The Little Rock/Las Vegas Newspaper War Heightens
by July 9, 2001 12:00 am 76 views
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has taken the lead in Sunday circulation from The Morning News of Springdale for the first time. But we wonder how long the D-G can afford to pour money into Northwest Arkansas. Word is the statewide newspaper has cut back on editorial staff in the main office in Little Rock so it will have more money available to fight The Morning News on the northwestern front. And the focus on Northwest Arkansas has caused a rift between the D-G’s Little Rock and Springdale offices.
Walter Hussman’s Wehco Media Group, which owns the D-G, has spent millions of dollars trying to penetrate the Northwest Arkansas market over the past four years. Finally, it has done so — at least for the biggest newspaper day of the week — by entering into an “alliance” with Community Publishers Inc. of Bentonville.
The competition now is between two formidable opponents — Hussman and Donrey Media Group of Las Vegas, which owns 13 daily newspapers, including The Morning News and the Southwest Times Record of Fort Smith.
Hussman is most famous for the newspaper war that resulted in the demise of the 172-year-old Arkansas Gazette in 1991.
Hussman has shown that he’s savvy in public relations. He made sure it was Gannett Co. of Arlington, Va., that officially closed the venerable Gazette the day before it sold the newspaper’s assets and its name to Hussman for $69.3 million. When the D-G hired Susan Scantlin to head its Northwest Arkansas operation, it made sure she quit her job as editor of the Daily Record first, so it didn’t look like the D-G was hiring someone away from the competition for the top job in its Springdale office.
Careful to avoid the appearance of an invading Little Rocker, the D-G says the “alliance” means Fayetteville and Bentonville still have their hometown newspapers. Sherman Frederick, president of Donrey, said the CPI papers are merely “atrophied appendages” of the statewide D-G.
It wasn’t long before the state’s newspaper readers began referring to the D-G as the “Gazette” simply because the Arkansas Democrat had appropriated that name into its own after defeating its well-respected competition. Now, it’s almost as if the Arkansas Gazette never existed.
Will people still refer to the Times and Daily Record a decade from now? Without those names attached to the D-G’s, we doubt it.