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Arkansas Media Elite:
An Introduction
By Joy Ritchey
I've been struggling to get this first column completed for the new Localist—it's hard to know how much introduction is necessary or if I should just jump in. Decided to go for the introduction, so bear with me. I am a Little-Rock native, but was living away when the original Localist was being produced, so I'm not a part of the original team.
Lindsey and TJ were nice enough to ask me to pitch in a media column for the new on-line version and I'm thrilled to do so.
You can check out my blog, which is about Central Arkansas media—mostly print, but some online and some broadcast—as well as a bit on the national media, at www.arkansasmedia.blogspot.com. If you know of any interesting or fantastic or just plain terrible media sources that you would like to see covered in this column or on the blog, please get in touch.
I started the blog shortly after I moved back to Arkansas and became frustrated with the limited and often terrible news sources available here. Of course the main source is the daily Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and I plan to continue writing quite a bit about them. One problem, though, is their website. There is none worse. You must be a paid subscriber and jump through a hundred hoops to get to the articles online. If you are not a paid subscriber or are unable to find an article or columnist I write about in this space, get in touch and I will provide you with either a user name and password to get onto the site or, if the link has already been moved into the archives that you must pay to read, I will send you a Word document with a copy of the text. Just for the fun of it, I'd encourage you to check out the paper daily, though, as it is always worth a good laugh.
I plan to use this space to address the Localist itself, as well. There have been several free weekly papers in Little Rock—the earliest and most interesting that I remember being The Spectrum and the most recent and most establishment-oriented one being, of course, The Arkansas Times. While Localist is not a free weekly of the same sort, it is meant to address a lot of the information and resources that we are lacking by the absence of a true ALTERNATIVE free weekly in the area. Which is awesome for us. Participate daily and send money.
Our editor, Lindsey, has described the philosophy of Localist to me as being, in part, "for us, by us." I think that's great, but I hope to use this column to examine what's being written "for us, by idiots," which should be fun and enlightening and I hope will help keep us aware of all that is missing, all that we want, all that we deserve, and all that we can create for ourselves in a community publication. Not to mention the good chance of creating a little competition, which of course we will win, with some of the other publications in the area and happily expanding the US included in "for US, by US," as I suspect the Localist group, who seem to be a fairly tight, though certainly not elitist, group of friends, could be ever expanding and growing and progressing.
So, pardon the boring introduction, but not having been a part of the original group and being a new type of column for Localist, it was necessary. I'll get on with it next time. More media. More swearing.
A few options for next week:
A. I introduce you to the most stupid man at the Democrat-Gazette and you laugh your ass off at what a bitch he is.
B. I share with you the insane responses to my Arkansas Times article on Green Day (yes, I do sometimes write for the AT, as do others at Localist, but, I swear, they don't pay enough to buy our loyalty).
C. Lindsey and I kick it and break down for you all the local Arts & Entertainment blogs, showing you how seriously they all blow and manage to miss out on everything interesting going on in town.
D. You get a short and funny lesson on the oft-referred to and rarely explained Arkansas Newspaper War—just cause you're gonna need a primer to understand exactly what's up with the Times and D-G as well as an awesome list of the cast of characters and their psychological profiles.
Joy Richey is a writer living in Little Rock. You can find her blogging at www.arkansasmedia.blogspot.com. Holler at her at girlarkansas@gmail.com.
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