Matthew Moore: The nonprofit newsroom Deep South Today recently announced they're launching Arkansas Today as an extension of their offerings in Mississippi and Louisiana. Warwick Sabin is the president and CEO of Deep South Today, and bringing the kind of reporting they do to Arkansas is a point of pride for him. He's a University of Arkansas alum who was heavily influenced by journalism during his time there.
Warwick Sabin: The first thing I did when I arrived in Fayetteville as a freshman — actually, before the school year even started — was I showed up at the offices of the Arkansas Traveler, signed up to be a staff writer. I was assigned to a story, I think, before classes even started. I got to interview Jim Guy Tucker when he was arriving at Drake Field.
I actually assumed I would be a journalist. I worked at the Traveler and with a lot of journalists in Northwest Arkansas when I was in college. I sort of drifted into politics a little bit, though. Ended up as student body president at the UofA.
Later on, when I was in Little Rock, I was associate editor at the Arkansas Times, went on to become the publisher of the Oxford American magazine. My life is sort of interwoven with journalism and public affairs in the state of Arkansas. And it definitely influenced my knowledge, my experience, my understanding of the state, the issues that we face.
And more and more, those issues impact people regionally and nationally, especially looking at the state of Arkansas right now. I think almost every member of the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate representing Arkansas is chairing a committee up in Washington. So we're talking about some significant influence. The issues that are happening in Washington affect us in Arkansas, but also Arkansas is impacting the nation.
Moore: When you started Deep South Today, what was it about that kind of reporting that you went on to do and became award-winning? What was it about that that seemed like a template you could bring to other places?
Sabin: We didn't know when we started Deep South exactly what it would evolve into, but we certainly understood the need in our region. We've seen an erosion of local news reporting happening all across the South, and it's having really bad impacts everywhere.
It's easy to have a lot of sources for national and international news — we're inundated with everything on the internet. But it's very rare for there to be people in your community covering the PTA, the city council, the local elections, also holding people in power accountable through investigative reporting. Those things don't happen if you don't put people on the ground and have a newsroom do the work.
And it's hard to do in our region because we don't have a lot of resources. We're rural, we don't have a lot of population density, and doing reporting is expensive. The model that I've created centralizes all of the business operations to support multiple local newsrooms at scale. What we're finding is that that works in a place like the South — we can sustain and grow more of this kind of local journalism, do it in more places, do it more efficiently at a lower cost.
We want to bring it to Arkansas. We see the need in the state, and I'm familiar with it personally. But we've also spent a lot of time doing the research and the quantitative analysis to understand what are those news gaps, what are the needs that aren't being fulfilled, how can we uniquely come in and fill those gaps, complement the existing media ecosystem, and work collaboratively with all of the other news outlets in the state.
We feel like we've done enough research, we've spent enough time listening, and we've got a plan. We're ready to meet that need in a way that I think is difficult for other organizations that don't have the scale and the resources that we have.
Moore: When you think about the work that's happened in Mississippi and in Louisiana, why did Arkansas feel like the next best place to bring this?
Sabin: I would compare Arkansas right now to where Mississippi was 10 years ago, when Mississippi Today got started. Mississippi Today is now our biggest newsroom. It was the first nonprofit newsroom in Mississippi, and now it's the largest newsroom in Mississippi. It really is meeting a tremendous need in Mississippi as the Clarion-Ledger, which used to be the largest newsroom in the state, is owned by Gannett and has now dwindled. The Associated Press obviously used to have a presence in Mississippi, and it no longer does.
Mississippi Today is providing this essential statewide news. Importantly, all of the news that we provide is free for people to consume — there's no paywall. People can get it online through our email newsletters, across all of our social media channels. We also provide all of that content free of charge to all of the other media outlets in the state.
You've got a lot of local newspapers all over Mississippi that run our coverage, because otherwise they wouldn't be getting coverage from the statehouse or other essential statewide reporting. That helps keep them in business because they can spend their resources doing the local reporting in their towns.
Arkansas is very much where Mississippi was 10 years ago — you have a dominant statewide newspaper, but it's not quite what it used to be. The Associated Press in Arkansas is not quite what it used to be. We've had a lot of local newspapers go out of business in Arkansas or decline.
We've got great reporting going on at KUAF and KUHF and WKSU, and certainly at the Democrat-Gazette, the Arkansas Times and the Arkansas Advocate. Just a lot of really good reporting happening. But there's more going on than any one of those outlets can cover by themselves. We see the same opportunity to create a statewide newsroom that fills the gaps, provides that reporting free of charge to all of the other news outlets in the state, and works collaboratively with public media and commercial and for-profit media so that everybody can utilize their resources to do the things that fit their missions most closely. Together in that kind of ecosystem, we're serving the public in a way that is really important.
I do want to digress for a second and say I think we've all come to realize that journalism at this point is a public service. It used to be that you could make a lot of money reporting the news — obviously before the internet, but in the 20th century there were huge profit margins for media.
In small towns in Arkansas, you often had competing newspapers. Nashville, Arkansas, had two papers that competed against each other, and that was not unusual, because people had to pay to get the news. They had to get a subscription, had to buy it at the newsstand. Advertisers really needed to advertise in the local paper if they wanted people to know what was going on. Then the internet comes and takes away all that revenue. It went from very profitable to not profitable at all.
In the course of the last 25 years, we've experienced that kind of creative destruction in journalism. But what we've also learned is that if you don't have that information, your civic life and civic health really suffers. People don't know what's going on. They have no common source of information. They don't know who's running for office, they don't know what's going on in their name in government or otherwise. It really hurts public discourse, hurts public knowledge, impedes people's ability to participate in their own democracy.
I think it also creates more toxicity in our politics, because people are working from a lack of information and they tend to demonize people who think differently than they do. Understanding that it's not going to be profitable to do this work but it's important, you approach it like you do a college, a university, a performing arts institution or a museum. You do this work as a public service, as a nonprofit organization. That is the value that we're bringing to Arkansas — we're going to be able to provide information as a public service to all the places that are being underserved by it.
Moore: One of the ways you describe your efforts here in Arkansas is you'll do on-the-ground reporting. What does that mean?
Sabin: We're going to have reporters in places. The places that we're starting with are Central Arkansas and Northwest Arkansas, mainly because those are the centers of activity in the state right now — from politics, business and culture, in all the ways that we understand those places to be in the state of Arkansas.
That doesn't diminish the need that we want to meet in the rest of the state. We see Central Arkansas as a good jumping-off point to cover things in the Delta and South Arkansas, and obviously from Northwest Arkansas you can get into north central and the west central part of the state. We're seeing those two places as a place to start and base our reporters and editors and grow from there.
It's really important that we have that physical presence and that our journalists are part of the communities that they're serving.
Moore: When we think about the award-winning reporting that your news outlets have done, we're thinking a lot of this sort of in-depth and investigative journalism. What I'm hearing from you is that a lot of the work you hope to do is also this very basic — here's what's happening at the local level, at your local political level. How do you find that balance between here's the news you need to know, and here is the in-depth investigative journalism?
Sabin: It starts with having really excellent editors and reporters. That's what we have in our other newsrooms, and that's what we're going to be establishing in Arkansas.
Oftentimes the in-depth accountability and investigative reporting happens as a result of the daily shoe-leather reporting. You're reporting on something that's going on, something seems fishy, you look into it a little more closely, you're getting good guidance from an editor, and all of a sudden it becomes a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative report.
That's exactly what happened at Mississippi Today, when one of our enterprising young reporters stumbled into the misuse of welfare money in the state of Mississippi. She was just doing really unglamorous work, digging into papers for really a year or two before it turned into what it turned into. And she won a Pulitzer Prize. But you have to have the resources and the guidance and the time to do that kind of reporting.
In essence, these two things are happening at the same time and in parallel — you're reporting the day-to-day stuff, but leaving the space to really dig into things more deeply as you see opportunities to do so.
We recently created an investigative reporting center at Deep South Today. We have dedicated investigative reporters in each of our newsrooms alongside dedicated data reporters in each of our newsrooms and local investigation fellows provided through The New York Times. We collaborate with The New York Times on developing these investigative reports. This is a really unique model nationally.
When we were able to announce the Investigative Reporting Center a few months ago, we had already written Arkansas into it because we knew that we were going to launch Arkansas Today. So when Arkansas Today comes online, we're going to be bringing this dedicated investigative reporting capacity into the newsroom alongside all of the other partnerships that we already have — with ProPublica, The Associated Press, Grist, The Marshall Project, KFF Health News and Agnotice, which brings D.C. coverage to us. These are all things that Arkansas is going to benefit from on day one, because we've established that infrastructure at the Deep South Today level.
Moore: Anything I missed?
Sabin: One thing — we've advertised the job posting for the editor in chief position. We're going to be hiring for an editor in chief, and that person obviously will be hiring the rest of the newsroom. We're really excited to have local leadership in Arkansas.
The business model we have, of course, is that from a business perspective we're supporting Arkansas Today with all of the infrastructure we've already built at the Deep South Today level. But when it comes to the newsroom itself, they have total editorial autonomy. That's how all of our newsrooms work. We don't tell them what to cover, there are no dictates from on high about any of that. All we do is really try to serve the newsrooms by giving them what they need to do the best reporting they can do.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
