Overview

The Arkansas Gazette began with a printing press being floated up the Arkansas River in 1819. Until its demise following a long, bitter, and very public newspaper war in 1991, it was inextricably linked with the state's history, reporting on every major Arkansas event. Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette, knowledgeably and intimately edited by longtime Gazette reporter Roy Reed, comprises interviews from over one hundred former Gazette staffers recalling the stories they reported on and the people they worked with from the late forties to the paper's end. The result is a nostalgic and justifiably admiring look back at a progressive newspaper that, after winning two Pulitzers for its brave rule-of-law stance during the Little Rock Central High Crisis, was considered one of the country's greatest. The interviews, collected from archives at the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas, provide fascinating details on renowned editors and reporters such as Harry Ashmore, Orville Henry, and Charles Portis, journalists who wrote daily on Arkansas's always-colorful politicians, its tragic disasters and sensational crimes, its civil rights crises, Bill Clinton, the Razorbacks sports teams, and much more. Full of humor and little-known details, Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette is a fascinating remembrance of a great newspaper.

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9781682263006

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Reviews

""In 1991, Arkansas lost a piece of its heart. The Arkansas Gazette, the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi, was sold to its crosstown rival, the Arkansas Democrat, after losing a brutal newspaper war. The Gazette's rough birth, agonizing death, and just about everything in between are movingly detailed in Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette: An Oral History, edited by Roy Reed. … At 172 years of age, the Gazette had predated statehood. But it could not survive in an age of corporate owners who understood neither the newspaper or its state."" —John Schwartz, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Winter 2009 ""In this exploration of the late Arkansas Gazette, the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi when it eased publication in 1991, Roy Reed has brought together a collection of small stories that tell a larger story. it is these anecdotes—entertaining, thought-provoking, sometimes sad—and the deeper truths about newspapers as community and journalism as community-builder that make this book noteworthy."" —Cathy Ferrand Bullock, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 2010 ""No southern newspaper had a more talented staff, a more courageous executive editor, and an owner more willing to risk his livelihood than the Arkansas Gazette. Roy Reed lets those who made it so tell the story. The results are always interesting, often hilarious, and sad at the end."" —Claude Sitton, retired southern correspondent and national editor of the New York Times and former editor of the Raleigh News and Observer and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary ""Fascinating reading with superb editing and commentary by Roy Reed, a terrific writer. Laced with telling and often humorous anecdotes about a period when folks still talked seriously about newspapers having souls."" —Jack Nelson, retired Washington bureau chief, Los Angeles Times ""This book ranks with Stud Terkel's Hard Times and The Good War as riveting oral history edited into a book. Roy Reed brilliantly crafts the story of the rise and fall of one of America's greatest newspapers."" —Gene Roberts, Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

Author Information

Roy Reed (1930–2017) was a renowned journalist for the Arkansas Gazette and The New York Times, where he provided important coverage of the civil rights movement. A professor of journalism at the University of Arkansas, he was the author of Beware of Limbo Dancers: A Correspondent's Adventures with The New York Times, Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal, and Looking for Hogeye.

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