Arkansas Publisher Weekly: March 17, 2022

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Little Rock documentarian first journalist killed in Kyiv

Guest Column:

At the root of democracy: free flow of information

By Kelley Shannon

Arkansas Press Association

Publisher Weekly Vol.17 | No. 11 | Thursday, March 17, 2022 | Serving Press and State Since 1873

Janes takes editor’s chair at Areawide Media This month, Areawide Media in north Arkansas and southern Missouri got a new owner from New Jersey and a new editor from within its ranks.

CherryRoad Media, Inc. added to its growing portfolio of Arkansas community newspapers March 1, acquiring five more Arkansas newspapers for a total of nine in the state. Among them was Areawide Media, which publishes the Villager Journal, the News, the South Missourian News, Areawide Record and Avenues magazine. Areawide’s coverage includes Sharp, Fulton and Izard counties in Arkansas and Oregon County in Missouri.

a bachelor’s in English. She says that aside from a waitressing job she tried to juggle her first terribly busy year on staff, this is the only place she’s worked since graduating.

Janes says the transition to the new owners, still in its early stages, is going well, and so far there haven’t been many changes. “I feel like it’s going to go in a positive direction,” Janes says. “We’re under new ownership, but we’re still trucking along as we were before. We haven’t completely switched over to what they have planned for us.”

Also in recent weeks, Renee Janes has moved into the editor’s chair from the reporter’s desk she formerly occupied.

She replaces Kim Break, who left to pursue other opportunities.

She says some of the changes will help with the newspaper’s short staffing.

Currently the editorial team consists of Janes and one full-time reporter. Although they’re trying to hire another reporter, applications have been scant.

Janes is entering her seventh year with the company. Born in Salem, she grew up just over the Arkansas border in Oregon County, Missouri. She graduated from Missouri State University in 2014 with

“Right now I paginate quite a bit, which I was also doing as a reporter,” Janes says.

“I think that’s going to change, that we’ll be focused more on our reporter and editor positions in the editorial department, and

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Janes takes editor’s chair at Areawide Media Continued from Page 1

they will be taking over the pagination. But I think that’s going to be at least a month or so out.”

She’s anticipating some bumps as responsibilities shift. “I think it will be a positive change. But because we’re so used to being in control of how everything is done, it will be something different to get used to,” she says.

Janes says working for the newspaper the past six years has given her a greater appreciation for the rural farming communities spread throughout the area

and the exceptional people who make the area their home.

throwing their irons in the fire to bring interest to that community,” she says.

“I grew up in Oregon County, but until I started working for the newspaper, I didn’t realize how many people do so many positive things for our community and try to improve on what’s there,” Janes says.

As an example, she says that Thayer, Missouri has in recent years lost several businesses, but she has witnessed many people in that community coming together to generate some energy and growth for the town. “A lot of people there are

Her current focus, she says, is not on changing the editorial direction, but on continuing to find and tell the local stories from the four counties.

“I look forward to learning more about the communities we cover. There are a lot of remarkable, caring people that do so much to help improve our rural communities,” Janes says. “And we will continue to provide news coverage to the best of our abilities.”

Little Rock documentarian first journalist killed in Kyiv On Sunday, March 13, Little Rock journalist and filmmaker Brent Renaud made headlines across the world when it was announced he had been killed by Russian troops in a residential battlefield while covering the suffering of Ukrainian citizens.

Renaud, 50, was killed in Irpin, a town just outside Kyiv that had been under heavy shelling. Injured in the attack was a colleague, American documentarian Juan Arredondo. While receiving treatment on a hospital gurney, Arredondo said he and Renaud had been on their way to film citizens leaving Kyiv when they came under fire. “Somebody offered to take us to the other bridge, and we crossed a checkpoint, and they started shooting at us. So the driver turned around, and they kept shooting, two of us. My friend is Brent Renaud, and he’s been shot and left behind,” Arredondo told authorities.

Renaud and Arredondo had been fellows together in Harvard’s Nieman Fellowship class of 2019, a program for some of the world’s top journalists. The duo had come prepared to document people fleeing their country and to provide them with iPhones so they could record their journey wherever it took them. They had been working in conjunction with TIME magazine on the project, which was to be a film about refugees and migrants in 10 countries, for about a year.

On “Face the Nation” Sunday, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan called Renaud’s death “shocking and horrifying,” and said that the U.S. and its allies would impose “appropriate Arkansas Publisher Weekly

consequences” against Russia for the killing.

“I will just say that this is part and parcel of what has been a brazen aggression on the part of the Russians where they have targeted civilians, they have targeted hospitals, they have targeted places of worship and they have targeted journalists,” Sullivan said.

Andriy Nebytov, the head of Kyiv’s regional police force, said on Facebook that Renaud “paid [with] his life for trying to highlight the aggressor’s ingenuity, cruelty and ruthlessness.”

Renaud was born in Memphis but grew up in Little Rock, graduating from Hall High School. He majored in English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, then received a master’s degree in sociology from Columbia University in New York City. He learned his craft through internships at outlets such as PBS, Rolling Stone and the BBC. He began his career covering the 9/11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan.

Renaud covered wars, political turmoil and natural disasters across the globe, and tackled serious issues such as homelessness, special education, abuse, mental illness, drugs, PTSD, refugees and cartel violence.

He often worked with his brother Craig Renaud making documentary films and taking on assignments from outlets 2

including the New York Times, HBO and Vice News. The brothers own a production company, 501 Films Inc., in Little Rock.

They are known for their humanistic approach to documentaries in the world’s hot spots.

The Renaud brothers’ work has won many top television and journalism awards, including a Peabody Award, two Columbia DuPont Awards, two Overseas Press Club Awards, an Edward R. Murrow Award, an IDA Award, a DGA nomination for Best Directors and multiple Emmy nominations.

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March 17, 2022

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As a voluntary organization of more than 5,000 members, we support leadership development and public service.

The Arkansas Bar Association is your link to experts in the legal profession The Arkansas Bar Association is where the leaders in the legal profession connect. We serve as the central point of engagement for educating attorneys, participating in pro bono work, educating the public about legal issues and helping to promote the integrity of the legal profession. Explore our website or give us a call today to connect with the experts.

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Russia’s independent press falls under Kremlin pressure As President Vladimir V. Putin wages war against Ukraine, he is also dismantling the last vestiges of a Russian free press.

Earlier this month Russia’s independent broadcast media collapsed under pressure from the state. Echo of Moscow, the freewheeling radio station founded

by Soviet dissidents in 1990 and that symbolized Russia’s new freedoms, was “liquidated” by its board. TV Rain, the independent television station that calls itself “the optimistic channel” said it would suspend operations indefinitely.

Dmitri A. Muratov, the journalist who shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year, said that his newspaper Novaya Gazeta, where staff have been threatened, harassed and even killed for their reporting, could be on the verge of shutting down as well, although it will continue publishing as long as possible.

“Everything that’s not propaganda is being eliminated,” Muratov said.

Russia recently passed a law that threatens prison time for anyone publishing what

authorities consider to be lies about the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

The law says anyone found guilty of disseminating “false information” about Russia’s armed forces would be punished by a prison sentence of up to 15 years or a fine of up to 1.5 million rubles, or about $14,200. Since the Russian government considers the invasion a “military operation,” even using the term “war” could be considered false information.

Reporting data on Russia’s military casualties that contradicts the official party line might also be considered a violation.

“Since everybody from the president to the leaders of the opposition listens to us, we are influential,” Aleksei A. Venediktov, Echo of Moscow’s longtime editor in chief, said. “The authorities see a threat in us. …. We came under the steamroller of military censorship,” “This isn’t a question of media, this is about freedom of speech in the public sphere,” said Venediktov. “You can’t speak for or against something. That’s a crime.”

Little Rock documentarian first journalist killed in Kyiv Continued from Page 2

Their films have received critical acclaim in Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, Forbes, USA Today, The New York Times, Filmmaker Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and American Cinematographer.

The brothers also founded the Little Rock Film Festival, which ran from 2007-2015, and the Arkansas Motion Picture Institute.

In a Facebook post, the Arkansas Cinema Society wrote, “Brent played an invaluable role in building the Arkansas film community that we all know and love today. Without Brent and his brother Craig’s work to create the Little Rock Film Festival, countless Arkansas filmmakers might have never been inspired to pick up a camera.”

While serving as a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas in 2019, Renaud encouraged students to continue to develop their journalistic skills and not to curtail their ambition.

“No matter where they come from, even if that is a small town in Arkansas, it is very possible,” Renaud said.

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“Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault.

It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph, and the signs of horror are still in the air.”

— Henry Anatole Grunwold

Arkansas Publisher Weekly

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March 17, 2022

Florida legislators put news publishers nationwide on notice The Florida House of Representatives has voted to send a bill to Gov. Ron DeSantis that would strip Florida’s newspapers of legal notice revenue.

House Bill 7049, which now heads to Gov. DeSantis for his signature, would eliminate the requirement for local governments to publish required municipal and county government public notices in a third-party publication. Instead, governments would be allowed to publish them on a county website. The bill passed the Senate on March 10.

This new bill comes less than three months after legislation was passed that expanded the number of newspapers eligible to publish legal notices in the hopes of driving down costs for local governments, and also required all legal notices in the state to be published on Floridapublicnotices.com, a free and independent searchable database run by the Florida Press Association.

Supporters of the measure say it shouldn’t be the state’s job to make local

ARKANSAS IS FILLED WITH BEAUTIFUL VIEWS BUT PERHAPS NONE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE VIEW INSIDE OUR GOVERNMENT.

governments subsidize newspapers. They say the measure will make notices more widely accessible to Floridians who may or may not subscribe to a newspaper.

Critics of the measure, which was passed just as newspaper publishers nationwide were preparing to celebrate Sunshine Week, say legal notices contain important public information. Notices should be published by an independent third party because governments have no incentive to publish legal notices in a way that is easily accessible for Floridians, they argue. Under the new bill the state’s legal notices could be strewn across 67 different county websites instead of the centralized public notices clearinghouse run by the Florida Press Association.

“If I wanted to hide something from the public that’s required to be noticed, this is exactly the process I would use,” said Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, during a Senate committee hearing on the bill. “I would throw it on one of 67 different websites.”

Some lawmakers feel the new legislation to remove public notices from newspapers entirely is a jab at publications that sometimes publish stories and editorials critical of the Republican leadership in Florida.

“The free press here in the free state of Florida isn’t reporting what the governor’s communications director wants it to report,” Sen. Gary Farmer, D-Lighthouse Point, said during a committee hearing on the bill.

We have a responsibility to you, our readers. It is our job to question authority, expose wrong-doings, fight injustice and get to the heart of the issues that matter most. We are watchdogs who advocate for accountability and transparency.

As we observe Sunshine Week, we celebrate why freedom of information through an open government is a bedrock of democracy. Information belongs in the hands of the people, and officials of government should never shield the public from this constitutional right. You deserve no less.

IT’S YOUR RIGHT TO KNOW.

An exception in the new bill is made for municipalities and counties with less than 160,000 population.

The new law would require the presence of “adequate” broadband access throughout a county and if adequate broadband access exists, a public hearing must then be held before a government entity can run public notices on its own website.

Sen. Jennifer Bradley, R-Orange Park, said she supported the bill because of the provision to protect small counties and require adequate broadband access before local governments could move public notices to their websites. Bradley said she doesn’t believe any local government agency in the rural communities she serves will be able to make the determination, as required by the bill, that there is “adequate” broadband access.

“I think that it’s a real problem and I think that not only do you have to find internet, but you have to find that it’s going to be county-wide, that it exists in all areas of the county,” Bradley said.

Brought to you by this newspaper and the Arkansas Press Association.

“Our local papers are important and they’re trusted and they’re wanted,” said Bradley. “I expect when those issues are brought up, that the county commissions are going to want those notices where they know their citizens can find them. So I think it’s going to be fine.”

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette retires zoned supplemental editions The Three Rivers Edition and the River Valley & Ozarks Edition, weekly zoned advertorial sections of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, appeared for the last time on Sunday, March 6.

Three Rivers advertising manager Terry Cody and RVO advertising manager Peggy Morris separately announced their retirements to coincide with the discontinuation of the advertorials.

Both editions had been published for more than 25 years. At their peak the editions were published twice weekly, on Sundays and Thursdays, and distributed both in the Arkansas DemocratGazette and on racks as stand-alone publications.

The editorial focus was on community, school and local church events, and the publications had a reputation for never printing bad news, making them popular with advertisers. The editions were made Sunday-only publications in 2013. In 2020 the printed editions were discontinued and the supplements were folded into the Sunday digital replica of the Arkansas DemocratGazette.

The Three Rivers Edition, based in Searcy, covered Cleburne, Independence, Izard, Jackson, Lonoke, Sharp, Stone, White, Woodruff, and northern Pulaski counties.

Said editor Jennifer Ellis in a column announcing the discontinuation, “Our stories have featured the differencemakers, the people who step up when help is needed, the shining stars and the everyday folks in the communities we cover.”

LET US KNOW We want to know about your new hires, retires and promotions!

Send your staffing changes to info@arkansaspress.org to be updated online and included in the Arkansas Publisher Weekly.

LET’S GET SOCIAL The River Valley & Ozark Edition, with offices in Conway, covered Conway, Faulkner, Perry, Pope, Van Buren and Yell counties and the City of Maumelle.

A third zoned advertorial supplement, the Tri-Lakes Edition, covered Saline, Grant, Garland, Clark and Hot Spring counties, and was discontinued in 2018.

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AG Garland orders more open access to government documents In a memorandum for heads of executive departments and agencies on Tuesday, United States Attorney General Merrick Garland released guidelines on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), saying that FOIA requests should encounter fewer barriers. The guidelines include a presumption of openness, telling agencies if foreseeable harm is in doubt, “openness should prevail,” and strongly encouraging agencies to make discretionary disclosures of information.

In the guidelines, Attorney General Garland said that “agencies should post records online as soon as feasible”,

Arkansas Publisher Weekly

whether or not a formal FOIA request has been received.

“The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review has long required individuals to file FOIA requests to obtain official copies of their own records of immigration court proceedings. We are now changing that policy, and I encourage all agencies to examine whether they have similar or other categories of records that they could make more readily accessible without requiring individuals to file FOIA requests,” states the guidelines.

“It is equally important to ensure that the public can readily find information that the

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government makes available. Records should be posted online quickly and systematically. In addition, agency FOIA websites should be easily navigable, and records should be presented in the most useful, searchable, and open formats possible.”

The Attorney General also said the DOJ will not defend FOIA cases that are inconsistent with this presumption of openness.

Read the complete memorandum at https://www.justice.gov/ag/page/ file/1483516/download

March 17, 2022

Guest Column: At the root of democracy: Free flow of information

By Kelley Shannon As Ukrainians fight and die for democracy, Russia is arresting its own citizens who are protesting the war and threatening prison for journalists who report the truth.

“information dark age,” according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which called on journalists everywhere to stand in opposition.

In short, the Texas law is intended to give an advantage to the individual information requestor, not the government, unlike some states’ information laws.

The attempt to crush a democratic government and stop the flow of information comes as American news organizations and transparency advocates observe Sunshine Week from March 13-19, a time for highlighting government openness and a free press.

Thwarting free speech isn’t only happening in Russia. We simply need to think back to the Olympics a few weeks ago to remember the spotlight on China’s crackdown on dissent and free expression and its control of internet content. And, of course, there are other examples.

Certainly, let’s commemorate the freedom of information we enjoy – and constantly strive to improve – in the United States.

But it’s imperative to contrast it with what’s happening around the world and understand how devastating it is when a government allows only its own tightly controlled version of events to trickle out.

It’s astounding – and a lesson for us all.

Public officials are only the custodians of our public records. They do not get to tell us what information we have a right to view. Texans want to see basic police reports, documents relating to a local school district’s property purchase and a state university’s athletics consulting contract. That’s just a small sampling of how our state’s Public Information Act is used.

Earlier this month, Vladimir Putin’s government changed its domestic media laws to make it a crime to distribute what it deemed to be “false news” about the war. Doing so could mean up to 15 years behind bars. Many news organizations pulled journalists out of the country or shut their operations; the government also cut off access to major social media sites, the Neiman Journalism Lab reported in its thorough rundown on the severe restrictions.

The

censorship

amounts

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to

an

Blocking information is a favorite weapon of authoritarian regimes. Information is essential for democracy to flourish. The ability to examine public records and tune in to independent news sources enables us to speak out and hold our leaders accountable.

In our state, we are fortunate that the Texas Public Information Act, originally known as the Open Records Act, was established in the early 1970s to ensure citizens have the right to watch over government. It gives us the ability to obtain public documents and largely forces state and local officials who want to withhold information to argue to the attorney general’s office – an umpire, of sorts – as to why information should be kept secret. The law presumes all records are open unless a specific exemption in law states otherwise.

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The law is not perfect. There has been incremental weakening of it over the years, but open government supporters work every legislative session with lawmakers of both political parties to strengthen the act. We should fight with all our might to protect it.

In the end, in a democracy, the people get to judge their leaders and decide whether they will remain in office or get voted out. The free flow of information is the people’s path to questioning authority.

That, ultimately, is real power.

Kelley Shannon is executive director of the nonprofit, nonpartisan Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, based in Austin. For more information go to www. foift.org.

March 17, 2022