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The Improbable Life of the Arkansas Democrat: An Oral History. By Jerry McConnell. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2016. Pp. x, 245. Acknowledgments, cast of characters, illustrations, index. $34.95.)
If It Ain't Broke, Break It: How Corporate Journalism Killed the Arkansas Gazette. By Donna Lampkin Stephens. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 277. Acknowledgments, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95, paper.)
The fortuitous arrival of two new and contrasting books on recent Arkansas newspaper history offers a chance to sum up the roles that newspapers have played in the state from the founding of the Arkansas Gazette in 1819 to what many see today as the inevitable end of the line for print journalism. And it is a task that is inseparable from my own involvement in this history. I was a reporter for a third-grade newspaper and learned to set type by hand on a toy press. My master's thesis on the Little Rock press during the Civil War took me to Little Rock where Margaret Smith Ross, famed for her "Chronicles of Arkansas" published in the Arkansas Gazette during the Civil War centennial and then her book, Arkansas Gazette: The Early Years, 1819-1866 (1969), became my guide and mentor as the thesis grew into a dissertation on Confederate Arkansas. Then, in 2003, my Community Diaries: Arkansas Newspapering, 1819-2002, devoted a chapter to the "Great Newspaper War." Given all this, readers should be cautioned that my interviews and comments are quoted in both of the books under review.
In order to better grasp the broader picture, a brief history is necessary. In the nineteenth century, print enjoyed a near monopoly on the dissemination of information. Newspapers, mostly weeklies in Arkansas until after the Civil War, came into being primarily for political reasons. Yet a nose for news led editor/publishers to do much more than play politics. The crusading editor as a public servant appeared in Opie Read's novel Len Gansett (1888), and ethical standards were canonized when Walter Williams created the first academic journalism program at the University of Missouri in 1908. It took twenty years for the University of Arkansas to act, but Walter J. Lemke established a program there...