Excellence

Continued from page 4 quorum courts. It takes a lot of hustle to keep an eye on them all.

While the area grows each day in population — latest estimates are 36 people a day into the region — the staff of the NWADG does not. We’ve learned to be efficient. We also depend on our sister paper the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for much of what we offer our readers.

Many papers award cash to contest winners and other gifts or bonuses. We don’t. It takes the newsroom working together to produce a product of which we can be proud. A good photograph cropped and handled poorly becomes a bad photo. A good story had editors, designers and others working to make it the best it could be. Video, audio and podcasts have to be recorded, edited and posted - usually by someone other than the person who gathers or arranges them.

We’re lucky to have a newsroom of journalists who have decades of experience, most of it in this region. As managing editor, I couldn’t ask for a better group of professionals to do this important work.

Smaller Dailies

Steve Watts, Editor

The Daily Citizen, Searcy

holding a second full-time job in radio. Filling out our small staff is Sports Editor Jason King, who also focuses on covering White County, using as little national sports coverage as possible despite only being part time.

Good journalism starts with good people who make connections in the community, earning the trust of those they cover by being fair and accurate, and I feel that we have that.

I believe that the value of a newspaper like ours is community coverage. We’re not going to outdo others on state news or national news, and readers can get that without us so they don’t need our paper to be filled with it. Most of what they get from us, they can’t get anywhere else. And if they do get it somewhere else, it’s generally going to be because we broke it.

I would say that our commitment to this community is reflected in receiving first place in General Excellence, but I believe there are many newspapers in the state that have the same commitment, so I don’t think we’re anything special in that regard. So many of us just want to be good community journalists. We want to tell the stories that are important to our readers and inform them about those things they won’t learn about elsewhere (or at least not in informed detail).

Larger Weeklies

Jonathan Feldman, Editor and Publisher

The Leader, Jacksonville

The Arkansas Leader staff is grateful to the Arkansas Press Association for honoring us as one of the state’s best newspapers. We know the APA staff works hard to organize a statewide contest like that every year. We appreciate all you do to support us yearround.

Community newspapers should never be written off. They matter now, and they must remain valuable community assets in the future – Facebook or A.I. can’t document, pay tribute to people we’ve lost, celebrate milestones, analyze and offer solutions to problems in the community. We’re irreplaceable.

With newsrooms getting smaller and smaller, it’s hard to know how you are going to stack up against other newspapers that are larger than yours. Of course, everyone in this industry is dealing with the same problem — how to cover their communities thoroughly with fewer reporters.

Thankfully, I’ve been blessed with a hardworking staff. Community Editor Wendy Jones helps make sure that we are keeping our papers as local as we possibly can and wears so many hats that I can’t even list them all, which allows me to focus my energy on news stories. And staff writer Greg Geary works tirelessly to cover anything and everything he can despite

It feels good when you believe that you’ve accomplished that, when you believe that you are putting out a product that covers your community as well as you think you can reasonably cover it. When we reduced to publishing only two print editions a week (but online each weekday), there was some concern about our coverage being reduced, but we fought to keep those two editions larger and not lose any of the local coverage that we had been providing.

We’ve received several compliments about how loaded our papers are from those who had those concerns. Obviously, you always feel like there are things you could do better, but I am proud of the community coverage that we produce, of the award-winning efforts of this staff, and plan for us to keep it up as long as I’m here.

But we need community support and earning it means attending every meeting, civic group lunch, ribbon cutting, groundbreaking and politician visit within a 100-mile radius. That’s what my parents taught me and that takes a bigger newsroom team than the one we have now. Next year, I plan to hire a couple of more reporters who can get out in the field and get some scoops because that’s how community newspapers earn community support and ultimately new subscribers in print and online and deliver.

Since my father, who founded the paper with my mom, died in 2021, I’ve had to take on new responsibilities. It’s a lot of hard work: juggling payroll, ordering newsprint and press plates, fixing computer problems, servicing AC units, finding ways to cut costs, all while planning the news and laying out the paper.

We also welcome any newspapers across the state and beyond to come to us for printing. Our printshop team’s customer service and high quality is second to none. We’ll do a good job for you so give us a call.

See Excellence page 8