Welcome, competitor

New blood for an old business

WHAT’S NEW in old Brinkley, Ark.? You can read all about it in our newest competitor, the weekly Monroe County Herald, which is as young and hopeful as its publisher, 19-year-old Hayden Taylor, who has the best background of all for a journalist: no courses in journalism at all. Instead, he sounds like the old-fashioned newspaperman who moved west with the American frontier with nothing but a tray of type and, maybe later, a linotype machine—plus his own entrepreneurial ambition. And eager to learn the business.

Journalism courses? “I think I’m more concerned about management and administration,” he told a visitor to his office, “how to make the bottom line work.” Sure, he might pick up a textbook or two about the nuts and bolts of the inverted pyramid and the who, what, when, where and how of a news story, but something tells us he already knows about such things, having picked them up on his own—or just sensing them intuitively. He’s already got the beginnings of Qualification No. 1 for an editor or any other citizens of this republic: a liberal education.

Our boy publisher has a diploma— from Marvell Academy—and he went to a good liberal-arts college for a year, not enough to pick a major, thank goodness, and get on the treadmill to the barbarism of specialization. He just reads a lot, which is the best sign that he can educate himself. Every day. “I’ve always enjoyed reading,” he confesses, “and I’ve done well in history and politics, economics and religion. All those interests line up with writing,” he notes in what may be the understatement of the year. Besides, he’s got a great natural advantage for an editor and publisher whether in a small town or a great metropolis: His family roots in the business go deep. Much like Booker T. Washington, he’s just put down his bucket where he found himself, and struck out of his own. For what is any institution but the lengthened shadow of a single individual—like Hayden Taylor?

THE MONROE County Herald, like the news itself, is a work in progress. It has the great advantage of starting life afresh. Hayden Taylor should soon be a familiar sight around town, notebook in hand, if he isn’t already. For he understands that real newspaper work is legwork. “My friends,” he says, “think Facebook is where they can get ‘local news,’ and I just don’t believe that. That ‘news’ isn’t always news, and it’s hardly ever really local.”

Unlike those little softballs called tomatoes at the chain grocery store, news worthy of the name—real news—is fresh and home-grown. For the time being, Publisher Taylor will be focusing on local sports. What his paper doesn’t have, at least not yet, is a home-grown editorial column. For a newspaper without its own editorials is like a day without sunshine—or rain and fog, depending on the mood and/or inclinations of the editor. Mr. Taylor says he doesn’t have any political opinions himself—believe it or not—but he does have a plenitude of excuses for not expressing them, including this doozy: “People have been spouting their views at me,” he says, “especially this year, so I don’t think I really want to spout mine back at them.” Why not? Isn’t that like just batting an old tennis ball against the wall and returning it instead of playing against a real, live opponent? It may be fun in its own, self-contained way, but it’s not tennis, just practice for a game that’s never played.

But in the best conservative tradition, a lot of the faces around the newspaper office will be familiar, and any new policies will be made in the spirit of the old. It’s called continuity. Which is a good thing, including the kind that goes from generation to generation. Mr. Taylor’s mother, Beth, will go right on running the Cottagemall and Cafe on West Cypress Street in what’s left of downtown Brinkley, and she’ll be the Herald’s advertising director, good businesswoman that she is.

Glenda Arnett, who might best be described as the heart and soul of the old Argus-Sun, is to keep on rattling around the new-old paper and new-old Brinkley. She’s due to celebrate her golden anniversary, the 50th, in the local newspaper business come the spring. As for Mr. Taylor’s father, Larry, he was elected to Brinkley’s city council back in November, but both his wife and son says they’ve already made it clear to him that he can expect no special treatment from them. Attaway, Taylors! There is a time to stick together and a time not to, and this is, well, one of those times. We trust we’ve made ourselves sufficiently unclear, which is another art of this business.

So is surviving day-to-day disasters. In the middle of last month—Dec. 16—the newspaper office went up in flames. Katie Jacques and her husband published the old Argus-Sun for longer than either the Herald or its young editor has been alive, and she had nothing but good wishes to offer the successor paper. But, she admits, “the fire just really took a lot out of us.” As it would anyone. Happily, what doesn’t kill you may only make you stronger, and a firewall confined the damage to the old newspaper’s front office. Its priceless archives, dating back to the 1890s, were saved.

ANEWSPAPER is in many ways a reflection of the town it covers, warts and all. “I hope he’s got a lot of energy,” says local historian Bill Sayger. “I’m excited for him, I really am. If there’s fresh blood at the newspaper, or anywhere else in Brinkley, it could help reinvigorate the town.”

Happily, youth will be served, and in turn will serve the community. Tom Larimer of the Arkansas Press Association says Brinkley now has one of the youngest editors in the country, “and maybe that’s what the industry needs now—that young blood.” Hear, hear. For no matter how crowded a field is, there’s always room at the top. And who could ask for a better beginning than Hayden Taylor has just made? Call it a baptism of fire.