It's a new era at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, with a new publisher for the first time since 1974.
But she has a familiar name: Eliza Hussman Gaines, the daughter of Walter E. Hussman Jr., who has retired as publisher but retains the title of chairman of WEHCO Media Inc.
Gaines, 35, became publisher of the Democrat-Gazette on Jan. 1.
She's the first woman to lead the newspaper, which was founded in 1878, and she's the fourth generation of the Palmer-Hussman family to be in the newspaper business in Arkansas.
Gaines grew up in Little Rock, where she attended The Anthony School from kindergarten through eighth grade and Episcopal Collegiate School for ninth grade.
She remembers going to the newsroom office in downtown Little Rock occasionally with her father when she was a child.
"I just remember going to different departments and talking to people," she said. "Paul Smith was always really kind, and Larry Graham."
Smith retired as president of WEHCO Newspapers, Inc. at the end of 2013. He died in 2021.
Graham is vice president of circulation for the Democrat-Gazette.
For her sophomore through senior years, Gaines attended Santa Catalina School, an all-girls high school in Monterey, Calif. While there, she played varsity tennis, as she had done in the ninth grade in Little Rock.
Those were formative years in California.
"I felt very prepared for college," said Gaines. "I loved living outside of Arkansas and seeing a new place. I think I always knew that I was going to eventually move back to Arkansas and be here the rest of my life. So I really wanted to do something different. Living in California, I made great friends there, my best friends to this day. I was kind of outside the bubble of Little Rock."
During the summers when she was a teenager, Gaines interned at the Democrat-Gazette.
After high school, she went to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where she majored in English.
"I was a Russian culture minor with a focus on Russian literature," she said. "I feel like I read my entire four years, just reading and writing."
UNC is a family tradition. Her father and aunt both graduated from the university. In 2019, her father pledged $25 million to the UNC journalism school, which was renamed the Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
"We had grown up loving UNC," said Gaines. "We would visit and watch the Tar Heels play basketball. I just thought it was the most beautiful place I've ever been. I knew they had a good journalism program, and I knew I eventually wanted to go into journalism business."
After her first year at UNC, Gaines worked as a copy editor for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in the summer of 2006.
The next summer, she worked as a camp counselor in Colorado. One day in Vail, Colo., she met Alec Gaines, a North Carolina State graduate who was working in Raleigh, N.C., as a real estate appraiser.
They began dating that same year.
In the summer of 2008, Eliza Hussman Gaines worked as a reporter for the food and travel sections of the Democrat-Gazette.
She graduated from UNC in 2009 and took a job that summer as an intern and travel writer for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Gaines said she traveled to Ireland, the French Riviera, Las Vegas and all over California.
"I felt very lucky to do what I did when I was there because they had downsized the newsroom," she said. "When I got there, it was the travel editor and it was me, a 22-year-old intern. So it was up to us to put out the entire section. I was kind of thrown right into it. It wasn't hard news but it was still writing on a deadline. I learned a lot from that experience."
After six months as an intern, she continued working for the Chronicle's travel section as a staff writer for another four months.
"I was asked to stay on to join the food section, but I was dating my husband at the time so I couldn't be away from him for more than a year," she said. "It was too long."
So she turned down the job and moved back to Chapel Hill to attend graduate school. Alec Gaines was in law school in Charlotte at that time.
They dated long distance until they married in 2012, a couple of months after Eliza Hussman Gaines received her master's degree in mass communications.
The couple moved to Little Rock, and she began working as assistant publisher to her father.
Walter Hussman Jr. has been a pivotal figure in Arkansas journalism. He led the Arkansas Democrat through a newspaper war against the Arkansas Gazette, which was the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi River. Hussman won that war in October 1991, when the Gazette's owner closed the newspaper, selling its assets and name to the Democrat. The first issue of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette was published the next day.
Gaines said working closely with her father as assistant publisher was an education in itself.
"Basically, that was just an entire year of learning the business," she said. "I sat in almost every meeting with him and really soaked up everything and gave my input where I thought I could."
In September 2013, Gaines became executive editor of The Sentinel-Record in Hot Springs and editor of Hot Springs On the Go! magazine.
"I love Hot Springs," she said. "It's one of my favorite places. Putting out a new product every single day and being there kind of guiding that. It really clicked for me, how vital we are as a resource. Things are constantly moving. You don't really get a day off or a night off. You have to always be available if something happens, which is fine. I thought it was a really good experience."
In 2015, after a year in Hot Springs, she became vice president of audience development for WEHCO Media, a company founded by her great-grandfather, Clyde Eber Palmer, when he bought the Texarkana Courier in 1909. In 1973, her grandfather, Walter E. Hussman Sr., came up with the name WEHCO, which stood for Walter E. Hussman Company.
WEHCO Media now has 11 daily newspapers in Arkansas, Missouri and Tennessee, in addition to several weekly newspapers, cable television, broadband and digital services.
In her job as vice president of audience development, Gaines said she was involved with the conversion of WEHCO newspapers from print to digital delivery of a replica edition, which can be read on a computer screen. WEHCO furnished iPad computer tablets to thousands of subscribers to get them accustomed to reading the newspaper that way.
Walter E. Hussman Jr. said WEHCO has distributed 55,000 iPads to its daily newspaper subscribers. He said the company has spent $18.7 million on iPads and another $9.4 million on conversion costs, which include meetings with readers around the state and walking them through how to use the iPad to read the paper.
Gaines said she worked with editors in the WEHCO newsrooms to come up with strategies to drive audience engagement.
"And I think that's when I started to see, to really understand, how vital it was to get to younger subscribers," said Gaines. "I had known that, but that's when I really realized that younger people don't see the newspaper as something that is vital to their lives every single day. Their parents probably get the paper every single day but they don't."
Young people don't see the value of a daily newspaper because they think they can get all the news they need for free online, she said. The Democrat-Gazette has a pay wall, asking readers to subscribe after they've had access to a few stories.
"I think my main goal is getting the next generation to feel like they need to invest in newspapers because it's worth it for their community to have a watchdog and to have a media source that's really invested in the community," said Gaines. "And it's their newspaper. It's not ours necessarily. It's theirs. It's the community's. And it's been there so long for a reason. I'm scared of what will happen if we lose it. Government wrongdoing, higher taxes, higher crime rate. I don't want to live in a community like that. If we don't invest now, it's going to be too late."
Gaines said it became clear that they would have to try some new things to get younger readers and others who weren't traditional newspaper readers.
Part of that strategy is to provide breaking news stories on the Democrat-Gazette's Arkansasonline.com website and through email newsletters.
"I think we have gotten much better at this but I think it's understanding the audience's wants and their needs and their habits and meeting them where they are instead of what's convenient for us in terms of our publishing schedule," she said. "So, instead of holding a story for the next day, we can go ahead and publish that on our website and get it out in a newsletter or breaking-news alert. There's no reason for us to hold something back for the next day's publication. We don't want people to read old news."
The next day's newspaper can provide lengthier, more detailed reporting on the story, said Gaines.
In 2020, David Bailey retired, and Gaines replaced him as managing editor of the Democrat-Gazette.
"My first day I had to send everybody home because of the pandemic," she said. "We were so unsure of what was happening."
The pandemic was a problem for the iPad rollout. Gaines said people didn't want to gather in a crowded hotel ballroom to learn how to read the newspaper on an iPad because they were afraid of catching covid-19.
"I think we had really high hopes, and then the pandemic hit and we lost so much advertising revenue," said Gaines. "I think that really affected our efforts."
Gaines was named executive editor of the Democrat-Gazette in September, and Alyson Hoge took over as managing editor.
The last person to hold the title of executive editor at the Democrat-Gazette was Griffin Smith, who resigned in 2012.
Gaines said this is a challenging time for newspapers. Many newspapers have been closed or dramatically downsized.
"I am positive about our future," she said. "I don't think it's all doom and gloom. ... Because I don't think we're dying. We just have to find a different way to be viable for many years to come to ensure our future."
Eliza and Alec Gaines have a daughter, Mary Helen, and three sons, Holden, Hamilton and Walter Hill, who was named for her father and for Chapel Hill, N.C.
