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Guest Column:
Check in regularly with readers By Jim Pumarlo
Arkansas Press Association
Publisher Weekly Vol. 15 | No. 8 | Thursday, February 20, 2020 | Serving Press and State Since 1873
Rector fifth grader launches new school newspaper Before Adam Holmes and Top School Stories Today, Rector fifth graders had to rely on school bus gossip and questionable rumors to get the straight facts about their elementary school like “What’s for lunch?” and “When’s the next assembly?”
students, and it’s a fun way to share his passion.” Top School Stories Today regularly features 10 to 11 tidbits of valuable information per printing. According to Holmes, regular coverage includes lunch listings, upcoming events and activities and always a joke.
Now, students at Rector Elementary School have a credible source of information and a larger understanding of journalism, community and teamwork.
“I wanted to keep the students updated and provide them with a little bit of relief every week,” Holmes said. Holmes distributes about 45 copies of his upstart newspaper each week, and he personally delivers a copy every week to Mark Manchester, the Rector Elementary School principal. Manchester himself got his start in journalism, cutting his teeth as a sports reporter at the local Clay County Democrat and at the Northeast Arkansas Tribune in Paragould. After 10 years in the newspaper industry,
Holmes, 11, approached Rector Elementary faculty back in October with a request to write a student newspaper. Holmes takes care of all the reporting and writing. His teacher, Lauren Dorman, has one responsibility: print the copies of the Adam Holmes with a recent edition of Top School Stories Today. one-page, weekly publication. “He does everything himself, and you can tell it’s something he’s passionate
about,” Dorman said in a recent telephone interview. “We put them out there for
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Acclaimed novelist, journalist Charles Portis dies at 86 Charles Portis, a journalist who grew up in south Arkansas and worked at the Northwest Arkansas Times and Arkansas Gazette before achieving international acclaim as a novelist, died Monday, Feb. 17, in Little Rock. He was 86.
Portis was a graduate of Hamburg High School. His father, Samuel Porter Portis, was superintendent of schools in Hamburg and his mother, Alice Waddell Portis, was a columnist there for the Ashley County Ledger. Portis was a Marine who served in the Korean War. After his military service,
he attended the University of Arkansas, earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1958. He wrote for the Arkansas Traveler while at UA and went on to be a reporter for the Times and Commercial Appeal in Memphis. He was a reporter and columnist for the Arkansas Gazette, he wrote for Newsweek and he was London bureau chief for the New York Herald-Tribune.
Portis’s most famous novel, True Grit, was a New York Times bestseller and the basis of two major motion pictures, the first starring John Wayne as a Fort SmithContinued on Page 3