Arkansas Publisher Weekly: December 12, 2019

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Contest entries due by January 28

Guest Column: Facts and assumptions By Steve Brawner

ARKANSAS

Ar k ansas

Publisher Weekly

PRESS ASSOCIATION

Vol. 14 | No. 50 | Thursday, December 12, 2019

Serving Press and State Since 1873

Graves eases into retirement after six-plus decades Louie Graves isn’t walking away entirely from the newspaper business after nearly a lifetime in the industry. He’s still willing to pitch in if the Nashville News-Leader needs some help. He’s hoping to continue writing his weekly column. Oh, and he’ll keep the pearls, dress and lipstick, thanks.

Graves, 76, is a legendary newsman who got his start delivering newspapers at nine and has worked in the family business in some form or another ever since, save for the time he spent at the University of Arkansas and in the Navy in the 1960s. The former Arkansas Press Association president announced his retirement from full-time work not long after he wrapped up one of his newspaper’s holiday traditions: dressing as Mrs. Claus for Christmasthemed ads. “I have a suspicion they’ll ask me to be Mrs. Claus until I’m dead,” Graves said in a telephone interview right after a postlunch nap early this week. “I just had this idea of doing some Christmas ads, but having Mrs. Claus visit the stores and have her picture taken with the people at the stores. I’ve always had a strange sense of humor, so we just started doing it.”

Louie Graves at his desk at the Nashville News-Leader.

The idea of Graves dressing in drag to visit local merchants started in 2003, the same year he, his wife, Jane, and John Robert Schirmer founded the Nashville Leader. The Mrs. Claus tactic was an effort to keep pace in a competitive environment – for 13 years Nashville was the rare small community served by two weekly newspapers.

The Leader was established after a dispute between Graves and his siblings, owners of what was then the Nashville News. The Nashville News, purchased by Graves’s parents in 1950, remained in operation and was published by Graves’s brother, Michael, before Schirmer acquired the News in 2016. Schirmer merged the newspapers into the Nashville Continued on Page 2

Reminder: Complete judging for North Carolina contest Arkansas Press Association members and others who agreed to help judge the North Carolina Press Association Better Newspaper contest should have already

submitted their judging decisions via the North Carolina association’s online portal. Dec. 12 is that state’s deadline for judges to complete their work. Nearly three dozen Arkansans volunteered to help judge the contest. Any judge with questions or who needs additional information should contact Terri Cobb

at the APA at terri@arkansaspress.org or Katie Martineau at the North Carolina association, katie@ncpress.com. APA is judging the contest as part of a reciprocal agreement with its North Carolina counterpart. Members of the North Carolina association were judges in Arkansas’s contest earlier this year.


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