Last week's celebration of the 200th birthday of the Arkansas Gazette served up some remarkable state history and more than a little concern about what may lie ahead.
The Gazette's story began in the earliest days of the Arkansas Territory, 17 years before statehood, when an adventurous young William E. Woodruff set up shop in a two-room log cabin near Arkansas Post, then the territorial capital.
The 24-year-old native New Yorker had set out from Nashville, Tenn., where he had worked as a printer, hauling a wooden press and other supplies on a long river trip into the Arkansas wilderness.
He printed his first paper there on Nov. 20, 1819, and moved the Gazette two years later to Little Rock, the new territorial capital.
Woodruff and a succession of other owners, most notably members of the Heiskell family, built this oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi River into the storied Arkansas Gazette.
The newspaper survived a lot of challenges and flourished as it chronicled the news, reaching a professional pinnacle during the 1957 Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis.
The newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for its coverage of the crisis. Harry Ashmore, the executive editor, won another Pulitzer for editorial writing that had strongly favored desegregation.
The work, the Pulitzer committee said, demonstrated "the highest qualities of civic leadership, journalistic responsibility, and moral courage."
The demise of the Gazette came in 1991, when what remained of the newspaper was purchased by the victors in a newspaper war that was itself historic.
WEHCO Media Inc. had purchased the Arkansas Democrat, a struggling afternoon paper in Little Rock, in 1974 and installed Walter E. Hussman Jr. as publisher.
Three years later, Hussman approached the Gazette about a joint operating agreement between the papers but was repeatedly rejected.
Hussman and his father, who headed WEHCO, set about making the Democrat more competitive, offering some free classified advertising and shifting to morning circulation. The paper also offered steeply discounted display advertising rates and greatly increased the size of its news hole and of the newsroom staff.
It was, as Hussman said last week, all part of a last-gasp effort to save the Democrat.
By 1984, the Democrat was making a profit. But, by year's end, the Gazette was suing, accusing the Democrat of predatory pricing. In the 1986 trial, the jury sided with WEHCO.
That was also the year the Gazette sold to the Gannett Co., the nation's largest newspaper chain.
Gannett significantly changed the look and content of the Gazette, not to everyone's liking. The newspaper war carried on until 1991, when Gannett closed the paper down.
Hussman bought its assets and name and, on Oct. 19, published the first issue of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
All these years later, it was Hussman throwing a big party last week to celebrate the long and proud history of the newspaper he vanquished and its hyphenated successor.
The celebration came, however, as Hussman and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette are fighting yet another battle for the future of the newspaper.
This one is a battle being waged throughout the newspaper industry to attract readers and advertisers in the age of the Internet.
Hussman's answer is to go digital in much of the state, cutting costs for newsprint, transportation and carriers while maintaining content and customer service.
He's doing it by giving Apple iPads to the paper's subscribers to enable them to read an e-edition as he stops delivery of printed newspapers six out of seven days of the week.
The newspaper has been phasing in the program and expects, by the end of this year or early next year, only to deliver a print newspaper on Sundays in 63 Arkansas counties.
(The Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a separate publication serving the other 12 counties, will continue to be distributed in print.)
The strategy is a bold gamble, just as were the last-ditch steps the Democrat took to survive almost 20 years ago.
They worked. Maybe this new strategy can carry the Democrat-Gazette deep into a third century of delivering the news to Arkansas.
Commentary on 11/27/2019