When Scott Siler announced East Arkansas Broadcasters Inc.’s purchase of the defunct Stuttgart Daily Leader from GateHouse Media in mid-September, the radio executive left himself ample wiggle room. “We will be making plans over the next several weeks to bring the paper back in some fashion as soon as possible,” he said.
Siler, chief operating officer of EAB, parent company to Arkansas County Broadcasters Inc., which bought the paper, didn’t respond to inquiries from Arkansas Business several weeks ago about delays in restarting the paper, which hasn’t published since the sale, for which no financial details were released.
But Siler did speak with Stephen Steed of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, reporting that publishing plans have been put off until after the first of the year.
Siler took a blunt question about whether the purchase was meant simply to stave off competition for ad money now going to the broadcasters’ six area radio stations, including Stuttgart’s original radio station, KWAK.
“I understand the question, but we see [the purchase] as information-competitive and also a step forward with news coverage of south Arkansas,” Siler told Steed. Gatehouse shuttered the newspaper, which had been in publication since 1885, on Sept. 6. Siler’s team is still deciding on what form The Leader will take, either printed, digital-only or both.
Meanwhile, the Helena World, which was sold by GateHouse to local investors Chuck Davis and Andrew Bagley at the same time as the Stuttgart deal, is up and publishing again with a former editor Rick Wright back in charge of the news report. Wright, once a sports writer at the Dallas Morning News, spent 18 months at the Hope paper from 2017 to earlier this year. He has also been a managing editor in Mena, Waldron and Dardanelle.
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