Atkins Chronicle’s Obituary, 123 Years in the Making

Billy Reeder took over the Atkins Chronicle in May. It published its final issue in June.

Billy Reeder thought he was rescuing the Atkins Chronicle when he took it over at the end of May. A month later, he was shuttering the 123-year-old weekly newspaper, the oldest operating business in the Pope County town.

“I thought I had nothing to lose here, and that I could put some of my ideas into practice,” the Arkansas Tech University journalism professor told Arkansas Business last week. He said the previous owners, Van Allen Tyson and Ginnie Tyson, had been trying to sell it for years. “Their daughter Gail called me and said they were going to shut it down at the end of May, and I thought we [his wife, Paula, was co-publisher] would be able to take it over and reboot it.”

Reeder, who already ran a small digital marketing company as a side job, combined the Chronicle and its smaller sister paper, the Dover News, into one weekly and figured he could make them sustainable with a 50 percent budget cut and a website reboot.

But the numbers were far worse than he expected.

“After one month, we’d lost about $5,000,” Reeder said. “I teach journalism at Tech and my wife is a teacher, and we couldn’t afford to spend six months digging a deep debt. The nail in the coffin was a lack of any interest from advertisers.”

Almost nobody was buying ads, and circulation in and around Atkins, population 3,000, was down to about 1,300 a week. “I was putting about 1,000 papers into the boxes and selling about 200, at 50 cents each.

Subscriptions were down, and when I talked to a guy at a car dealership about buying an ad, he told me that his advertising in a different paper was his biggest waste of money.”

Reeder leveled with readers in a remarkable note on June 26, a piece that felt like a letter from a literate, thoughtful friend.

“Print journalism,” he wrote, “is extraordinarily expensive to produce. This paper that you’re paying 50 cents for? It actually costs between $8 and $10 to produce. … You read that right. Eight to ten dollars. For every single copy of the paper that we sell. Believe me I know. I’ve done the math.”

The Chronicle and the Dover Times “were operating in the red for some time,” he wrote, and readership had been on a steady decline. “Our hope was that by consolidating the papers and cutting expenses deeper than the bone, combined with new energy and resources, we could at least break even … . We could not.”

The Reeders enlisted Johnny Carrol Sain, as their unpaid managing editor. A prolific freelance outdoor writer, Sain also edits About the River Valley magazine in Russellville and is interim executive director of the Arkansas Wildlife Federation.

The idea was for Sain to become a partner through his sweat equity, but he quickly found himself spread too thin. And, “as it turns out,” Reeder said, “reporters like to be able to eat and pay their bills.”

Reeder drove home the financial hurdles with one statistic. Revenue from local advertising for the final weekly Dover Times amounted to $4.50. There was one tiny ad for a local merchant to go with a smattering of statewide ads and legal notices, said Reeder, who was personally putting the Chronicle into the news racks at 1 a.m. on press days. “If the needle had moved even a tiny bit positively, we would have tried to go longer,” he said.

It was a sad end to a storied history for the paper, which was run for a century by the Tyson family.

First published on Nov. 30, 1894, by George L. Parker, the Chronicle was sold to W.F. Turner, a former teacher, in 1898. Turner sold it to another former teacher, Ardis Tyson, in 1917. Van Allen Tyson is Ardis Tyson’s grandson.

“The paper was going to be shut down at the end of May, so we took the chance,” Reeder said. “I hate that communities are losing local newspapers, and that’s the great irony.

“The only place that people are going to get local journalism is from a local outlet. The Democrat-Gazette isn’t going to cover a school board meeting at Hector. But here is the reality: If a community wants a paper, it’s got to support that paper.”

Reeder said that newspaper closings may seem to be simply “part of the continuing move toward digital and television,” but most of those outlets aren’t telling community stories. “Local news outlets like the Chronicle do. But at the end of the day, bills need to be paid.”