By Joel Phelps | The Arkadelphian
In our newspaper days we remember being in competition with Josh Berry, a Henderson State University alumnus who went on to become a news reporter at KARK Channel 4. Berry was a beast at beating us to good stories, and my how aggravating it was to see local news broadcast on late-night news before the Siftings could hit the newsstands. Oftentimes, though, we’d see Berry report on something — typically a human interest piece — that we got to first. News moves in more than one direction. Local outlets like The Arkadelphian take topics of state or national interest and apply them to how they affect us on a local level. Likewise, state outlets often rely on information from local media (and sometimes we even break news that goes national, like the 2011 Albert Pike flood that landed us a first place award from the Associated Press). For the past couple of months we’ve been reporting on a Glenwood business owner who stands accused of serial rape. From the time we first broke this story in June until this week — when we learned his victims number in the dozens and his acts date back to the ’90s — we had been waiting patiently on a Little Rock station to pick up this story. We were finally relieved this week when we saw KARK’s broadcast and subsequent interview with local law enforcement. We’re glad Little Rock is paying attention to us!
We spent Wednesday as a guest in the downtown office of magnoliareporter.com visiting with its publisher, Mike McNeill. For 12 years McNeill has been doing what we set out to do when we launched in summer 2021, so he’s obviously doing something correct. During his first month in operation he was surprised that his website was the recipient of 10,500 page views — nowadays he gets that many views on a slow news day. His website gets some 4 million views in a year now. While we’re not getting anywhere near that number of views at The Arkadelphian, we surpassed our 2022 goal a couple of months ago, and McNeill assures us we will continue growing. Considering our own excitement of getting a laughable 1,000 views last summer on a story about a school board meeting, we’re confident that we’re well on our way to reaching an audience the same size as magnoliareporter.com. Read what McNeill had to say about our visit in his own version of Bits & Pieces.
Our visit with McNeill wasn’t just an excuse to get out of town. Our reason was to pick his brain a little about his successes in hopes that we can bring his expertise home for the benefit of our readers and advertisers. We both took time from our busy work schedules to make this visit possible, and we had lots of catching up to do upon our return to Arkadelphia (we’re betting the visit put his schedule behind, as well). But it will be worth it, at least for us, as our readers should begin seeing more news and information, as well as some more regional news, on our free website. We’re always open to suggestions. Be sure and drop us a line.
Congratulations to the Reddies and the Tigers for their successful season openers. You can find coverage of those stories, as well as from Badgers games, here on The Arkadelphian.
JUST IN: We just checked our spam folder in search of something that shouldn’t be there, and learned we will be the recipients of an $8.5 million donation from some foundation. All that stuff we said a few paragraphs ago about being successful? Looks like we’re headed for early retirement!
Joel Phelps is publisher and editor of The Arkadelphian. It’s finally Friday/I’m free again/I got my motor runnin’ for a wild weekend! Email Phelps at editor@arkadelphian.com or call him at 501-304-2134.