New Era Begins For Readers

By Rogers Morning News

Posted: November 1, 2009 at 2:10 a.m.

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ROGERS — The Springdale Morning News, The Rogers Morning News, the Northwest Arkansas Times and the Benton County Daily Record are all part of the same chorus now. Like Northwest Arkansas, they will cooperate - most days.

The four local daily newspapers are now partners with the Northwest Edition of the statewide Democrat-Gazette. Local weeklies havefound a place, too.

Sometimes the members of this choir will each sing their own tunes. That will make things interesting. The differences among us are as much a part of this region’s strength as the cooperation.

When everybody thinks the same way, nobody’s thinking, the wise heads say. Well, that has never been a problem around here.

This partnership has beaten the odds already.

The usual result of a long, hard newspaper war is that one side wins and the other vanishes.

The fact that this merger is the best option does not hide the loss being suffered here. There is no justice in telling someone who is doing a good job that his or her services are not needed any more. There is only the law of necessity. It takes something like this merger to remind us that a newsroom is a small part of a newspaper.

A newspaper is a manufacturing and distribution center. It is a sales and design company, a business office and an accounting firm. It is a place that makes something completely different every day. It will never be an assembly line but has to perform to that level of efficiency and do it faster.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., recently said he hopes the Las Vegas Review-Journal goes out of business. Apparently, that paper is not helpful toward his re-election. We winced at his apparent ignorance of how many people work at a newspaper. Did he really want a company that employs so many people - people he represents - to fail? Did he really want another major employer in that hard-hit city to go under just to clear his political path?

Apparently he did. The Review-Journal will not oblige him. Good for it. (Both the Review-Journal and The Morning News, until the forming of the Northwest Arkansas Newspapers partnership, were owned by Stephens Media.)

Warren Stephens recently said one of our goals is to be in business the next day. He was speaking of investment banking at the time, but the principle applies. We feel that keenly today.

To be in business, we have to offer readers something of value. We believe that in-depth local reporting is something you do not find for free on the Internet. Bloggers, as a rule, do not go to planning commission meetings. We will no longer plow the same ground as our new partner, the Democrat-Gazette. This combination will offer a level of depth, thoroughness and detail that would have been hard to find in the best of times in any newspaper market.

The partners in this merger, Stephens Media and Wehco, are serious people. They were willing to fight for this place, our place. They also could put the fight aside when the contest stopped making sense.

As a result, this region shall have the strongest, healthiest newspapers in these United States.

This “blessed spot” will have more of what so many other regions are losing or have already lost.

We will be here tomorrow. We shall be another of Northwest Arkansas’ unique strengths.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 11/01/2009

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