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Looking
Back at the Arkansas Gazette
An Oral History
Edited by Roy Reed
One of the great stories of
twentieth-century journalism
“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
“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
“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
With a legendary beginning as a printing press floated up
the Arkansas River in 1819, the Arkansas Gazette
is inextricably linked with the state’s history, reporting
on every major Arkansas event until the paper’s demise
in 1991 after a long, bitter, and very public newspaper war.
Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette, knowledgeably
and intimately edited by longtime Gazette reporter
Roy Reed, comprises interviews from over a 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 publication known for its progressive
stance in a conservative Southern state, a 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.
Roy Reed is
the author of Faubus
and Looking
for Hogeye. He was an Arkansas Gazette reporter
for eight years before becoming a national and foreign correspondent
for the New York Times and then a longtime professor of journalism
at the University of Arkansas.
April
6 x 9, 378 pages, 8 photographs, index
$34.95 cloth
ISBN 978-1-55728-899-8 | 1-55728-899-2
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