Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Publisher Walter Hussman was interviewed May 21 in a 45-minute telephone conversation conducted partly as he was driving home from the office. Three days before, he had published a letter to subscribers laying out the Little Rock newspaper’s plan to cut print publication to Sundays only, and an effort to convert subscribers to reading the paper on iPads his company will provide as long as readers keep up their subscriptions.
The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for readability. Questions and comments by the interviewer are in boldface type.
You pretty succinctly summed up your plans in your letter to subscribers published Saturday. Do you have any messages for a business readership?
A couple of years ago I heard Alex Jones give a talk. His family owned the newspaper over in Greeneville, Tennessee. Two of his brothers stayed in Tennessee, but Alex went off to work for the New York Times, and he ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize as a media reporter. He wrote about the Bingham family that owned the Courier-Journal [in Louisville, Kentucky], and the big family fight when they sold the paper. He wrote a book about that, and apparently the Suzlberger family was so impressed that they cooperated when Alex and his wife [Susan Tifft; they divorced in 2010] wrote a book about the New York Times.
“The Trust.” I read that book not long after I started at The Times, in 1999.
Yes, “The Trust.” After writing
Article source: https://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/126871/interview-walter-hussman-on-the-future-of-arkansas-newspapers
