Buy Local — News, That Is (Editorial)

The steady drumbeat of newspaper closures continued last week, with news that GateHouse Media Inc. was shutting down its weekly papers in Pulaski and Lonoke counties.

The newspapers were the North Little Rock Times, which had absorbed the Maumelle Monitor, Sherwood Voice and Jacksonville Patriot into a single weekly print edition last year, and the Lonoke County Democrat, a 2017 combination of the Cabot Star-Herald, the Lonoke Democrat and the Carlisle Independent.

“The bottom line is that the papers were not doing what we needed them to do as profit centers,” said Teresa “Tee” Hicks, a GateHouse official who’s also publisher of the Pine Bluff Commercial, another GateHouse property. “That’s the only reason; the workers were doing their jobs well. We just have to use our resources where they best benefit the company.”

Businesspeople will be sympathetic. GateHouse, based near Rochester, New York, is part of publicly traded New Media Investment Group and GateHouse is noted for what one media analyst called its “tight expense control.”

The closings leave The Leader of Jacksonville, a twice-a-week publication, as northern Pulaski County’s only traditional newspaper, and the weekly England Democrat still publishes in Lonoke County.

There was one piece of good news: Garrick Feldman, publisher of The Leader, says he’ll be expanding to offer a North Little Rock edition. Feldman, like the publishers of Arkansas Business and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, lives here and is devoted to local, community-based coverage.

Locally owned news outlets — staffed as they are by human beings — are not perfect, but because their owners and staffs live among you, we are much easier to hold accountable. And we are committed to our communities in a way unmatched by those who don’t live here.