Paper’s editor on 4th PB stint
Byron Tate, recently named editor of the Pine Bluff Commercial, has experience in the newspaper business that goes back more than three decades, and has now worked four times at the Pine Bluff Commercial under five different owners.
“That must be some kind of record,” Tate said.
Tate received his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1986 and his master’s in journalism from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 1999.
He started as a reporter at the paper in 1986 covering education and within a year began covering City Hall. A year after that he was named regional editor, a position he held until 1990. Tate credits his multiple stints at the Pine Bluff Commercial with helping form his approach to news reporting, and he said the time he has spent in Pine Bluff helped shape him as a newsman.
“When people ask me where I’m from, I say Little Rock, but as far as my working life goes, it seems like all roads have come through Pine Bluff,” he said. “After college, I kind of went on an odyssey, and Pine Bluff was the first place I stopped. I went off and interviewed in Alabama and Louisiana at several papers and the only offer I got was Pine Bluff. I should have just interviewed there and gone on spring break.”
Tate said then-editor Don Williams kept a close eye on him, editing his stories sitting right next to Tate as he worked, which Tate said sometimes left him wondering if he was in the right line of work.
“But over time I sat next to him less and less because it really just takes a while to get up and running when you’re fresh out of school and you’re thrown into a daily newspaper mix,” Tate
said.
In 1990, he and his wife Pat, then teaching elementary school, moved to a sister newspaper in Vallejo, Calif., where he served as city editor for four years.
“I’d seen the ad on the bulletin board for a city editor at the paper in Vallejo and I kind of half seriously tossed it down in front of Mike Hingel, who by that time was editor at the Commercial, and told him, ‘I’m out of here,’” he said. “Mike told me if I was interested he could call them up and tell them. Before long we’d loaded up the wagon and headed west.”
Tate said his four years in Vallejo gave him his first taste of newspaper work from an administrative point of view, an education in newsroom management which he said has proved invaluable during the years since.
“In Pine Bluff, as regional editor, it was me and another person which didn’t amount to much as far as keeping up with personnel,” he said. “But I had a whole staff in Vallejo with lots of different personalities. I had photographers who felt like they were above going out and covering icky things, so it took a whole different skill set, making sure stories were covered well and put in the paper.”
In 1994, Charles Berry, then publisher at The Commercial, called Tate back to Arkansas to be editor of The Commercial, where he remained until 2000. It was during this time, his second stint at The Commercial, that Tate studied for, and was awarded, his master’s degree in journalism.
At the end of 1999, Gene Kincy, the publisher of the Southwest Times Record newspaper in Fort Smith, another sister newspaper, approached Tate to be the executive editor of that newspaper, a position which he accepted in early 2000. At the time, the Southwest Times Record was the second largest paper in the state, second only to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
“Working at such a large newspaper afforded me the experience of what it meant to be the premiere news entity for a large city,” Tate said. “There were TV and radio stations that we competed with, so every day, we were on the line to produce excellent quality journalism. Every day was game day, and I was fortunate to have a great staff that thrived on that kind of pressure.”
In late 2010, Tate returned to the Pine Bluff Commercial for a third time, to take on the role of publisher and editor, although he said the major newsroom duties were delegated while he took on a role that consisted mainly of oversight of the business as a whole.
“I had someone in place who served as kind of managing editor at the time so the bigger hat that I wore was my publisher hat,” he said. “I got the calls in the middle of the night when the press room was having problems, had to manage budgets and revenue, cut expenses, look for new revenue — all of that was a whole different skill set from anything I’d ever done in the news business.”
Tate left the paper in 2016 to take a position at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff where he has been teaching journalism classes and serving as adviser to the school newspaper. He said he views his return to the Pine Bluff Commercial in its new form as a challenge in a career that has been built upon challenges.
“Every promotion I’ve had has been kind of a, you know, you kind of gulp and say, ‘Can I pull this off, can I do this?’” he said. “I’d never been a city editor, I’d never been an editor, never been an editor of a big paper, and I’d never been a publisher when I took these jobs, but you have confidence in yourself and others have confidence in you, and I think — I hope — I’ve done a pretty good job. I’ve certainly had some good times trying.”
Across the years, the newspapers Tate has written for, edited and run have won numerous awards from the Associated Press Managing Editors association and the Arkansas Press Association. He is past president of the APME, the APA and the Arkansas Newspaper Foundation. His wife taught college English in Fort Smith and Pine Bluff for many years and is now executive director of Neighbor to Neighbor, a nonprofit food pantry in Pine Bluff. They have one son, Ethan, who just recently graduated from a Master of Fine Arts program at ArtCenter in Los Angeles.
Tate said his latest turn at the helm of the Pine Bluff Commercial will be a challenge unlike any he has ever taken on, and one which he said he believes will not only be successful, but could represent a change to print journalism that will allow it to thrive for years to come.
“I’ve done a lot of things in the newspaper business but when I was introduced to this idea, the two things that jumped out at me were that this will preserve the newspaper for Pine Bluff, Arkansas,” he said. “A town of this size needs a local newspaper, and I am passionate about news and relish that aspect. The other part is that this is a bit of an experiment.”
That experiment comes from the need that local communities have to maintain in-depth local coverage. If it’s successful, Tate said, the model could be replicated in other communities and prove to be the salvation of local news coverage.