Roy Ockert recalls standing in the January cold in 1981, helplessly watching the Batesville Daily Guard burn to the ground, set ablaze by teenage vandals.
Ockert had been the editor of Independence County’s biggest newspaper for more than five years at that time, steadily building a staff and improving local news and sports coverage. But after the fire, he wondered if the paper would survive under its family ownership.
The daily was underinsured, and its resources were never the same. But to Ockert’s surprise, the Jones family, the paper’s owners for nearly nine decades, managed to resist buyout attempts.
After several more years as editor in Batesville and some time in academia, Ockert went to work for Paxton Media Group of Paducah, Kentucky, editing its papers in Russellville and Jonesboro before retiring in 2012.
In the wake of the death this year of Dr. O.E. Jones, the Guard publisher, Ockert was unsurprised to hear that Paxton acquired the paper June 1. Jones’ family had published the 7,000-circulation paper since the Depression, and for 46 years he left the practical running of the business to his wife, Pat Jones, who retired last month as general manager.
Skip Rutherford tweeted that the sale claimed the last family-owned daily paper in Arkansas. Rutherford, dean of the Clinton School of Public Service and a Batesville boy who worked for the paper as a teen, got a quick reply from Ron Fournier, the former Little Rock and national reporter who went on to become publisher of Crain’s Detroit Business: “The Dem-Gaz is no longer family-owned?”
Fournier, who was referring to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is president of Truscott Rossman, the Michigan PR firm he joined after leaving journalism a few months ago. His question is a good one, but the answer is not clear-cut.
Democrat-Gazette Publisher Walter Hussman Jr., chairman of Wehco Media Inc., oversees a privately held conglomerate of two dozen newspapers, 13 cable TV and internet service providers and about 1,900 employees at operations in six states.
Still, he’d argue that the Little Rock daily is family-owned. Wehco, which has an estimated $250 million in annual revenue, is based in Little Rock. Hussman lives in town, and his corporation’s roots go back to the chain his grandfather, Clyde E. Palmer, built early in the last century in south Arkansas.
The Guard, by contrast, fits the classic image of a family paper with its small-town office and newsroom and advertising staff of about a dozen. The Joneses’ son Ross is an art and computer specialist at the paper, and their daughter-in-law, Lua Jones, is online administrator.
Paxton is also a family-owned corporation, with generations of Paxtons in its leadership, but it’s a hefty private chain of nearly 40 dailies, a television station and numerous weeklies operating in 10 states, with an estimated revenue of $340 million a year.
Ockert saw Paxton as a likely suitor for The Guard long before the sale. Along with The Jonesboro Sun and Russellville Courier, Paxton owns the nearby Searcy Daily Citizen and the Paragould Daily Press.
Ockert figured Paxton could economize by printing The Guard in Jonesboro, as it does the Paragould and Searcy papers. Sun Publisher David Mosesso confirmed on June 4 that Paxton had done just that
“We printed our first edition here in Jonesboro last night,” he said.
Dr. Jones was a light-touch publisher, but he was deeply dedicated to the paper. He had helped his mother, Josephine Phillips Carroll Jones, modernize operations after his father’s death in 1949, and he was on board years later as Ockert led it into the computer age.
“O.E. was not a full-time newspaperman,” Ockert wrote in a January reminiscence. “He was a dentist whose office was next door to the Guard building, but as one of three principal owners (with his mother and sister), he had a strong interest in the newspaper’s success. O.E.’s dad and older brother had been career newspapermen, but both died young. His goal was to avoid the same fate … .”
Ockert knows from experience that Paxton is a good company, he says. “That being said, there’s a difference working for a family-owned and a corporate-owned newspaper,” Ockert told Outtakes. “I’m not going to say one is better than the other, because I saw good things and bad things with both, and the trend away from locally owned businesses and into corporate ownership is certainly not confined to the newspaper business.”
But he says he’ll never forget his special kinship with The Guard. “Most of all, I remember the family atmosphere — picnics, team sports and games, parties at the Jones house, laughing and sometimes crying together.”
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