Arkansas Publisher Weekly: March 3, 2022

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APA welcomes new associate members Guest Column: Into the issues: ‘60 Minutes’ report gives local media opportunity to elaborate, reinforce message

Arkansas Press Association

Publisher Weekly

By Al Cross

Vol.17 | No. 9 | Thursday, March 3, 2022 | Serving Press and State Since 1873

Brown, FOIA Task Force let the sunshine in

March 16 is National Freedom of Information Day, established in 1986 on James Madison’s birthday. The fourth president proposed the First Amendment and was involved in writing and shaping that first entry in the Bill of Rights.

While we don’t know what the weather will do on March 16, the day is part of the sunniest week of the year for journalists and the public. March 13-19 is designated as Sunshine Week and

dedicated to promoting and advocating for the protection of states’ Freedom of Information Act laws.

In Arkansas, the Freedom of Information Act Task Force made up of about a dozen appointees is the official body of individuals collaborating to protect open government in the state.

Wes Brown of The Daily Record in Little Rock is a veteran journalist with a career spanning more than 35 years. He’s

also the Arkansas Press Association’s representative on the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act Task Force. He says the group meets weekly when the Legislature is in session and stays and abreast of FOIA challenges and developments via group emails throughout the year. Brown joined the Task Force in 2020 and worked closely with it through the 2021 legislative session.

He said back in the early 1990s when Continued on Page 2

APA Advertising Conference to be held next week Don’t forget to register for the 2022 APA Advertising Conference, which will be held Friday, March 11, via Zoom. The link is arkansaspress.org/ event/2022AdConference and the cost is $25.

Starting at 9:30 a.m., consultant Bill Ostendorf will lead a morning session on creating eye-catching, visually appealing ads that get the message across and result in more revenue. Ostendorf, who has led thousands of training sessions for

journalists, publishers and ad directors in 23 countries on a wide range of topics, will discuss ways to more fully understand the needs of your advertisers and how to create effective ads that will bring both readers and response.

Winners of the 2022 APA Better Newspaper Advertising Contest will be announced in the afternoon in a presentation with emcee Roby Brock of Talk Business & Politics.

The contest, in which APA member

newspapers submit their best advertising work from the past calendar year, honors the most innovative and effective ads and campaigns. This year, 731 entries were received for the contest. Entries were judged by members of the Wisconsin Press Association.

Plan to make it a day of training for your sales, art and production team to learn how to better meet the advertiser’s goals and improve communication among all parties.

Brown, FOIA Task Force let the sunshine in Continued from Page 1

he was working for the Tulsa World, Arkansas’s FOIA law was widely known as the strongest in the nation and a model for other states.

“But now there’s a movement at the legislature to kill our FOIA by death by a thousand cuts, little by little,” Brown says. “Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen it weaken a bit because of different exceptions lawmakers have carved out for a number of reasons.”

He gives as an example a bill that didn’t make it into law that would have exempted coroners’ reports from full public disclosure.

Besides the FOIA Task Force, Brown says organizations like APA and the Society for Professional Journalists work hard to protect the law from such challenges and to champion ways to make it stronger.

For instance, back in 2019, a bill he was heartened to see become law actually strengthened the state’s FOIA by requiring all public meetings to be recorded. “It’s a great way to make sure that records are kept, and that not just reporters get it, but average citizens, too,” Brown says.

He also says that conversely, in an age where digitization should make archival and retrieval of public records easier than ever — after all, digital records don’t require staff to sort through many boxes of papers and scan or copy them all — too often public officials seem even more resistant to sharing. “But what’s happening now, we’re having this fight where the person who is guarding so-called public records wants to keep them out of public purview,” he says. “We want to know what our government is doing. It’s weird to me that people who are becoming public officers, sometimes their first instinct is, ‘We don’t want to give you access to that information.’ when it’s our information!”

Brown says citizens and watchdog organizations like the FOIA Task Force must keep up with emerging technology and fight to keep all types of records public. He remembers working as a reporter covering the state capitol beat during a previous legislative session and seeing legislators “tearing up” the FOIA with their proposals. While he says today the journalism industry does a much better job of following the pertinent bills and protecting the FOIA, the experience galvanized his interest in protecting it from Arkansas Publisher Weekly

those who would weaken its power.

“I am a real FOIA advocate. If it were left up to me, no records would be out of public purview,” Brown says. “But there are times, especially in the legislative process, when there’s give and take. Sometimes you have to understand that there’s a real possibility that those bills are going to pass, so we have to make sure we get the best outcomes for those bills.

“We like to go in and talk to the legislators.

We’ll say, ‘Hey, did you know this is going to weaken the FOIA?’ A lot of times when you talk to them, they will actually pull down the bill or try to improve it, change the language,” he says. “And we have John Tull and Robert Steinbuch on the task force. They’re both attorneys, and they do a great job of helping us focus on the exact language we want to see. Sometimes that helps us so we can rewrite a bill, or change the language in a bill or take out the FOIA language so it won’t weaken it.”

He says the transparency laws are under threat at the national level, too. “A lot of federal records are getting clogged up.

That’s another frontier we have to continue to push for transparency,” Brown says.

A lot of times, the threat of having that legislation supporting your claim is enough, he continues. “Just the fact people know they can’t keep certain records from the public. Those records don’t belong to them,” he says. “Just that threat is a good deterrent.”

Brown says a free press is “the vanguard of what we do.” But ultimately, the information belongs to the public the government serves.

“Reporters, people like me who do this for a living, need access to information for 2

stories,” Brown says. “But the FOIA was written for the benefit of average citizens, not just for the press. So that the average person has access to their government and their government is transparent to them. That’s the most important jewel of the FOIA.” Transparency is important. It protects us as journalists, yes, but the biggest thing is it holds our government accountable.

We still have a government of and for the people. That’s always been the one thing that separated the United States from any other place.”

News Leaders Association, the organization that founded Sunshine Week in 2005, encourages newspapers and their staffs to share their success stories, FOIA battles, new laws and other efforts on behalf of open government on social media using #SunshineWeek and tweeting to @Sunshine Week. NLA further encourages news organizations to submit stories, editorials, columns, cartoons or graphics for use by other news outlets via the Sunshine Week website. Email content links to sunshineweek@newsleaders. org. NLA requests submissions include a brief description or headlines suitable for posting on the Sunshine Week site.

March 3, 2022

Arkansas Press Association Virtual Advertising Conference March 11, 2022 Registration cost is $25 | arkansaspress.org/event/2022AdConference

BILL OSTENDORF President and Founder Creative Circle Media Solutions

Schedule 9:30 A.M.

“Creating Ads that Create Revenue” Presented by: Bill Ostendorf

Bill Ostendorf is president and founder of Creative Circle Media Solutions, a network of talent he has been building for more than 30 years. He founded Creative Circle, a consulting firm, in 1984 at the tender age of 28.

Over the course of his newspaper career Bill worked as a reporter, photographer, news editor, features editor, copy desk chief and graphics director at a number of newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, Paddock Publications in suburban Chicago, The Times-News in Twin Falls, Idaho, The Standard-Examiner in Ogden, Utah, and The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. He taught copy editing at Utah State University and has guest lectured at dozens of other universities.

Bill holds a BSJ in magazine writing and an MSJ in newspaper reporting and management from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. After 16 years of balancing part-time consulting and fulltime newsroom work, Bill left The Providence Journal to manage Creative Circle full time in June 2000. Since then, he has worked with more than 300 media companies on three continents as a trainer or management consultant, and has led redesigns of more than 700 print publications and more than 300 web sites.

Welcome & Introductions Ashley Kemp Wimberley, APA Executive Director

1:00 P.M.

2022 APA Better Newspaper Advertising Contest awards presentation Emcee: Roby Brock

Veteran journalist Medley new editor at Times Record three weekly newspapers in Oklahoma, the Yukon Progress, Piedmont-Surrey Gazette and Okarche Warrior. Prior to that, he worked three decades at the Oklahoman. He started his career in 1987 at the Wichita Falls Times Record in Texas.

Medley holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oklahoma and earned a master’s degree from Oklahoma City University in 2001, earned while working nights on the police beat. With the advanced degree he taught journalism at the University of Central Oklahoma as an adjunct instructor from 2007 to 2011.

Gannett has appointed Robert Medley as the new editor of the daily Times Record in Fort Smith, and of the weekly newspapers the Booneville Democrat, the Charleston Express, the Paris Express, and the Press Argus-Courier in Van Buren. Medley brings 35 years of newspaper experience to the Fort Smith newsroom. Most recently, Medley was managing editor of

“We are excited to have someone with the credentials that Robert brings as the next editor of the Times Record,” said Dann Miller, Arkansas state editor for the USA TODAY NETWORK, which owns the Times Record. “His decades of experience in Oklahoma City gives him a unique understanding of the issues that impact the region and I am confident he will help elevate the journalism in Fort Smith and continue the strong digital subscription growth we have experienced during the past year.”

As editor, Medley plans to prioritize local content. “Our medium of storytelling is not

Support the future of Arkansas journalism through the Arkansas Newspaper Foundation.

going away,” the former professor said.

“While the technology changes and how we deliver it continues to evolve, life is about stories because we have nothing else when it’s over.”

Medley says that although he’s worked many beats and served many roles in his career, his strength is feature writing. “(I have) a lot of experience with community news and what makes people read and tick,” he said.

He also brings with him family ties to the area. His grandfather, Harmon Asa Durden, lived in Fort Smith. Thirty years ago Medley interviewed his grandfather about life in Fort Smith, he told the paper.

“He was a wealth of stories and legends of this area and region and could tell stories all day,” Medley said.

Medley said that amid the pandemic, newspapers are even more vital.

“There was a downturn in the newspaper industry. We all know that, but a pandemic came along, and people have needed news more than ever: news about the schools, the school district, do we wear masks today?” he said. “I hope to have a source for the people of Fort Smith to go to find out what the biggest story of the day is that affects them.”

S AV E T H E D AT E FOR THIS SUMMER’S

Your donation will help: • Promote the welfare of the community

newspaper industry.

• Fund legislative efforts to protect

transparency in state government.

• Cultivate educational opportunities for future

journalists.

Tri-State Press Convention

• Ensure the viability of the newspaper industry

for years to come.

June 23 - 25, 2022 Sheraton Downtown Memphis

Donate securely at: arkansaspress.org/page/aboutanf or mail a check to: Arkansas Newspaper Foundation 411 South Victory Street | Little Rock AR 72201 The Arkansas Newspaper Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization.

All donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowable under law.

Arkansas Publisher Weekly

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March 3, 2022

APA welcomes new associate members The Arkansas Press Association board of directors recently approved the associate member applications of the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery and the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance.

The mission of the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery is to raise proceeds for scholarships for Arkansas students. Since 2009, the lottery has raised more than $1 billion and awarded more than 650,000 scholarships.

Its website is myarkansaslottery.com.

The Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance was incorporated in 2004 as an alliance between the Arkansas Foodbank, Food Bank of North Central Arkansas, Food Bank of Northeast Arkansas, Harvest Regional Food Bank, River Valley Regional Food Bank and the Northwest Arkansas Food Bank. In 2008, the Arkansas Hunger Coalition merged with the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance and expanded the scope of the Alliance’s work, which is at the forefront of hunger relief, nutrition education and advocacy. Learn more about the Alliance at arhungeralliance.org.

We welcome them to the association.

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Arkansas Publisher Weekly

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March 3, 2022

Anti-boycotting laws documentary features Arkansas publisher defending free speech

Alan Leveritt, publisher of the Arkansas Times for nearly 50 years, is at the center of a 2021 documentary, “Boycott”, by director Julia Bacha, about the threat to the First Amendment from anti-boycotting laws quietly passed in 32 states so far.

An editorial by Contributing Editor Gretchen A. Peck in Editor & Publisher recently examined this phenomenon.

Leveritt is waging a legal battle against a 2017 Arkansas law requiring businesses and organizations that do business with the state sign a pledge supporting and promising not to boycott Israel or face a 20% fine. He penned a Nov. 22 op-ed about the suit in the New York Times and spoke with E&P editor Mike Blinder in a December vodcast.

entirely advertising supported, with a substantial amount of that advertising coming from state agencies. Leveritt says he has done business with the state for many years, so he was surprised in 2018 when longtime advertiser Pulaski Technical College, part of the University of Arkansas system, issued an ultimatum that the Times sign the pro-Israel pledge.

Leveritt says he remains astonished that other news publishers in Arkansas and other states have signed these pledges. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he filed suit against the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees, challenging the law on the grounds that it violates both the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

“Our paper focuses on the virtues of Sims Bar-B-Que down on Broadway,” Leveritt says in the op-ed. “Why would we be required to sign a pledge regarding a country in the Middle East?”

“Let’s be clear, states are trading their citizens’ First Amendment rights for what looks like unconditional support for a foreign government,” Leveritt said in his op-ed.

Leveritt is one of three plaintiffs featured in the documentary who are suing their states for almost identical anti-boycotting laws.

Since 2015, 32 states have passed antiboycott legislation aimed at suppressing the BDS (boycott, divest and sanction) movement aimed at Israel.

The others featured in the documentary are Bahia Amawi, a PalestinianAmerican teacher who lives and works in Austin, Texas, and Mik Jordahl, a legal counselor challenging the anti-boycott law in Arizona.

Arkansas Times is locally focused and

Arkansas Publisher Weekly

“The plaintiffs all represent different political backgrounds,” the filmmaker

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explained during a follow-up interview with E&P. “They are motivated for different reasons, which really offers a tapestry of incredible diversity that is the United States. And people are willing to take enormous risks and sacrifice their potential livelihood to defend democracy.”

She says Leveritt’s case is distinctive in that he represents a news publisher.

“When we got to meet Alan, we knew that he was going to be a prominent person in the film because he’s a news publisher.

There’s something so important about the role the media — particularly local journalism — plays in upholding our democracy in America,” Bacha said.

“I think many people will be moved, touched and motivated by Alan’s story,” she said.

Bacha also interviewed former Arkansas Senate Majority Leader Bart Hester, a Republican who introduced Arkansas Code (Annotated) 25-1-503. Hester said he sponsored the bill because “it was the right thing to do,” citing his evangelical beliefs and a desire to protect Israel’s “chosen people.”

Leveritt, a former conservative from an Arkansas farming family, says he Continued on Page 8

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Anti-boycotting laws documentary features Arkansas publisher defending free speech Continued from Page 6

believes that anti-boycott legislation has gained traction across the states because of “evangelical Biblical literalism” — meaning, evangelical Christians are particularly protective of Israel because of its context to the Rapture. An estimated 100 million people in the United States identify as evangelical.

The bills also had some influential lobbying organizations behind them.

“There are a couple of key organizations that played outsized roles in ensuring that the bills were able to spread so quickly and with minimal public scrutiny over the past few years,” Bacha said, citing ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) and CUFI (Christians United for Israel). ALEC is the lobby behind standyour-ground laws and restrictive voter-ID requirements. The anti-boycott legislation they’ve championed and managed to roll out to 30+ states is similar, with boilerplate language — what’s referred to as “model legislation” in policy circles.

With the help of Israeli journalist Itamar Benzaquen, the filmmaker also tracked the U.S. lobby for anti-BDS back to Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which strategized to co-opt U.S. lobbying organizations and endear U.S. legislators.

“Our goal when we started making the film, which very much remains our goal today, is to ring the alarm bells, for Americans to know that there is a significant threat to a fundamental right to boycott,” Bacha says.

The filmmaker says there’s evidence that their methods are being modeled for other types of speech-damping laws. “There’s a law in Texas that went into effect in September 2021 that says, if you want public contracts, you cannot be divested from the firearms industry,” Bacha said.

“So, this is an attempt to protect the firearms industry, and it looks like lobbying came from groups like the NRA. Similarly, Texas passed a law that says if you want public contracts, you cannot be divested from fossil fuels.”

In the film, ACLU attorney Brian Hauss compared the lobby for anti-boycott laws to what happened in the wake of 9/11 and the dawn of the “war on terror.” He recalled Arkansas Publisher Weekly

how anyone who dared speak out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq was cast as antiAmerican or sympathetic to terrorists.

Similarly, opponents of these anti-boycott laws are disparaged as anti-Semitic.

Because the term “boycott” is subjective, that will have a bearing on how these laws are enforced, Hauss explained during the E&P Reports panel. Generally, to boycott — a person, a business, a government, a nation — is “a collective withholding of patronage,” he explained.

Leveritt says the Arkansas Times has no plans to “withhold patronage” from Israel, nor has the outlet ever covered Israel, the Palestinians, nor the land they dispute.

“We don’t take political positions in return for advertising. … The state does not dictate our political positions, period,” he says.

Leveritt expected to hear from other publishers, who he thought would be outraged by what they’d learned and how these laws imperil not just news publishers but any American who does business with the state.

“The silence was deafening,” Leveritt told E&P in a follow-up email.

Similarly, no other news publishers reached out to Hauss at the ACLU to inquire about the case and their own rights.

“I think it’s a combination of factors,” Hauss said. “I think they’re busy and dealing with all these forms, and they just send in whatever they need to sign to get the contract done. They’re not paying a tremendous amount of attention to all these subclauses that are getting stuck into their contract. I think there are also a fair number who don’t want to take a public position on this issue. They recognized that it’s a hot-button political issue and very polarizing, and on top of that, they don’t want to jeopardize their advertising contracts with state and local governments. … We really rely on the bravery and commitment of individuals like Alan to lead the charge.”

Leveritt’s case is currently awaiting a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for 8

the Eighth Circuit. He had expected his case to be “a slam-dunk,” but lost to the state, which argued that a boycott is an economic action rather than protected speech, and therefore subject to its “regulation.”

The ruling meant the Arkansas Times paid the 20% penalty on state-agency advertising. It has grossly impacted Leveritt’s bottom line and only compounds other revenue challenges the Times faces. The Times appealed the ruling, which then went before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Although the appeals court ruled in Leveritt’s favor, the Arkansas government successfully petitioned for en banc rehearing by the full court. Oral argument before the en banc court took place in September 2021. The parties await the court’s ruling.

The threats to free speech are not just happening at the state level. In a June 21, 2021, press release Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) lauded the Combating BDS Act of 2021, which he reintroduced with Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia).

“The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is the single most destructive campaign of economic warfare facing the Jewish state of Israel today,” Senator Rubio is quoted in the press release.

Rubio’s and Manchin’s offices did not respond to a request for comment. ‘ “Senator Rubio’s bill is really kind of a donothing bill that was just designed to lend rhetorical support to the state measures,” Hauss suggested.

“At the federal level, there’s much more scrutiny, so for them to pass an antiboycott law that penalizes people and businesses at the national level, there would be much more press coverage, much more attention and activism than at the state level, which unfortunately gets very little coverage,” Bacha said.

“But there is no legislation that Congress can pass that un-does the First Amendment. No matter how many laws they try to pass, this is still unconstitutional,” the documentarian concluded.

March 3, 2022

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Guest Column: Into the Issues:

‘60 Minutes’ report gives local media opportunity to elaborate, reinforce message

By Al Cross

The local news crisis got its biggest play yet to an American audience the evening of Sunday, Feb. 27, as CBS’s “60 Minutes” did a story that reached perhaps 9 million viewers. It didn’t make the best case ever for local journalism, but as the show usually does, it told the tale through some compelling personal stories.

Most of those stories, and the belief that “journalism is essential for the survival of American democracy,” as one former reporter put it, are familiar to readers of The Rural Blog. But they are not well known by many Americans, so for local news media, the network report is an opportunity to reinforce the message, and elaborate on it.

The story’s only evidence of “increased corruption by local officials,” was a rather old story: the 2010 revelation by the Los Angeles Times (uncredited by CBS) that officials in the small L.A. County city of Bell were paying themselves exorbitant salaries after “the local newspaper there shut down,” as CBS put it. Actually, the area had a paper, but it was covering so many municipalities that Bell got little attention.

There’s plenty of other evidence that lack of local journalism is bad for taxpayers, such as studies showing higher interest rates for bond issues, fewer candidates for local office and more straight-ticket voting and political polarization. But those points didn’t have compelling video, like the footage “60 Minutes” used, showing enraged citizens at a meeting of the Bell City Council.

Beyond academic studies, in other places with shriveled journalism we have seen the election of bigoted but unprofiled candidates, parroting of politicians’ press releases, and use of disaster funds with little oversight. And lawsuits to get public records are no longer filed mainly by the news media. Meanwhile, partisan websites, often masquerading as news media, fill the vacuum. Even some politicians have voiced concern about reduced coverage of elections.

At the same time, local reporters have also exposed such evils as pharmacies’ role in the opioid epidemic and ripoffs by contractors, forced resignation of corrupt officials, and Arkansas Publisher Weekly

there are examples of newspapers that have improved their bottom lines through accountability reporting. So, there’s a much larger story to tell about local news than CBS did, but its report tees up the ball for local news media to remind their audiences of their value to their communities.

For some of us in journalism, the headline on the story could have been what Steven Waldman of Report for America said near the end of the report: “We need a dramatic increase in the commitment of foundations, and philanthropists and donors like you and me to actually supporting local news.”

Waldman elaborates on that in a two-part essay for Columbia Journalism Review, in which he writes, “Our goal should be to create a better local news system than we had in the past, including far better service for communities of color and for rural areas. To make that local news system a reality, I believe that we need to add 50,000 local reporters.” He also calls for better business models, enlightened public policy and creating new methods of financing news operations, such as tax credits for organizations that take over local newspapers.

The more philanthropy the better, from big grants to small donations, reader memberships and so on. That said, grants have a way of running out, so they are more likely to be bridges to transformed business models for newspapers as they shift to an online existence — gradually, so they can still enjoy the revenue generated by print, their main revenue source, as print fans gradually leave the scene. And that’s a reality of the newspaper business that papers need to explain to their readers, too.

For those who didn’t see “60 Minutes,” read about a few excerpts below: The first protagonist was Evan Brandt, sole reporter at the Pottstown Mercury, which has won two Pulitzer Prizes and “at one time had dozens of reporters;” anyone in the town of 23,000 could walk into the newsroom and give a tip for a story to hold local officials and institutions accountable.

Now Brandt covers 21 eastern Pennsylvania towns and nine school districts from home.

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“He says the worst culprit is the hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, “the second largest owner of U.S. newspapers, which “has been called a vulture, bleeding newspapers dry.” Brandt said he went to Alden CEO Heath Freeman’s home on Long Island to ask “What value do you place on local news? And I’m not talking about money.”

But Freeman walked off before Brandt could pose the question.

As the industry shrinks, correspondent Jon Wertheim asked, “to what extent does democracy shrink with it?”

Former Chicago Tribune reporter Gary Marx said, “This is an attack on our democracy,” which papers serve by “holding our leaders accountable.” He and colleague David Jackson investigated Alden before it bought the paper and found profit margins as high as 30 percent in one market. “We felt that Alden didn’t realize the civic trust that’s embedded in this profitmaking machine,” Jackson said.

CBS paraphrased Freeman as saying that “Alden is committed to providing robust, independently minded local journalism and that it’s time for tech giants to start paying for the ‘billions of dollars’ they’re making off of news publishers’ content.”

The story had five RFA reporters in a group interview, including Chris Jones of 100 Days in Appalachia, who covered the Jan. 6 riot because he had developed sources among extremists. The former Marine has a community journalism ethic: “These are our neighbors, you know? We’re not writing about someone I’m never gonna talk to again. They’re people before they’re interview subjects.”

Al Cross edited and managed rural newspapers before covering politics for the Louisville Courier Journal and serving as president of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the extension professor of journalism at the University of Kentucky and director of its Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, which publishes The Rural Blog at http://irjci.blogspot.com.

March 3, 2022