A Fireside Chat with Frank Martin III

Hall of fame journalist and former owner of the West Plains Daily Quill Frank Martin III spoke at the Lincoln School on his experience and the current state of journalism on the local and national levels. Martin, 77, began his career in journalism at 14 working for his father, Frank Martin II. Though he did not stay there his entire career, he would return to West Plains to take over the Quill until 2016, when he sold the paper. 

Martin began the fireside chat with a brief overview of the history of Howell County and the schools, hospitals, industries, and newspapers within. He covered the founding of the town in between 1856 and 1857 -- the town being destroyed in 1863 by fire, and the rebuilding of the town following the Civil War. Martin covered the history of cooperation in the county, retelling a story of one of the early churches that was a church on the first floor and a masonic lodge on the second floor. The West Plains Weekly Quill was launched by Mills Williams in 1885, with the West Plains Daily Quill following in 1903. Martin said the Quill was eventually sold to his father and his two partners, who ended the weekly paper. Martin took over the paper in 1976 and worked there for the next 40 years.

 

“The national news has let us down recently,” said Martin. “We have to face that Donald Trump said and did some very strange things during his presidency and it just got wilder and wilder. Most of my colleagues in the news business didn't know how to describe it, so they didn't.”

 

He says these people did a thing called sanewashing, which is the act of minimizing radical aspects of a person or idea in order to make them more acceptable to a wider audience. “On the other hand, they didn't tell us how sick Biden was and how doddering he was. It wasn't until that disastrous debate that we had any clue how bad it was.”

 

Martin discussed the hard backlash the Washington Post received after deciding not to endorse a candidate, losing over 250,000 subscribers. “We're now faced with an unknown because Trump obviously hates us. We're the 'enemy of the people' and the 'fake news', so it's going to be interesting, among other things, how we survive.” 

 

“Newspapers are in decline, and there's no way to look at them with any hope.” said Martin. “There's a death spiral, and I'm afraid some of our local papers are going to get it. In the papers today, the Quill is doing as good as they can. Abby Hess works real hard. It was sold to a company that told me they would put out a good local paper, and they didn't. They hollowed it out. I had seven in the newsroom most of my time there. She has one reporter and we hadn't put a paper out with one reporter.”

 

He asked Howell County News how many reporters we have, having myself and our editor, Amanda Mendez. “She's doing a wonderful job too, even before you got there. I don't know how she did it.”

 

He said the first problem was that readers are dying. He said the average reader is now 80 years old and that kids don't read. “Fifty-four percent of American adults read at a sixth-grade level and below. Twenty-one percent of American adults are illiterate,” said Martin, statistics that come from the National Center for Educational Statistics. “That simply does not bode well for newspapers.” 

 

Martin ended the chat with anecdotes from his time in journalism. These included butting heads with then-Mayor Glenn Roe and stories about Roe killing neighborhood dogs, his experience dealing with death threats, bomb threats, and a family of Hungarian immigrants who were defrauding communities “from here to Oklahoma.”