Earlier this month, The Pine Bluff Commercial celebrated the first anniversary of Walter Hussman Jr.'s announcement that the historic publication had been acquired by WEHCO Media.
Hussman, the publisher of this newspaper, said the Commercial would be included seven days a week inside the digital replica of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
"We have never bought a newspaper intending to do this," he said at the time. "And the reason we're doing this is we think this will be great for Pine Bluff. Actually, we think it will be good for our company. If this works in Pine Bluff, this is going to be great for community journalism in America because it's going to show a model and a path forward for other newspapers to be sustainable."
With so many people predicting the demise of the newspaper industry, which is essential to American democracy, it's time for experimentation. Hussman has shown in recent years that he's not afraid to experiment. In Pine Bluff, he hired the talented Byron Tate to return for a fourth stint at the Commercial, which has now been around 140 years.
"Newspapers have had a hard way to go," Tate wrote in his column. "In the day, they made a lot of money. Then corporations took notice and snatched them up, intent on making huge profits. As newspapers changed hands again and again, each new entity was eager to cut expenses and reap more revenue.
"As profits from online advertising ate into that expected revenue, these new owners kept cutting expenses and very quickly that meant fewer reporters--you know, the people who cover the stories and give readers a reason to buy a paper. It doesn't take even a bachelor's degree in economics to see where that train was heading."
By early 2020, Tate said that "one could fit all of the Commercial employees into a church van and probably have room for a couple of dogs." Hussman stepped in.
"Hussman hasn't been immune from the headwinds buffeting the newspaper industry," Tate wrote. "But he's hardly new to the game, and he's definitely not new to taking a risk on the media he dearly loves--newspapers. . . . The city, he said, desperately needed a good newspaper, and he was going to ensure that it had one."
Tate's column was published just as I was finishing a book titled "Clyde E. Palmer: Arkansas Newspaper Publisher." It's from the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media and is distributed by the University of North Carolina Press. I was in a hurry to finish the book since I was scheduled to interview Hussman at an event in Little Rock. Hussman is Palmer's grandson.
The event has been postponed to spring 2022 due to the pandemic. For those who love newspapers and recognize their importance to the future of Arkansas, it's a fascinating read. I'm glad I finished the book, originally written as a master's thesis by Larry Bracken at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 1987.
In reading about Palmer, a pioneer in using new technology at newspapers, one sees where Hussman inherited his willingness to take chances.
"I was only 10 years old when my grandfather died, so I later learned more about him from the stories," Hussman says. "His name was Clyde Eber Palmer, and he began a commitment to local journalism in the public interest that now spans four generations of our family. I was 2 years old when my parents bought the Camden News in Arkansas from my grandfather and moved my two older sisters and me from Texarkana to Camden.
"My sister Marilyn was 8, and Gale was 11. They had grown up in Texarkana, where my grandparents also lived. My father was away in World War II for several of those years, so they spent meaningful time with our grandparents and knew them much better than I. Marilyn recounts fond memories of our grandfather . . . She remembers playing checkers and other games with our grandfather in the upstairs study, and she attributes her love for games to those experiences."
Hussman began working for the family company in 1970. The advertising director at Texarkana was also an aviation instructor who taught the 75-year-old Palmer to fly. On the day of Palmer's first solo flight, he was told to take off, make some turns and land.
Hussman tells the rest of the story: "The instructor watched Palmer take off, make one left turn and then just disappear over the horizon. The instructor went into a cold sweat. Palmer might crash. He might be hurt or killed. . . . And worst of all, my grandmother, Palmer's wife Bettie, would learn [the instructor] was secretly teaching her husband to fly. He waited nervously.
"A half hour later, he saw a plane . . . coming his way. It approached the Texarkana airport and landed. It was C.E. Palmer. Relieved, he asked Palmer where he had gone. Palmer replied he simply followed the highway and flew up to Hope and back. Palmer always followed his instincts and rarely fit a mold."
Hussman said his favorite story about his grandfather involved meeting a young William Dillard, who had opened a store at Nashville in Howard County when Dillard was 24.
"After eight years, he was ready to expand, and he came to Texarkana," Hussman says of Dillard. "One of his first meetings there was with the local publisher, C.E. Palmer. It was 1946; Dillard was now 32 years old, and Palmer was 70. He told Palmer he wanted to open the town's first department store, but he didn't have enough capital to do it. He said if Palmer bought stock in his company, he would become Palmer's largest advertiser and that Palmer's retail advertising would increase 50 percent.
"Palmer had never done anything like that, but he later agreed. After he had invested and the store was up and running, Palmer called Dillard one Christmas Eve and asked him to lunch. At lunch, Palmer said that Dillard had not been honest with him. This puzzled Dillard, a man of high integrity. Palmer then told Dillard he had indeed become his biggest advertiser, but his business had doubled, not increased by merely 50 percent. Palmer said that if he never got a nickel out of the stock, it would be the best investment he ever made."
Hussman writes in the foreword to the biography: "I have reflected on how my career has differed from my grandfather's. While I worked on consolidating ownership within our family, he often sought outside investors. While I followed my father's strategy to buy and hold properties to realize a return by operating them, Palmer would often buy a newspaper and sell it within a few years.
"My grandfather's passion was business--mostly in newspapers and then broadcasting--but he would invest in anything he considered profitable, including real estate, oil and gas. Palmer once started a newspaper in Fort Smith, and when it proved difficult and unprofitable, he pulled out after a year. In contrast, we bought the struggling Arkansas Democrat in 1974--and despite enormous challenges competing with the larger Arkansas Gazette (first owned locally for more than a decade of our competition and then owned by the country's largest newspaper company, Gannett, for the next five years), we persisted, and we prevailed."
I came to the Democrat as a sportswriter seven years after Hussman had become publisher. Like Tate at the Commercial, I'm on my fourth stint at either the Democrat or Democrat-Gazette. After 21 years away, I returned to full-time newspaper work in June 2017. I wanted to play a small role in Hussman's effort to publish the last true statewide newspaper in America.
"While I have had a far more varied, challenging and exciting business career than I would have ever imagined, my real passion has always been journalism more so than business," Hussman says. "I realized when I joined the family business many years after my grandfather died, and with my father nearing retirement at age 64, that I was drawn to the allure of carrying on into a third generation the legacy of a family business, a legacy started by a remarkable man and publisher, Clyde E. Palmer."
Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.