What’s black and white but not in the red all over?
The Stone County Leader is one answer, if you’ll forgive a twist on a childish old pun about newspapers (or sunburned zebras).
The Leader is read all over Mountain View and Stone County, and it’s enduring while rivals sink in a sea of red ink. One key is giving readers what they want, 35-year publisher Rusty Fraser told Arkansas Business last week.
Fraser’s paper stands in contrast to the overall bleakness of today’s newspaper economy. Since 2004, more than 2,000 U.S. newspapers have shut down, and more than 90% of them were weeklies.
Fraser, who began his career as an ad salesman for the Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama, moved to Arkansas for the first time in the 1970s to publish the Baxter Bulletin in Mountain Home. (“That’s caused some confusion over the years,” Fraser confided, “the fact that both towns have Mountain in the names.”) After a stint publishing small papers in Texas, Fraser bought the Leader in 1985.
“What sets us apart is that our circulation is still pretty strong, with a press run of about 3,700 a week,” Fraser said of the Leader. “Our penetration is pretty high considering our population, too.” Mountain View, the county seat and home to Ozark Folk Center State Park, a major pre-COVID tourist destination, has about 2,800 residents. Stone County is home to about 12,500.
“We put a heavy emphasis on circulation, and we’re surrounded by mostly chain-owned papers that have seen their circulation plummeting.” With no mortgage and no corporate office to claim shares of his revenue, “I guess we’re really doing OK,” Fraser said.
Though the Leader has held onto readers while other publications have seen them vanish rapidly, Fraser’s paper has not been immune to the COVID-19 pandemic. A fall visitors’ guide that usually produces $14,000 to $20,000 in revenue had to be scrapped because tourism advertisers are hurting, and the paper lost about 300 Newspapers in Education subscriptions when the virus upended schooling.
Fraser hopes fervently that a vaccine will return tourism to normalcy as early as next year. How optimistic is he? “We’re still planning our spring visitors’ guide.”
With a Paycheck Protection Program loan and an unflagging devotion to local news and sports, the Leader finds itself in an enviable position: “If I break even, I’m happy,” Fraser said.
At 78, he owns his paper, has no debts and counts on several employees who’ve devoted their lives to small-town newspapering. One of those is Fraser’s wife, Neal. Others include Editor Lori Freeze, who hired on with Fraser straight out of Arkansas State University. “She’s been with me ever since, now in her 33rd year. It’s the only job she’s ever had, and she’s good at it.” Office Manager Pam Rider is a 27-year veteran. “I hired her straight out of business school,” Fraser said.
Small-town rhythms sometimes work in the Leader’s favor, he said. Two experienced reporters are keeping up their beats part time while working from home and caring for children. “Edie Sutterfield still covers the school board, even though she is home with a newborn baby.” Another reporter with children, Lana Griffith, covers the city council, filing her stories by email.
Fraser said another ASU journalism graduate on the staff, Steve Watkins, “is a helluva good writer for us and has also published several books.”
“We’ve been all-local news since I took over, and that’s what readers want,” said Fraser, who takes photographs for the paper and covers some events. He also keeps readers engaged with a trick he borrowed decades ago from Walter Hussman Jr., longtime publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: letting readers place classified ads free of charge.
Free want ads were a winning tactic for Hussman in his competitive battle against the Arkansas Gazette in the 1970s and ’80s. “I did that at the same time Hussman did, and we’ve kept it up,” Fraser said. “The chain papers see classified ads as a revenue source. We see them as a readership attraction. Many people will buy a paper in order to read the classified ads.”
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