NAN Better

One more “A” and NAN would be tasty flatbread. As it is, it’s Northwest Arkansas Newspapers LLC, and the acronym was created, logo’d up, and announced by the new company. One suspects that was to delay unhappy people creating a snide abbreviation or nickname, as happened when the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette was formed in 1991 (my name for it never caught on, Demzette).

NAN comprises the Northwest Arkansas edition of the Demzette along with the daily newspapers of Fayetteville, Bentonville, Springdale and Rogers. Dozens of colleagues — and I’ve been around enough years to know and appreciate many of them — have been laid off. It hurt to see them go. NAN still employs me, but that could change in the new year, or this afternoon. Blame the nation’s Good Depression that started a year or two ago.

When Ozarkers have had a chance to speak to me in the last month, they uniformly hate the merger, specifically the look of the four city papers. They’re not vague, not ambiguous.

Until I tell them what could’ve happened: The papers could have been shut down entirely. I alway hope that is a reminder, not news, but to a one, friends, acquaintances and people I do business with (doctor, barber etc.) do not connect the national newspaper crisis — with big city newspapers in bankruptcy, ending print editions or out-and-out closing — with home. Some don’t know about San Francisco, Denver, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul and so on. Today: The New York Times Co. “expects its print advertising revenue to decline 25 percent in the fourth quarter.”

A quarter in a quarter is a bunch.

This Brick isn’t to save me breath. The people who’ve talked to me don’t read it. This is to flesh out my observations of the past five weeks.

The papers look good in one specific way, as does the redesigned Web site, nwaonline.com, in content. All have more articles than ever before. More news, more features. Sure, you can see lots of gaps and bugs, in ink or pixels. That’ll take months to smooth out. The typography is mismatched; more on that in a moment. Yes, the number of opinions on the editorial pages has shrunk.

Although I am a column maven, I’m not too bothered yet by the cutting of many columns by newsroom staff and by community members. To people who’ve asked me about that specifically, suspecting conspiracy, I say again, the alternative is no newspaper, so even the few writers published by NAN would not see print.

There’s some essays by regular contributors I will miss. Others have been writing too long and frankly need a break. If I am wrong and they should still be hollering about what’s wrong, there’s always the Internet, with blogging and the online version of letters to the editor, “comments.”

What I’m suggesting to the region is to give this operation at least six months before judging. The four city newspapers will get a shared typographical design before too long. Let’s hope the retention of separate identities in form and content remains the top priority. Seeing the differences between Fayetteville’s Northwest Arkansas Times (progressive, often culturally astute) and Bentonville’s Benton County Daily Record (Mayberry-like, with sophisticated touches) always has been a pleasure for me, heightened by the fact they have been owned by a single media company (Community Publishers then Wehco) for a good decade.

If there’s a lesson here, besides the Good Depression hits in different ways and some are as near as your driveway, it’s this: Opinions are like orifices, everyone’s got a half-dozen, on a good day.