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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.
Graves eases into retirement after six-plus decades Continued from Page 1
News-Leader at that time, and Louie Graves returned to the newspaper office he literally grew up in.
He attributes some of his newspaper’s successes to consistency, much like his Mrs. Claus appearances.
Over the years, Louie Graves has said little about the dispute that led to the division among siblings. He hasn’t changed his mind about discussing it, even in his impending retirement.
“I know our industry is changing, but when I go to events here in town, whether the Boy Scouts are doing something, or a women’s organization or junior auxiliary, I tell them thanks for doing it every year,” he said. “Continuity is what’s important, and with newspapers it’s important to just keep doing it. Everybody’s readership has fallen off in the last decade or so, but if you keep having an interesting newspaper with things they can’t get elsewhere, they’ll keep coming back.”
“My brothers and sisters and I had a difference of opinion in 2003,” he said. “The happy ending to this thing is that my brothers and sisters and I have become reunited again and everything’s OK.” He said the competition against his own family was a subject of interest to multiple media outlets, and even the BBC wanted to air a piece on the two newspapers.
Graves, APA president in 1986, was preceded as president of the association
by his father in 1960. Jane Graves was APA president in 2002. She passed away five years later, and Louie Graves continues to end every column he writes with a tribute to his wife. Graves is a recipient of the APA’s Golden 50 Service Award for 50-plus years of service to the newspaper industry. He also received one second-place prize he distinctly remembers, for column writing. “One year at the APA awards luncheon, my brother’s column won first place and mine won second. Schirmer was saying, ‘Oh my goodness! We’re going to have to put Louie under suicide watch!” he laughed.
“I didn’t talk about it much,” he said. Schirmer, a local high school English teacher and a member of the APA board, was the right person to bring the two newspapers together, Louie Graves said. His hope in retirement is to continue writing his column, “Mine Creek Revelations,” on a consistent basis. He’s even reached out to the Nashville school superintendent to talk about being brought on as a substitute teacher. “I’ll probably fill in some with Schirmer and them at the Leader,” he said. “I can’t just sit back and get fatter. I’ll be looking around for part-time stuff to give me a little bit of income, and I’ll go until I stop and can’t do it.”
Louie Graves dressed as Mrs. Claus to help a local store manager sell recliners.
Happy Holidays APA will be closed on Wednesday , December 25 for the Christmas holiday. Arkansas Publisher Weekly
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December 12, 2019
APW contest entries due January 28
National Newspaper Association expresses support for new USPS proposal Proposed legislation in Congress to reform how the U.S. Postal Service funds obligations to retirees won the support of the National Newspaper Association (NNA). The NNA and other industry groups argue that current law requiring USPS to pre-fund retiree health benefits will lead to untenable postal rates for newspapers.
Entries for the annual Arkansas Press Women Communications Contest are due by Jan. 28. Arkansas communicators may enter a diverse sampling of work in the contest, with eligible entries being work completed at any time during the 2019 calendar year. First-place winners from Arkansas are eligible to compete in the national contest, with those honorees being recognized during the 2020 National Federation of Press Women conference held in Little Rock in June. This marks the first time in three decades that Arkansas has hosted the national conference. For rules, categories and to submit entries, visit https://nfpwcontest.secure-platform. com/a/organizations/AR/home. Arkansas Press Women members pay $20 for their first entry and $15 for each additional entry. The cost for nonmembers is $30 for the first entry and $20 for each additional entry. For additional information, or if you have questions, contact Helen Plotkin, communications contest chairwoman, at haplotkin@outlook.com.
INDUSTRY QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you’re at it.” -Horace Greeley Arkansas Publisher Weekly
The bill, HR 2382, is expected to quickly pass the House, according to NNA. A companion bill was also filed in the Senate. Congress in 2006 implemented the requirement for the Postal Service to prefund retiree health benefits. That has led to what the NNA termed as “staggering debt by USPS of any measure we have seen in the more than 100 years that NNA has worked on postal policy.” USPS cannot afford the obligation, so the organization’s
debt continues to grow. “I know many in Congress are rightfully concerned about fiscal accountability and about the wide gaps in private sector retirement funding coverage,” said NNA President Matt Adelman. “Some have told our members that they worry the government is going to have to pick up the tab. But this bill won’t create that problem. Rather, it will help to avoid it by helping USPS to keep rates stable and protecting the mail business that it presently has. If we let this problem drift on, it will lead to much higher rates, drive away more mail and put the USPS into an even deeper hole.” The bill has 292 co-sponsors in the 435-member House.
Press groups ask U.S. Supreme Court to allow records access Journalism organizations and First Amendment supporters this week petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a freedom-of-information case related to access to college campus sexual assault records. The brief maintains that “federal student privacy law has been abused and distorted to deny access to records essential for public safety,” according to a news release from the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida. Noted author John Krakauer has asked the high court to hear an appeal of a Montana Supreme Court ruling that the Center said would provide him information about how state officials dealt with a sexual assault allegation against a college athlete. The brief filed Monday in support of Krakauer’s petition said educational institutions misuse student privacy laws, 3
like the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), to withhold what are otherwise public records. FERPA requires organizations to keep education records confidential, though Krakauer and others argue that in some instances FERPA is used as a shield to block disclosure of public records. According to the brief by the journalism organizations, “hidebound institutions take advantage of the muddle of contradictory judicial interpretations of FERPA to opportunistically conceal unflattering records.” The Brechner Center news release said the brief cites cases where schools used FERPA to cover up misconduct, including an instance in Columbus, Georgia, where a news organization had to sue to obtain surveillance video of an employee critically injuring a 13-year-old student. December 12, 2019
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Guest Column: Facts and assumptions By Steve Brawner It’s always dangerous to quote one of our four most recent presidents including the current one, because so many readers despise one or two of them – often exactly two, depending on the reader’s political persuasion. Most people seem OK with former President Jimmy Carter, age 95. But sometimes one of those presidents says something so insightful that it’s worth the risk. Former President Bill Clinton spoke at the 200th anniversary celebration of the Arkansas Gazette’s founding Nov. 21, and this is what he had to say about Russia’s interference in American elections, as quoted by the Arkansas DemocratGazette. “Their real goal is to break the conviction that we can know and we can act on what we know, and we can predict the consequences of acting on what we know,” the 42nd president said. Clinton painted a dark picture of where this is leading, saying, “Technology and the movement toward authoritarianism all over the world are driving us to the point where ordinary people may find it hard to tell fact from fiction or truth from a bald-faced lie. If that happens, it will be impossible to sustain meaningful democratic government.” The remedy? “We need to know things, and we need to be able to have discussions, even arguments, with our neighbors based on the same set of facts,” he said. It was not so long ago that Americans
Arkansas Publisher Weekly
were working off the same set of facts reported by a relatively small number of media outlets – one of the three national TV networks led by CBS’ Walter Cronkite, radio stations, and newspapers. Importantly, those facts were based on a set of assumptions shared by a majority of Americans. It was assumed that the United States was the good guy and that the Russians were the villain. The American Dream was assumed to be attainable. Consumption was assumed to be completely desirable. Americans more or less shared a common religion, an Americanized version of Christianity. This was not a perfect arrangement, and I’m not trying to glorify it. Walter Cronkite made mistakes like the rest of us, and those assumptions allowed many injustices and wrongs to be swept under the rug. But the arrangement did make democracy easier in this diverse land. Assumptions these days are no longer so widely shared. And people being people, we choose to consume information that confirms our assumptions. Americans who watch Fox News and listen to Rush Limbaugh are presented an entirely different worldview than those reading liberal blogs. And if they rely on Facebook for their news? Goodness. Return to what Clinton said earlier: If ordinary citizens can’t tell truth from lies, “it will be impossible to sustain meaningful government.” Republicans and Democrats in Washington seem unable to agree on
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anything and don’t seem to want to try. And why should they? They and their constituents are working off different facts and assumptions. The result is that our country’s democratic processes are breaking down at the national level. The federal government is running a $1 trillion budget deficit this year not because the economy is failing, but because the political system is. Votes to impeach and then remove a president from office – arguably the most serious actions Congress can take other than declaring war – are falling entirely along partisan lines. If members of the House of Representatives were a jury pool, the lawyers would object to all of them. Clinton said he read six newspapers a day when working as a senatorial staffer in the 1960s. Three leaned left and three leaned right, but the reporters offered the same set of facts. “I think that’s what we need to look for again, and then we need to be able to trust people with that mission,” he said. Yes, you have to look for objective factbased journalism a little, but it’s not hard to find. It still occurs, particularly in newspapers. That would be a first step. If we can start with facts, then maybe we’ll have better and more universally shared assumptions. Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist in Arkansas. Read more of his work at independentarkansas.com.
December 12, 2019