Reporting for Arkansas

About

Jack Hill was a pioneering Arkansas documentary filmmaker dedicated to sharing his state’s history with a wider public. Following a decade as an award-winning investigative journalist and news anchor at KAIT in Jonesboro, Hill was pushed out by new management for his controversial reporting on corruption in a local sheriff’s office. What seemed like a major career setback turned out to be an opportunity: he founded the production company TeleVision for Arkansas, through which he produced dozens of original films. Although Hill brought an abiding interest in education and public health to this work from the beginning, he found his true calling in topics based in Arkansas history. Convinced that a greater acquaintance with the state’s most significant historical events would nurture a greater sense of homegrown pride, Hill tirelessly crisscrossed the state to capture the voices of hundreds of Arkansans recalling significant chapters in the state’s history, such as the oil boom in El Dorado and Smackover, the crucial contributions of the Arkansas Ordnance Plant in Jacksonville during World War II, and the role of Rosenwald Schools in expanding educational opportunities.

In Reporting for Arkansas, Dale Carpenter and Robert Cochran present a biography of Hill alongside an annotated selected filmography designed to accompany sixteen of his best films on subjects related to Arkansas history—all newly hosted online by the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies at the University of Arkansas.

Authors

Dale Carpenter has taught broadcast journalism and documentary filmmaking at the University of Arkansas for a quarter century. His documentary films have been broadcast nationally on PBS and have garnered seven regional Emmy Awards.

Robert Cochran is professor of English and director of the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of several books on Arkansas culture, including Lights! Camera! Arkansas!: From Broncho Billy to Billy Bob Thornton, co-authored with Suzanne McCray.

Review

“Dale Carpenter and Robert Cochran’s Reporting for Arkansas: The Documentary Films of Jack Hill is a highly readable, highly usable volume, both a biography of Jack E. Hill, the pioneer of Arkansas documentary film journalism, and a guide to sixteen of his best films.”
—Donna Lampkin Stephens, Journal of Southern History, February 2024

Praise

“Always a reporter, constantly driven to expose wrongdoing, and relentless in his pursuit of the truth as he saw it, Jack Hill was an Arkansas original. Dale Carpenter and Robert Cochran have written a book about Jack that is worth your time.”
—Larry Foley, documentary filmmaker and Mid-America Emmy winner

Series

A central focus on a single state, combined with openness to the widest imaginable range of topics—these are hallmarks of The Arkansas Character series from the University of Arkansas Press, jointly sponsored by the CENTER FOR ARKANSAS AND REGIONAL STUDIES and the DAVID AND BARBARA PRYOR CENTER FOR ARKANSAS ORAL AND VISUAL HISTORY in the University of Arkansas’s Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. We seek in-depth portrayals of insufficiently celebrated accomplishment (and insufficiently rebuked foul behavior) in all arenas of human endeavor. Equally welcome are accounts of big-screen events and famous players (office holders, rock stars, movers and shakers) and adventures of local legends, unheralded artisans, stars of unlit stages. “The classic is the local fully realized,” wrote William Carlos Williams, “words marked by a place.” But not only words. Every form of excellence (and outrageousness) rooted in this place.