John Troutt Jr., the longtime Jonesboro Sun publisher and editor who went to work at his family’s paper as a 10-year-old newsboy and turned the small-town afternoon daily into a Pulitzer Prize contender, died Thursday night in Jonesboro. He was 88.
Troutt took over the paper his grandfather bought with money earned from photographing American Indians in the late 19th century and guided it into the digital age before selling it to the Paxton Media Group in 2000. In all, the Troutt family owned the paper, a fixture in northeast Arkansas’ largest city, for 99 years.
Troutt’s death was announced in a post on Facebook by his son, Bob Troutt, who said his father “spent a lifetime making sure that the residents of this are were up to date on everything that mattered.”
The post also mentioned Troutt’s devotion to the Jonesboro region’s prosperity, noting that he organized the industrial recruitment organization Jonesboro Unlimited. “But first and foremost he was a newsman” who grew the paper from a circulation of about 10,000 to a height of 28,000 daily and 31,500 on Sunday by the time of the sale to Paxton, a chain based in Paducah, Kentucky, that now owns several Arkansas papers and recently bought the last family-owned small-town daily in the state, the Batesville Daily Guard.
John Troutt Jr. was born Oct. 10, 1929, and grew up basically at the Sun, which his grandfather, W.O. Troutt, bought in 1901. W.O. Troutt had made enough money photographing American Natives in the Indian Territory to buy a small paper in Spiro, in present-day Oklahoma, but he quickly decided his future was elsewhere. “He made the decision Spiro wasn’t going to grow — he sure as hell was right there, it never did — and started scouting around,” John Troutt Jr. told Arkansas Business in 1999. “He found out a paper was for sale in Jonesboro, and that’s how the family got here.”
Troutt received many honors in his long journalism career, capped by the Sun’s runner-up finish to the Hartford Courant for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in breaking news reporting, the year after two students at Westside Middle School killed five in one of the nation’s early school shootings. Troutt also received the Arkansas Press Association’s Distinguished Service Award in 2012 and its Golden 50 Award. He was also a recipient of the Ernie Deane Award and the Lemke Award from the University of Arkansas, his alma mater.
“The newspaper was the first in the United States to start using digital cameras for news and sports coverage under an experiment with The Associated Press,” longtime Jonesboro editor and educator Roy Ockert wrote in a 2012 appreciation. “But the Sun mostly became known for its solid and extensive coverage of local and regional news. Three times while John was editor and publisher the Sun was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize… .”
After graduating from Jonesboro High School in 1947, Troutt studied journalism and history at UA, where he came to know future Arkansas newspaper leaders like Bob McCord, Bob Douglas, Jerry McConnell, Bill Shelton and Charlie Rixey. He served honorably in the U.S. Army, where he witnessed atomic bomb tests.
In his early days at the Sun, Ockert wrote, Troutt’s father was business manager, his uncle was editor and his aunt, Grace Witherspoon, was society editor. Troutt became managing editor in 1964 and became the paper’s editor and publisher upon the death of his uncle Fred in 1980.
“I still refer to him as John Jr. because when I first met him, John Troutt Sr. was very much alive and running the Jonesboro Evening Sun, along with his brother Fred,” Ockert told Arkansas Business.
Under Troutt’s leadership, the paper became a champion of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, and in 1982 he shifted the paper from afternoon to morning publication, adding a more regional presence.
“When I came to Jonesboro as a freshman journalism major at then-Arkansas State College, The Sun hired me as a part-time sports writer so for two years I got to sit a desk away from John Jr., who was called city editor but really was the newspaper’s main reporter,” Ockert said. “The way he went about covering local news – straight-up and hard-nosed — became a part of the foundation for my own career as a daily newspaper editor.”
Much later, Ockert took great pride in following Troutt as editor of the Sun after Paxton Media Group bought the paper in 2000. “I kidded him that it took two of us – an editor and a publisher – to replace him.”
Troutt wedded his wife, Greta, in 1954, and sons Bob and Ed worked for the Sun until the newspaper was sold, Ockert wrote.
“A lot of Arkansas journalists owe a great deal to Mr. Troutt, and I’m one of them,” said Chris Bahn, business special publications publisher for Arkansas Business Publishing Group and a former reporter at the Sun. Even in the 1990s, when he was the paper’s top executive, he would come in at night to help paste up the newspaper’s pages and make sure the front page was up to his standards, Bahn said.
“That’s basically been the whole guiding principle to the Sun,” Troutt told Arkansas Business in the 1999 interview. “Not to put out the most profitable newspaper, we’re not, but to put out a good newspaper.”Memorial services will be held at 11 a.m. Monday at First United Methodist Church in Jonesboro. Funeral arrangements are by Emerson Funeral Home of Jonesboro.
“His greatest legacy, I think, was protecting and preserving the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act,” Ockert said, noting that Troutt, McCord and John Robert Starr were instrumental in getting the state’s model law passed, and “fought hard to make sure it meant what it says.
“Our tribute to him should be keeping that legacy alive.”
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