Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette: An Oral History (review)

Newspapers once held an exceptional place in the affections not only of scholars but also of the general public. They inspired composers, John Phillip Sousa's Washington Post March being but one of many newspaper-related compositions. Loyal readers caught and reported errors of typography and fact, pestered editors, and saved clippings for scrapbooks. For more than a century, this world resembled a pyramid, its foundation resting on the country weeklies, and its middle being the small-town dailies, with the metropolitan press at the pinnacle. Monitoring this world was Editor and Publisher, which at the time of this writing had become extinct. Also extinct are the independent publishers and editors to whom the journal was directed. Media companies successfully gained control of newspapers; journalism schools were transformed into Mass Communications departments. Hence almost all that is left is to write the history of the press that was and never again will be. Richard Kluger, who in 1986 wrote the obituary for the New York Herald Tribune, observed that every newspaper death harmed the nation's health and denied to history "a devoted witness." One egregious example was the shutting down of the venerable Arkansas Gazette on October 18, 1991.

The first newspaper in Arkansas came out on November 20, 1819, when William Edward Woodruff, a Long Island-born and trained printer edited, published, and even perhaps delivered the Arkansas Gazette. Once launched, the Gazette changed hands and politics but maintained its enduring role as the state press of Arkansas. During Reconstruction, the newspaper was unflatteringly called "The Old Lady." John Netherland Heiskell owned and edited the newspaper from 1902 until his death in 1972. After his death, it passed to his son-in-law, Hugh Patterson.

There is no history of its longtime evening competitor, the Arkansas Democrat, but in 1969 the Arkansas Gazette's staff historian, Margaret Ross, wrote the Arkansas Gazette: The Early Years, 1819-1866. There were no other subsequent books until this oral history collection appeared.

This book will mean different things to different readers. This reviewer first visited the Gazette office in the mid-960s, later wrote material for the newspaper, and was acquainted, sometimes closely, with some of the people interviewed or mentioned in the book. Older Arkansas newspaper readers will share this familiarity, thus making many of the local and topical references all the richer. But this book is more than just local history. Those seeking to follow the collapse of American journalism will find that coming to terms with these stories is essential in comprehending the end of an era that in some sense began when Walter Williams created the journalism program at the University of Missouri in 1908. It was also Williams' once-famous "The Journalist's Creed" that proclaimed the very opposite of the modern dogma that newspapers exist only to give readers want they want.

Another value of the book is that it is history, or rather the fragments and materials for a history, seen mostly from underneath—a working-class view of the demise of one of America's great newspapers. The oral history sources at the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History contain some 150 interviews. Editor Roy Reed, a former Arkansas Gazette reporter who moved on to The New York Times before returning to Arkansas, brought both personal and professional experience to the job of framing twelve chapters of material, most of it from the end of World War II to 1991. Little evidence of shyness emerged from the interviewees, whose often larger-than-life egos were fueled by nicotine and caffeine, not to mention alcohol. Editor Reed admitted to removing a few strong personal statements, but what remains is still a powerful story.

Approximately one-third of the book covers the glory years in the mid-1950s when the Gazette took the lead in denouncing Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus' interference with the integration of Little Rock's Central...