D-G Northwest Edition Not Much Different From Previous Version

When Northwest Arkansas residents awoke July 12 to the debut of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s zoned Northwest Arkansas edition, many of them couldn’t tell anything had changed.

Responses from media observers we questioned varied from, “It’s great” to “I can’t tell the difference.” Most of the responses fit into the latter category. These weren’t journalists we were talking to. They were politicians and business people.

The D-G had already been running several Northwest Arkansas stories on the front of the “Arkansas” section, so when it became the “Northwest Arkansas” section, many readers didn’t notice any difference in coverage or that “Northwest” had been added at the top of the page.

A week to the day after the section premiered, the inside pages were filled with Associated Press stories from Arizona, New Mexico and Texas instead of articles about Northwest Arkansas as the section name implied.

The D-G has been trying to distance itself from Little Rock with its new section. Three days before the July 12 debut, the newspaper changed the company’s name from Little Rock Newspapers Inc. to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Inc., and the new name began appearing beside a copyright symbol at the top of each section instead of the Little Rock moniker. Also, the blue line under the page-one flag, where the words “Little Rock” had appeared, now contains the word “Lowell,” designating the small Benton County town where the D-G has a multi-million dollar printing press.

All of this is supposed to lull Northwest Arkansas residents into accepting the new D-G as a local publication. Northwest Arkansas is a slippery terrain to define, and the D-G is proposing to cover 12 counties under that regional designation. We hear readers down in Clarksville are ticked off because they’re getting Fayetteville news in the Northwest D-G instead of the Little Rock news they had previously received.

Tony Cox, a Kansan who came on board recently as editor of the D-G’s “Business Matters” section, said in a July 19 column that “No one really cares about this battle.”

Cox says journalists are blowing this competition out of scale. And perhaps he’s right. After living through the 13-year newspaper war between the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette, veteran journalists in this state know what D-G Publisher Walter Hussman is capable of. He vanquished an Arkansas institution — a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper that was around to report on the death of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1821, before Arkansas was even a state. He humiliated Gannett Co., the nation’s largest newspaper chain, and kicked the carpetbaggers out of Arkansas. And he lost perhaps $100 million in the process.

We haven’t seen anything like that yet in Northwest Arkansas, but Hussman has already invested in a huge staff and expensive press. The last Arkansas newspaper war had a more meager beginning, and Hussman’s strategy this time looks mighty familiar.