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Why we hate our local papers
Because there's only one! How many two-paper towns are there left, anyway? Back home in the northwest corner of Arkansaw, we have a good situation: There are two local newspapers. One, the Morning News, had traditionally been the Springdale newspaper and has always been the best of the local papers. (Yes, I had a column there for a few months, but this had been my opinion for the previous ten years.) It's now expanded to cover the entire corner of the state. The other is sort of an unholy trinity: The Northwest Arkansas Times, traditionally the Fayetteville newspaper, which has always been inferior fishwrapper (though I wouldn't wrap anything in it I planned to swallow, it's fine for carp), the Benton County Daily Record, the Bentonville paper, and the northwest Arkansas edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Little Rock paper (and that's a story in itself, how the Arkansas Gazette, oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi, was destroyed), are in an agreement to stuff each others' newspapers. What makes this interesting is that the the Times was bought by the Record's parent company, CPI (who used to print my newspaper--they did a beautiful job), which is majority controlled by the Walton family. The Democrat-Gazette is owned by the Hussman family, who have a small newspaper chain. The Morning News was bought out by Donrey Media, which itself was bought by the Stephens family. The Stephens family is big Democrat money and power in Arkansas, while the Waltons are their Republican big brothers. The Hussmans find the Waltons congenial. In other words, this is a proxy war between the two most powerful families in the state. How's it turning out? The Morning News is still the best newspaper in the area. The Record is about what it always was--an okay, not special hometown daily. The Times will never be anything but fishwrap, never has been any more and never will be. The Democrat-Gazette is a pretty good paper (better than I like to admit--the Gazette has a place in my heart). Oddly, both the Times and the D-G have a self-consciously diverse op-ed page, which in both cases kinda sucks. The Morning News' page is not so assembled, and yet it's as diverse, and much more civilized. For anyone who'd like to look for themselves:
The Morning News
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