Eliza Hussman Gaines Takes Editorship as Bailey Retires at Democrat-Gazette

Eliza Hussman Gaines

Longtime Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Managing Editor David Bailey is retiring, making way for the publisher’s daughter, Eliza Hussman Gaines, to take the top editorship.

Gaines’ father, Wehco Media Chairman Walter Hussman Jr., who also bears the publisher’s mantle, made the announcement on Monday in the Democrat-Gazette newsroom.

A former editor of the Sentinel Record in Hot Springs, Gaines was previously vice president of audience development for the Democrat-Gazette and other papers in the Wehco chain. “I’m excited to get started,” she was quoted as saying in a “breaking news” alert posted by the newspaper’s website, ArkansasOnline.com. She is a former San Francisco Chronicle travel writer and a master’s degree graduate of the University of North Carolina’s school of journalism, now to be named for her father in the wake of a $25 million gift from Hussman and his family to the school in September.

The change in editorship comes less than a week after the paper, which is making a major and novel transition from print delivery to a digital replica formatted to be read on an iPad, announced 28 non-newsroom layoffs. 

Part of the business model is offering free iPads to subscribers as long as they keep their $34-a-month subscriptions while getting a paper delivered only on Sundays.

The conversion rate has been good, but several media observers have raised questions about circulation numbers.

Bailey, 70, a former city editor, will end 27 years of service to the paper in March. He has led the newsroom since Griffin Smith Jr. resigned in 2012 as executive editor, a position that was allowed to go defunct.

Bailey was only the second top editor since the fiery John Robert Starr played general in the Little Rock newspaper war more than three decades ago. Smith, a lawyer by profession and a freelance journalist often published in National Geographic, took over after Starr’s retirement in 1992. That was a year after the publicly traded Gannett chain shut down the Arkansas Gazette and sold its assets to Hussman and the Arkansas Democrat, birthing the Democrat-Gazette.

“The best thing that can happen to a publisher is to have a really good editor,” Hussman said in his newsroom remarks, as reported by his newspaper. “I feel really fortunate.”

“It’s been a blast for 27 years — the most fun I’ve ever had,” Bailey was quoted as saying.

His first job in Little Rock was as assistant city editor in 1993, but he took control of daily coverage the following year, succeeding Ray Hobbs as city editor.

Bailey said “he and his wife Twyla eventually will move to the Gulf Coast, where they own a condominium,” the Democrat-Gazette reported.

The Democrat-Gazette layoffs were announced Jan. 23, with the 28 non-newsroom cuts described as necessary for the “bottom-line improvement” required of the digital transition. Cuts in print and delivery costs were baked into the strategy, which seeks to preserve the 100-plus-employee newsroom and continued statewide news coverage.

“The layoffs came in every department of the paper other than the newsroom,” Democrat-Gazette President and General Manager Lynn Hamilton told Arkansas Business. Job losses “included all categories of workers from cleaning crew to management,” he added. “They were difficult to do, but mandatory for the Democrat-Gazette to have a future.”

The paper outlined part of that future on Monday, when home delivery of all Monday-Friday print editions of the paper halted. The Democrat-Gazette has distributed 27,000 iPads to subscribers, it said, at a cost of $11 million. It plans a Sunday press run of 51,000, including 33,000 for digital subscribers and the rest for single-copy sales in news racks and stores. The paper will also print weekday editions in small press runs for retail sales, about 4,300 per day.

The digital conversion and the numbers do not apply to the 12 Arkansas counties served by the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a Wehco sister paper, though the paper said digital tests are under way in the Harrison and Fort Smith areas.

Still, the numbers raised some eyebrows among industry veterans, including former North Little Rock Times editor Jeremy Peppas, who posted on Twitter that the “math is weird.” Just 10 years ago, the Democrat-Gazette claimed paid daily circulation of 184,000, and Sunday paid circulation of 270,000.

The 33,000 copies to be printed on Sundays for today’s digital subscribers suggests that the paper, in just a few years, “shed more than 100,000 daily subscribers and about 166,000 Sunday subscribers,” Peppas wrote. “And if the 78 percent line is true, that means the subscriber count in 2019 was around 45,000.”

He described those declines as in line with subscription losses at other papers, but called the figures striking nonetheless.