Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette: An Oral History

by Roy Reed (Editor)

With a legendary beginning as a printing press floated up the Arkansas River in 1819, the Arkansas Gazette is inextricably linked with the state’s history, reporting on every major Arkansas event until the paper’s demise in 1991 after a long, bitter, and very public newspaper war. Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette, knowledgeably and intimately edited by longtime Gazette reporter Roy Reed, comprises interviews from over a hundred former Gazette staffers recalling the stories they reported on and the people they worked with from the late forties to the paper’s end. The result is a nostalgic and justifiably admiring look back at a publication known for its progressive stance in a conservative Southern state, a newspaper that, after winning two Pulitzers for its brave rule-of-law stance during the Little Rock Central High Crisis, was considered one of the country’s greatest. The interviews, collected from archives at the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas, provide fascinating details on renowned editors and reporters such as Harry Ashmore, Orville Henry, and Charles Portis, journalists who wrote daily on Arkansas’s always-colorful politicians, its tragic disasters and sensational crimes, its civil rights crises, Bill Clinton, the Razorbacks sports teams, and much more. Full of humor and little-known details, Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette is a fascinating remembrance of a great newspaper.

295 pages, Hardcover

First published April 5, 2009

Reviews

[Garrett Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a gift, a fascinating history of an enormously influential Arkansas newspaper and a tribute to the admirable role that journalists can have in a community. It is also full of hilarious anecdotes.

Many Arkansans have little sense of the history of the state. Some may not expect that history to include a newspaper like the Arkansas Gazette, which is remembered by a few people in this book as both the intellectual focus and the conscience of Arkansas. Chapters on the Central High integration, the corporate takeover of the Gazette and the newspaper war with the Arkansas Democrat provide an insider’s perspective on how a newsroom can operate well — and how it can cease to function properly.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Arkansas Gazette is the most important newspaper in Arkansas' history. It's been gone for over a quarter of a century now, but this look at its history through interviews with the people that worked there help show why it was important, and why it was the most read paper in the state during most of its existence.

It's also a look at the dangers of homogenized news as represented by companies like Gannett, publishers of USA Today, and the company that helped destroy the Gazette.

Reading interviews with the owner of the Democrat, the paper that won the newspaper war against the Gazette, I couldn't help but admire a bit the underdog story, despite believing that the paper's win has been detrimental to the state. In contrast, reading interviews with the Gannett people that agreed to be interviewed, I just became frustrated with how wrong some of them were. Even today some (but not all) seem incapable of recognizing their mistakes despite the obvious consequences.

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reed leverages his experiences, contacts, stories and journalistic know-how into a revealing portrait of the history, golden days and death of the Arkansas Gazette.

[Bill Carpenter · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was the newspaper I read from the age of ten. Through the Central High Crisis to the Bill Clinton era. Even took six hours of journalism from Jerry Dhonau, an Editor of the paper, in the sixties. Really a great book covering the paper's highs & lows. What it meant to the State of Arkansas in my estimation can best be said by David Pryor. He said, " . . . the difference between Arkansas & Mississippi is the Arkansas Gazette".

[Ron Sitton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I grew up wanting to write for the Gazette. Somewhat sad but interesting look back.