Arkansas's magazine of politics and culture. Arkansas news, politics, and entertainment.
201 E Markham Street
Little Rock, AR
72201
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The Arkansas Times was first published in 1974 as the Union Station Times, a slim 8-by-10 1/2-inch newsprint bi-monthly whose founder, Alan Leveritt, wanted to see more investigative reporting in print. (Little Rock had two daily newspapers at the time, but both were newspapers of record, focusing on beat reporting.) Since then, it has gone from newsprint bimonthly to slick magazine to weekly tabloid and back to a magazine, with an online presence starting in the mid-1990s.
Bill Terry, who came on in 1975, described the paper’s origins in a 2014 issue celebrating the Times’ 40th anniversary:
“I will never forget that first day at the office. Back then, Alan had one pair of pants, two shirts and a pair of shoes with one sole that flapped. He drove a 1961 black and white Ford that was scarred like a cueball and had tires slick as cannonballs, and he lived in the Terminal Hotel in a $10-a-week room with a warehouse view and neighbors down the hall who went to bed and got up in the morning thinking of muscatel. Alan had come into the office a few minutes before, and it was raining. The door wouldn’t shut tight, the rain was blowing in and there were two or three leaks in the roof that splattered on the floor making a sound like a very slow and half-crazy clock. A cat came in, looked around and went back out into the rain. The place was drafty: on the order of driving a car with the windows down, and it had a chain-pull toilet that flushed with a kind of wail and groan that reminded you of a boatload of people sinking. The furniture was what you would call gothic salvage, and included ripped chairs, leaning desks, a table made of unfinished plywood set on concrete blocks and a couple of typewriters with unreadable keys.”
The newspaper became the Arkansas Times in 1975 and was able to pay its staff soon enough. Its switch to a weekly publication was an answer to the demise of Little Rock’s progressive newspaper, the Arkansas Gazette, once a family paper and then a Gannett publication purchased after a long newspaper war by its right-wing competitor, the Arkansas Democrat. The Times hired several people from the Gazette and filled the liberal editorial vacancy left by the Gazette’s death. Its advocating reporting and the Arkansas Blog, Arkansas’s first online political blog, has been the scourge of reactionary right-wingers and quick to take on misdeeds coming from the left, as well.
