I Shouldn’t Have to Say This (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

Facebook is my social media drug of choice, and through a mutual friend there I became acquainted with a woman in Wisconsin who engages with a large and enthusiastic group of followers by asking random, open-ended questions. One last week seemed to provoke an especially large number of responses:

“What are you sick and tired of explaining to people?”

My answer was, “Donald Trump never intended to be president.” (This is what I call my Unified Theory of Trump, and it explains absolutely everything about the current administration.)

Other answers seemed to speak for entire occupations and professions:

• “Astrology and astronomy are not the same thing.”
• “How to floss.”
• “What an MFA is.”
• “It’s on the syllabus.” Or its more universal cousin, “It’s in the email.”

A few days and a couple of disheartening calls later, I started to wish I had answered thusly: “I don’t set out to upset advertisers, but in a conflict between advertiser and reader, the reader always wins.”

The calls I got, from readers who didn’t want to reveal their identities, were essentially the same. Very polite and respectful but deeply suspicious about why Arkansas Business had not been reporting on the federal criminal trial of R. Alan Hope, CEO of Powers of Arkansas, and Mikel Kullander, owner of Kullander Construction Co., which was in the hands of the jury as I was writing this column. (Update: see Jury Deadlocked, Mistrial Declared in Contractor Fraud Case.)

Powers of Arkansas, you see, is an advertiser in Arkansas Business and on our website, ArkansasBusiness.com, and the suspicion was that we were not covering the trial in deference to those advertising dollars. It was so unusual, one caller said, that we wouldn’t cover a trial in which there was so much reader interest.

Here’s the real reason: We simply don’t have the manpower to send a reporter to sit in a courtroom day after day. This is, in fact, not unusual. We routinely cover plea hearings and sentencing hearings, which require a few hours at worst. But other than spotty coverage of the 2004 trial of former Razorbacks Basketball Coach Nolan Richardson’s civil lawsuit against the University of Arkansas, I can think of no other trial we’ve staffed since I arrived as editor in 1999.

And that includes trials in cases that Arkansas Business had previously shown interest in. We didn’t cover the trial of former State Treasurer Martha Shoffner, although we broke the news that she was under federal criminal investigation.

We didn’t write stories about the trial of businessman John Stacks, although I personally went to federal court one morning for the rare opportunity to hear the defendant in a white-collar case take the stand in his own defense. (It’s just as well we didn’t invest the time, since his convictions were set aside and the charges eventually dropped.)

We didn’t cover the trial of Michael Heald and Brad Paul, former One Bank executives who were ultimately acquitted, despite the hundreds of column-inches we’ve devoted to the convoluted One Bank story over the years.

The bean-counters tell me that Powers of Arkansas has been an advertiser since 1997, two years before I got here. It didn’t keep me and Senior Editor Mark Friedman from going to the Powers of Arkansas building when federal agents were there to execute a search warrant so that we could take pictures and break the news. It didn’t keep us from reporting the indictments or from reminding readers that the trial was about to start.

That’s because, honest to goodness, I spend exactly zero minutes worrying about who advertises in Arkansas Business. That’s someone else’s job. My only job, and it still kicks my butt every week, is to take the available newsroom resources and create content that is indispensable to a specific business audience because (as crass as this sounds) readers like you are all we have to sell to advertisers.

I was born suspicious, or so my father used to say, so I understand the impulse to suspect the worst. But context is everything. I would love to have enough skilled reporters to send one to cover a trial that was originally expected to last two and possibly three weeks. Even the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which has an excellent reporter assigned full-time to the federal courthouse in Little Rock, couldn’t give this trial gavel-to-gavel coverage. (And I believe the Democrat-Gazette puts readers first, too, because Publisher Walter Hussman Jr. says so in the “statement of core values” he publishes on 2A every day.)

I’m not really sick and tired of explaining this. I just wish I didn’t need to.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.