Columnists Art Hobson, Grady Jim Robinson, Hoyt Purvis, Lowell Grisham and Fran Alexander will start appearing in all editions of Northwest Arkansas Newspapers on Sunday. This will include Fayetteville.
For now, it’s a one-at-a-time deal. We’ll have one of those columnists each Sunday. We hope to work our way into something more frequent for each of them, but that will take some more time.
There’s some potential for confusion here because Art’s first column is going to appear on Monday in Fayetteville and Fayetteville only. Art will join the Sunday “rotation” later. It was just his luck that he’s going to be the one who has to go Fayettevilleonly one time.
Now that’s the situation as of the end of the business day on Friday. Things got wild around here before then. I’m not promising anybody they won’t get wild again.
This explanation may be longer than it’s worth, but here it is:
After the newspaper merger, we had more columnists than places to put them. We told a bunch of those writers to please wait for us for one month while we sorted ourselves out. They did. Some of those columnists such as Gwen Rockwood found other spots in the paper, but most didn’t.
In the interim, we got a lot of reader response from Fayetteville.
They missed their local columnists. I’m not convinced that people from other towns didn’t miss theirs too, but the people in Fayetteville spoke out about it - as people from Fayetteville are wont to do.
I would say something about the squeaky wheel getting the grease here, but “squeaky” is the wrong word. Virtually all thee-mail and letters sent to me were quite courteous, understanding about the demands of a merger and very well reasoned. They were still strong in conveying their preferences, however. That’s true of all the letters I received, not just those from Fayetteville, but Fayetteville provided the large majority.
There were technical problems I don’t want to think about any more, much less explain. We think we’re going settle on a permanent place in the paper for these folks but that’s going to take still more time.
Simple politeness to the columnists, however, demanded that we do something. Leaving people dangling for one month only to ask them to wait some more would just be rude.
Greg Harton, the Northwest Arkansas Times editor, very generously agreed to give up his space for four weeks to allow his local columnists back into Fayetteville paper, once a week.
After that, I was going to carry them in my guest column slot on Mondays until we had a lasting solution. We’d worked all that out and Art wrote a column for Monday. He turned it in Thursday.
Then David Sanders, the conservative columnist from Little Rock, quit Friday morning.
This caught me by surprise. I don’t think David will mind mesaying that he was quite pleased his column would reach a larger audience through the merger. But then the chance to be Stanley Reed’s U.S. Senate campaign manager came up, and David took it.
Frankly, my first thought was “I’ll be hickory-switched.”
My second was that Greg should get his column back.
But the Sunday slot David left open is for all editions, not just Fayetteville. What would I do with the space in the other three towns?
Well, folks, I’ve read those “Fayetteville” columnists. Grady reminds me of the late Lewis Grizzard. There was no mistaking that Grizzard came from Atlanta.
That didn’t stop him from being read in papers nationwide. My personal hero for a columnist, Mike Royko, was a Chicago man through and through. That didn’t stop me from reading him. Not once.
Hoyt writes about the world and baseball. You can’t get more universal than that. Lowell writes about life. Fran writes about the planet, among other things. Art writes about science, among other things.
I may need to take a day off the first time Art plays in Springdale, but I’ll risk it.
David also left a Thursday spot open. I asked Brenda Blagg if she could go up from two columns a week to three. She agreed, but I couldn’t see having her writing columns for both Wednesday and Thursday. So I asked Bob Caudle to move to Thursday. He agreed. Now Brenda will appear Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.
And that - for now - is where we’re at.
DOUG THOMPSON IS EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR FOR NORTHWEST ARKANSAS NEWSPAPERS.
Opinion, Pages 6 on 12/13/2009
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