On the Short End of the Alliance   

Arkansas papers agree to an unusual cooperative arrangement.

CLIMBING THE STAIRS TO the newsroom, no one can miss the 12-foot wooden sign stretching high across a wall covered with more than 100 plaques, awards and other symbols of recognition for the Northwest Arkansas Times. Tall, gold letters on a black background spell out: "A Daily Newspaper Devoted to Truth and Perseverance in the Public Interest."
Since the Times' parent company, Bentonville, Arkansas-based Community Publishers Inc., formed an alliance last August with competitor WEHCO Media Inc., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Times has persevered through an arrangement previously unseen in the business.
Two community papers, the Fayetteville-based Times and its sister paper, the Benton County Daily Record, are owned by CPI but produced in the Democrat-Gazette's printing facility and delivered only as a package with the Northwest Arkansas edition of the Democrat-Gazette. The CPI papers are wrapped around the Democrat-Gazette for delivery. The deal was struck in the midst of a newspaper war in northwest Arkansas among the Little Rock daily, the CPI papers and the Donrey Media Group-owned Morning News in Springdale. Two of the competitors joined hands.
"Since the alliance went into effect we have all been a little bit confused about what it all means," says Dennis Schick, executive director of the Arkansas Press Association. "What they did was the first of its kind in the country, so there's nothing to compare it to."
The alliance brought together James C. Walton and Walter E. Hussman Jr. Walton, heir to the Wal-Mart empire, founded CPI in 1982 with company president Steve Trolinger. Hussman, publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, won a Little Rock newspaper battle with Gannett in the late 1980s and early 1990s and owns papers elsewhere in Arkansas and in Chattanooga.
Billed as the merging of circulation, advertising and production operations of the three dailies, the alliance is supposed to maintain editorial independence at each of the papers.
That was not such an easy distinction for readers in these communities to make when suddenly the papers that had been bringing them the news for more than 100 years started arriving with a statewide paper from a capital 200 miles away. It is no longer possible to buy the Times or the Daily Record without the Democrat-Gazette. People feared that their local paper was going away, Hussman says. "I think people's attitudes have changed because the papers haven't gone away, and they can see their local papers on the outside" when they are delivered.
But letters to the editor showed that concern was growing as the public watched its proud local papers whittled down to a third of their original size. The Times has shrunk from about 30 pages to a thin 10. An effort by the alliance to reduce duplication in coverage eliminated portions of the community papers, leaving them to focus on local news. The deal also spurred some trimming of the editorial staff. Before the alliance, the Times had 35 editorial staffers, a number that former Executive Editor Mike Masterson admits was high for a paper of its size but necessary for the competitive environment. The Times' editorial staff now numbers 28, Trolinger says.
The papers also moved most of their advertising to the Democrat-Gazette and no longer needed space for stories off the Associated Press wire. Neither the Times nor the Daily Record will file audit reports with the Audit Bureau of Circulations because their circulations, 14,958 and 11,264 respectively in September 2000, have been added to that of the Democrat-Gazette, Hussman says.
An ABC rule requiring the Times and Daily Record to print that they are editions of the Democrat-Gazette on their banners added to the readers' confusion, Hussman says. But he stresses that the Democrat-Gazette has no authority over hiring or firing at the Times or the Daily Record. And while no paper can control the editorial content of another, the editors feel it is in their best interest to talk about coverage to reduce overlap.
The alliance was not an easy concept for the staffs at the CPI papers to swallow, either. Without warning, reporters and editors who had thrived on competition found themselves allied with a former rival.
One former Times and Democrat-Gazette reporter says that he found out about the alliance while he was on vacation. "We had been going head-to-head for so long," Jason Harmon, now a freelance journalist, says. "I couldn't believe it."
Beyond separate editorial pages, the editorial autonomy element of the alliance is not clear. There is daily communication between top editors at the CPI papers and their counterparts at the Democrat-Gazette. (Times Executive Editor Greg Harton deferred all questions to Trolinger, as did Daily Record Editor Kent Marts.)
Trolinger says that the CPI papers exchanged story budgets even before the alliance. Now, story budgets of all three papers are shared daily by e-mail, Democrat-Gazette Executive Editor Griffin Smith says. Harmon and another reporter still at the Times say that there is more structured collaboration, even daily 10 a.m. conference calls among editors at all three papers. Susan Scantlin, editor of the Democrat-Gazette's Northwest Arkansas edition, would not confirm the conference calls but termed the arrangement a "highly collaborative relationship."
Harmon calls the idea of editorial independence at the papers "the biggest farce ever," and questions how much independence there could be with the executive editor at the Times being the former assistant city editor for the Democrat-Gazette's Northwest Arkansas bureau. Asked about the possibility of the CPI papers scooping the D-G, Scantlin says that maybe if something came up late in the day it could be a scoop.
"We will not carry a story they don't know about," says one Times reporter.
The alliance differs from a joint operating agreement, Smith says, in that since the papers are delivered together, there is no rush to reach the newsstand with a story first. The competition that now exists, he says, is in which paper has the most expert staffer for a particular local story.
Essentially the battle that existed among the Democrat-Gazette, the Morning News and the CPI papers in one of the fastest-growing areas in the country has become a balanced confrontation, with the alliance taking on the previously dominant Morning News.
Max Brantley, editor of the weekly Arkansas Times, says that the competition "is great for readers and great for journalists," but adds that the Times and Daily Record are not much more than zoned sections of the Democrat-Gazette. "In time the only way to go for efficiency is one paper."
"Nobody would say that [the Times and Daily Record] are as strong or as good as they were a year ago," Schick says, while adding that the newspaper industry is changing.
Masterson, the former executive editor who led the Times to four years as the state's best medium-size daily paper while enduring four different owners during his five-year tenure, still refers to those times as the "golden years." Now a columnist for the Democrat-Gazette and the one responsible for the sign that hangs above the Times' newsroom, he says, "The Times changed. Now it's a whole new animal."