UA Press Publishes Memoir on Death of the Arkansas Gazette

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Press has published If It Ain’t Broke, Break It: How Corporate Journalism Killed the Arkansas Gazette ($24.95 paper and e-book), by Donna Lampkin Stephens.

Stephens will be discussing and signing her new book at WordsWorth Books & Co., 5920 R St., in Little Rock from 3-4:30 p.m. Saturday, April 11.

She will also be at UCA’s Mirror Room in McAlister Hall from 1:40-2:30 p.m. Thursday, April 16. Both events are free and open to the public.

If It Ain’t Broke, Break It offers a firsthand account of how and why the Arkansas Gazette, then the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi River, died on Oct. 18, 1991, after perhaps the country’s last great newspaper war. The Gazette won two Pulitzer Prizes in 1958 for its coverage of the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957 while under the ownership of the Heiskell/Patterson family.

The paper was sold to the Gannett Corporation in 1986 after the family was unable to sustain the ongoing war against the Arkansas Democrat. But, as Stephens recounts, the newspaper survived just five years under the yoke of corporate journalism. Gannett sold the Gazette to Walter Hussman, owner of the Democrat, who then changed that newspaper’s name to today’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

“Donna Stephens’s account of the Arkansas Gazette’s last days offers no sympathy for the Gannett Corporation’s managers who drove the old paper down in its one-hundred seventy-second year,” said Roy Reed, University of Arkansas journalism professor emeritus, and author of an oral history on the demise of the Gazette. “She is unsparing in her blow-by-blow reporting on the outlanders’ actions that changed the paper from an organ of information to a target of disdain among discerning readers and serious journalists.”

Stephens worked as a sports writer for seven years at the Gazette, leaving when the paper was sold. She is a professor of journalism at the University of Central Arkansas and the producer of the films “The Old Gray Lady: Arkansas’s First Newspaper” and “The Crisis Mr. Faubus Made: The Role of the Arkansas Gazette in the Central High Crisis.”

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About program Boilerplate: The University of Arkansas Press, founded in 1980, is an academic publishing house that is part of the University of Arkansas. A member of the Association of American University Presses, it has as its central and continuing mission the publication of books that serve both the broader academic community and Arkansas and the region.

About the University of Arkansas: The University of Arkansas provides an internationally competitive education for undergraduate and graduate students in more than 200 academic programs. The university contributes new knowledge, economic development, basic and applied research, and creative activity while also providing service to academic and professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the University of Arkansas among only 2 percent of universities in America that have the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the University of Arkansas among its top American public research universities. Founded in 1871, the University of Arkansas comprises 10 colleges and schools and maintains a low student-to-faculty ratio that promotes personal attention and close mentoring.