hardly at all, but we didn’t care if she did. We figured out an ad rate for a monthly, and she’s had a great response.”

Local readers want things they can’t get elsewhere — school board minutes, sports statistics, pictures from schools. “You want to see your child’s name in the paper, something to put in the scrapbook,” Tyson said. “And it was really weird not to know who had died. We put in memories from years gone by.”

Van Tyson is writing a column and still reporting on city meetings. “He likes to be in the know,” his wife said.

So far, the business model is working. “We own the building, and we told Beverly we wanted expenses for that and to keep the utilities on,” Ginny Tyson said. “We told her we’d pay the printing bill and buy supplies and keep up the taxes and insurance on the building, and she could have everything else.” So far the revenue has been worth Davis’ time.

“We’re not mailing it out,” she said. “That’s a big-time money saver.” The weekly was circulating about 1,300 copies a week at the end, when Reeder said he was selling about 200 in news racks. All other copies were mailed. “This new way seems to be working better,” Ginny Tyson said. “We’re getting a lot of thank-you calls from people,” Van Tyson said on Facebook.

The new setup suits the Tysons. “We couldn’t keep up what we were doing, going to meetings almost every night. We’re 80 years old, and we’re tired.”