Some of the toughest reporting on surging Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is now coming from long-time nemesis Max Brantley, once a top editor at a former Gannett newspaper many old hands at Corporate (hi, Craig Moon!) would just as soon forget.
Brantley (left), editor of the Arkansas Times news weekly in Little Rock, was a senior editor at the Arkansas Gazette, a daily that Gannett shut down in 1991 after buying it just five years before. The paper's capitulation to its cross-town rival came amid $30 million in annual losses, and it ended one of the last great U.S. newspaper wars. More than 700 employees lost their jobs, likely the single-biggest such layoff in Gannett's history.The Gazette's closing silenced a newspaper with a sterling record of public-service journalism (stories just like Brantley's Huckabee takedown last month in Salon.) The Gazette's failure illustrated Gannett's inability to succeed in truly competitive markets -- a precursor to the mess GCI now faces companywide as rivals surge on the Internet.
Moon (left), now publisher of USA Today and one of Gannett's highest-paid executives, was the second of three publishers Gannett sent to Little Rock in a bid to salvage the paper. He couldn't, and got kicked upstairs. For an eye-opening view of Gannett's mismanagement of the Gazette, read this interview Brantley gave for an oral history project about the paper. (Former Gannett CEO Al Neuharth, who engineered the Gazette's purchase, could barely bring himself to answer questions during his interview for the project.)
[Top image: the Gazette in its 1950s heyday, when the Central High School desegregation crisis roiled Little Rock. For its coverage, the Gazette was awarded a Pulitzer Prize (left) for public service in 1958. The citation: "For demonstrating the highest qualities of civic leadership, journalistic responsibility and moral courage in the face of great public tension during the school integration crisis of 1957. The newspaper's fearless and completely objective news coverage, plus its reasoned and moderate policy, did much to restore calmness and order to an overwrought community, reflecting great credit on its editors and its management." Gannett sold that Pulitzer to the competition when it pulled the plug on the paper in October 1991.]
That's a great read, and it is So, So Gannett, having lived through the 80s and 90s at a Gannett paper.
ReplyDeleteThank you! Arkansas proved to be Gannett's Vietnam, with Little Rock as its Saigon: GCI went in, thinking its bigger financial firepower would win the market. But a local competitor, operating guerilla-style, won.
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