A 30th anniversary

Last Tuesday marked the 30th anniversary of the first issue of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. My memories of the great Little Rock newspaper war remain so vivid that it doesn’t seem so long ago.

I had worked at the Arkansas Democrat as a sportswriter, assistant sports editor and Washington correspondent during much of the 1980s. At the time the newspaper war ended, though, I was editor of Arkansas Business. We scrambled to cover the events of Oct. 18, 1991, the day Walter Hussman Jr. announced that the Gazette had ceased publication. The Democrat would be called the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette beginning the next morning.

“Today is the first issue of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a combination of the 120-year-old Arkansas Democrat and the 171-year-old Arkansas Gazette,” Hussman wrote in the Oct. 19 edition of the newly christened newspaper. “Little Rock and Arkansas have been served for over a century by what had become two of the best statewide newspapers in America. Beginning today, readers will get the best of both newspapers in one daily edition. Today is also the culmination and the end of perhaps the most intense newspaper competition ever known in the newspaper business.”

Upon Democrat publisher K. August Engel’s death in January 1968 (Engel had joined the newspaper in

1911 as business manager and bought a controlling interest in 1926), his nephews Marcus George and Stanley Berry took over the Democrat. George was editor, while Berry served as publisher.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Gazette, which had been hurt from a business standpoint by its progressive editorial positions during the 1957 Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis (the Gazette won two Pulitzer Prizes in 1958), regained its role as the state’s dominant newspaper.

By the time George and Berry sold the newspaper in 1974, the Democrat was steadily losing circulation. The Gazette’s circulation was 118,702 at the time, almost twice the Democrat’s 62,405 subscribers. The Gazette had about three times the Democrat’s revenue.

The Democrat’s new owner was a south Arkansas company headed by Hussman’s father. The company already owned daily newspapers at Texarkana, Hot Springs, El Dorado, Camden and Magnolia. The purchase price was $3.7 million.

Hussman had graduated from a New Jersey prep school in 1964 and the University of North Carolina in 1968. He later received a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia University and was 27 when he became Democrat publisher.

The younger Hussman grew up at Camden, working at his father’s newspapers. In Little Rock, Hussman faced a formidable challenge: operating an afternoon newspaper in decline. By 1974, 34 U.S. cities had separately owned newspapers that competed against each other, down from more than 500 in the 1920s.

For years, journalists at the Democrat had labored in the shadows of better-paid, better-known reporters and editors at the Gazette. At times, their jobs consisted of rewriting stories from the morning Gazette for the afternoon Democrat.

After Hussman purchased the newspaper, well-known Democrat columnists included Bob Lancaster, who provided biting, humorous coverage of the Arkansas Legislature, and sports columnists Fred Morrow and Jim Lassiter, who criticized the University of Arkansas Razorbacks far more than Gazette sports columnists did.

In 1977, Hussman approached the Gazette’s owners and sought a joint operating agreement in which the papers would share circulation and business operations while maintaining separate editorial staffs. The Gazette owners declined. Hussman responded by expanding the space devoted to news and offered free classified ads, something the Gazette wouldn’t match until December 1987.

Hussman also hired the former Little Rock bureau chief for the Associated Press, an aggressive newsman named John Robert Starr. The number of reporters increased from 57 to 101. In 1979, the Democrat gradually switched to morning publication. It started with a morning edition available only in Pulaski County. The final afternoon edition of the Democrat was published Oct. 7, 1979.

Hussman began using color in the Democrat in 1982, five years before the Gazette.

Of the growing newspaper war, the Society of

Professional Journalists’ Quill magazine noted in 1981: “Arkansas has not seen such fussin’ since [Gazette editor] Harry Ashmore and Gov. Orval Faubus went at it in the late 1950s.”

Starr was quoted in the article as saying: “The Democrat might still be a dog, but at least it barks.”

A March 1983 Wall Street Journal article on the newspaper war said: “Sometimes it seems as if the gray old lady of this city is being mugged by a street brawler.”

In December 1984, the Gazette filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Democrat’s owners, charging that they “conspired among themselves and with others with the specific intent to monopolize” the newspaper market in Little Rock. The trial didn’t begin for more than a year.

In March 1986, a jury in the court of U.S. District Judge William Overton ruled that the Democrat was innocent of allegations that it tried to run the Gazette out of business through unfair trade practices.

Before the year was over, the Patterson family of Little Rock had sold the Gazette to Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain. Despite investments by the Gazette’s new owners, the Democrat continued to make circulation gains. By April 1988, the Sunday Democrat had reached a circulation of 192,000, doubling its circulation of a decade earlier. For the first time since the Hussman purchase, the Democrat had more than 4% of the Little Rock newspaper market.

An additional boost for the Democrat came in May 1989 when the Dillard’s chain of department stores, the Gazette’s biggest advertiser, stopped advertising in the Gazette after an ad-pricing dispute.

For Arkansas readers, though, the most telling sign that the tide was turning was the August 1989 defection to the Democrat of Orville Henry, the Gazette sports editor for 46 years and the state’s most famous newspaper columnist. Henry’s move down the street was a sure sign that the Democrat was winning.

In July 1990, as Gannett hired the Gazette’s third editor in as many years, the Democrat surpassed the Gazette in Sunday circulation for the first time since the 1960s. The Gazette continued to have more weekday circulation.

Starr told Advertising Age in August 1990: “There was no way the Democrat could have won unless the Gazette made all the wrong moves. I think they’ve made all the wrong moves.”

In October 1990, another popular Gazette columnist, John Brummett, resigned. His columns soon began appearing in the Democrat.

Advertising Age reported in December 1990 that the Democrat was the fastest-growing newspaper in the country, while the Gazette was losing circulation the fastest. The handwriting was on the wall. Gannett, a public company, could no longer justify to stockholders the massive financial losses in Arkansas. It would have to close the Gazette.

Hussman wasted no time bulking up the staff of the new Democrat-Gazette. In April 1992, he hired Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor and nationally syndicated columnist Paul Greenberg away from the Pine Bluff Commercial. On June 23, 1992, Starr announced his retirement. Little Rock attorney Griffin Smith Jr., who had been the newspaper’s part-time travel editor while practicing law, was named executive editor. He served until his retirement in April 2012.

It was Smith who hired me away from Arkansas Business in 1992 as the Democrat-Gazette’s first political editor, largely to supervise coverage of Bill Clinton’s campaign for president.

Clinton had announced his candidacy while standing on the steps of the Old State House in downtown Little Rock on Oct. 3, 1991. He had grown up in Hot Springs reading the Gazette and dealt with Gazette reporters and columnists during his 12 years as governor. As it turned out, the Gazette would be around to cover only the first 15 days of his presidential campaign.