By Roy Ockert Jr.
After several years of teaching college journalism and photography in the early 1990s, I wanted to return to newspapering. It wasn’t that I didn’t like teaching, I just liked being a newspaper editor more.
So I was looking for the right opportunity, which was complicated. When I signed a contract, as I did to teach, I considered that a bond. When the first opportunity came along, I hd to turn it down. Little did I know the person who had contacted me about moving to Paragould would be my future publisher.
In 1994 I took a chance and declined another contract to teach at then-Arkansas College (now Lyon). Around that time I ran into Bill Newsom, the longtime executive editor of what was then called the Courier-Democrat at Russellville. He told me that he was planning to retire in a couple of years, and the newspaper would be looking for a new editor.
Two years was a long way off, though, when you’re not getting a regular paycheck so I continued to put out my resume.
My family had been in Batesville for 20 years, and the first 13 I had been editor of The Batesville Guard, a family-owned newspaper. I turned down several opportunities to go to other newspapers, in large part because we were raising two daughters, and all of us loved Batesville.
But for economic reasons I left the Guard in 1988 to teach. The owners, though, allowed me to continuing writing my weekly column, “Behind the News,” which I had started in 1975. That kept my hands in professional journalism.
Skipping forward, I didn’t have to wait long for the opportunity at Russellville. In the spring of 1995 Joe Stocks, who had become publisher there, called me to ask if I’d be interested in talking to him about a new position that was going to be created — managing editor.
Joe had taken the newspaper through a redesign and changed the name to The Courier. He and the company owning the paper, Paxton Media Group of Paducah, Ky., wanted to convert The Courier from an afternoon daily to a morning publication. A Sunday morning edition had been started years earlier, and afternoon papers were becoming obsolete. A Saturday morning edition was needed, especially to cover Friday night sports.
The managing editor would be an integral part in transitioning the staff to a morning publication and then be the night operations editor. Such a transition is not as easy as it sounds. Some of the staff would have to give up working a schedule of 7-4 or 8-5 and trade it for a 4-12, including weekends. The production staff would have a similar transition, but many members of that crew were already working nights.
The other challenge Joe set out for me was to strengthen the news coverage. Only one reporter, Laura Shull, was covering a beat (police), and no one was covering City Hall regularly. Joe also wanted a stronger editorial page.
My column had always been focused on local and state issues that affected local people. Courier editorials and columns were mostly on national and international affairs, and there were few letters to the editor.
I eagerly accepted the challenges of the new job and came on board in mid-July 1995. In my first column on July 18 I previewed the coming transition, which would take place on Sept. 1.
Although I had not worked nights since my high school and college years at The Sentinel-Record in Hot Springs, it was not a dramatic change for me. I’m something of a night owl who hates to get up early. Our daughters had left the nest, and my wife would stay in Batesville to sell the house and close our photography business (which took much longer than we had hoped).
The Courier already had a strong staff, and some would be needed on a daytime shift. But we’d have to spread our the schedule out over a longer day. And we were determined to do a better job of covering high school sports so we began enlisting the aid of “stringers” — non-staff people who would be willing to cover a game a week and get paid for one or two stories.
I spent much of the remaining weeks before Sept. 1 engaging in planning while helping with daily operations and doing some writing.
In adding a Saturday edition, we would drop the Monday edition so The Courier would still be six days a week.
Friday, Sept. 1, would be a big day. We would put out the last afternoon edition and then go to work immediately on the first Saturday morning paper. That happened to be the first weekend of high school football so much of the staff would have to work a double shift. I wrote a column for the Friday paper, which Bill headlined: “Read us tonight — and in the morning!”
Each edition would be two sections with a total of 32 pages. Each one was heavy on local news and pictures. With the staff stretched thin, Bill covered a Little Rock hearing in a murder trial that Friday, and that turned out to be our lead story on page 1 Saturday.
After the press rolled for the second time that night — actually early Saturday — Joe broke out some bubbly, and we raised a toast in the pressroom.
Then we went home for a little rest before coming back to work on the Sunday edition.
Roy Ockert was managing editor of The Courier from 1995 to 1998, when he replaced the retiring Bill Newsom as editor. Ockert became editor of The Jonesboro Sun in 2001, after Paxton Media Group bought that paper. He retired there in 2012 and can be reached at royo@suddenlink.net.