by Jim Hanas
wo weeks ago, Memphis Business Journal publisher Stuart Chamblin
III told the Flyer that the paper would be making some changes under its new owners,
American City Business Journals. In particular, he said the arts and leisure coverage
would be changing its focus.
“We’ll modify how we deal with it,” he said. “We think the arts coverage could be revised to better represent the business reader.”
The first step? Well, it turned out to be getting rid of Edwin Howard, who created “Life at the Top,” the paper’s arts and leisure section, back in 1983. Howard wrote his final “Front Row” column for MBJ last Monday, bringing an end to one of the longest careers in local journalism.
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Edwin Howard |
Howard became the “Amusements” editor at The Memphis Press-Scimitar in 1946. In the late Fifties he began writing “Front Row,” a five-day-a-week arts column, which ran until the paper folded in 1983. Like several other columnists from the defunct Press-Scimitar, he was not offered a job by The Commercial Appeal. Instead, he was hired by MBJ founding editor Barney DuBois to head up the paper’s arts coverage, an addition that was promoted in a campaign that featured billboards proclaiming, “Edwin Howard Is Alive And Well.” Until 1991, he was the section’s editor and sole contributor. After that, he moved to Washington, D.C. – where he still lives – but continued to file weekly arts and travel columns from around the U.S. and the world.
All that just to have your farewell column hacked.
Asked to comment about the discontinuation of his column by MBJ’s new ownership, Howard provided five paragraphs he says were edited out of his final column on the grounds that he was discussing the company’s business.
“I am commenting to you because I am concerned about the arts in Memphis losing the coverage and support that they were formerly accorded,” he explains in an accompanying letter.
Now, maybe Howard’s heyday is behind him. And maybe readers of MBJ aren’t all that interested in his globe-trotting adventures in China, Japan, Thailand, and Egypt. (If they are, the letters to the editor are sure to tell the tale.) But there’s still more than a little irony in the fact that the paper that extended his career and claimed it as a coup couldn’t see its way to letting him have his final say, no matter how critical.
“I’m not really going to comment on Edwin,” says Chamblin, when asked about the cut, adding that he’d prefer to let Howard “have his say.”
Agreed. Here’s what you didn’t read in Howard’s final “Front Row” column. For the record, this week’s arts and leisure section is slimmer, but it’s still called “Life at the Top.”
[This is my final column in the Memphis Business Journal.] It is also, I am told, the end of “Life at the Top,” the paper’s arts and leisure section, which I created in 1983 following Scripps-Howard’s decision to shut down the 102-year-old afternoon daily, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, where I had been arts and entertainment editor and “Front Row” columnist for some years.
MBJ’s new owner, American City Business Journals, editor Bill Wellborn tells me, has decided that in the future, the paper’s coverage of the arts will be limited to their business aspects, plus some news notes and calendars.
When Barney DuBois, founding editor and later publisher of MBJ, asked me to create an arts and leisure section for the paper almost 15 years ago, he said it was because he believed that business and the arts were natural partners, and so it has seemed these many years as business and corporations helped fund the arts by sponsoring symphony concerts, productions and performances by our theatre, opera and ballet companies, and touring art exhibitions at Dixon Gallery and Gardens and Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Business people in Memphis have given of their time as well as their financial resources, serving on the boards of our arts organizations, and helping them make the difficult business decisions necessary for Memphis’ cultural life to thrive.
But the times they are a-changin’. There was a time when both of Memphis’ daily newspapers reviewed every theatre production, symphony, opera and ballet performance staged in the city, and the electronic media – especially WMC-TV, where I was Lively Arts Critic for six years – also got into the act. Memphis Business Journal picked up the arts torch when the Press-Scimitar closed, but there is no question but that media coverage of the arts is declining everywhere, along with federal funding, and public school arts instruction. The Commercial Appeal began reducing its arts coverage several years ago, so it must be said that American City Business Journals is on the cutting edge with its decision to discontinue “Life at the Top.”
I wish ACBJ well with its new format here, even as I sympathize with Memphis arts organizations in their efforts to adjust to the media’s changing arts agenda. n