Author Archives: shumater

Life After Kovach

Posted on by

The Atlanta newspapers are tighter and brighter under Ron Martin. The purists may wince, but the numbers are up, and there’s still room for aggressive reporting.

By RICH SHUMATE
American Journalism Review/September 1992

ajr logoA newspaper editor and his wife emerge from a gourmet market. The camera zooms in as he walks out the door, carrying a salmon wrapped in plastic. He spies a USA Today box, walks over to it and buys a copy. He takes the fish out of the plastic and rewraps it in the newspaper, to the strains of his wife’s laughter. They walk away.

Coming soon to a theater near you.

This bit of USA Today-bashing might seem more like banter at a journalism convention than the stuff of a box office smash. The scene is more compelling when you consider the names involved. The man wrapping fish may well be Robert Redford. He’s expected to play Bill Kovach, former editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the scene comes from the first draft of “Above the Fold.” As told by the screenwriters, it’s the story of how Kovach left the New York Times in 1986 to bring hard-hitting, big-time journalism to Atlanta. Two years later, he’s forced out by timid management feeling pressure from corporate heavyweights and replaced by Ron Martin, who had been executive editor of USA Today.

But reality isn’t as simple as the scenario outlined in the screenplay: Kovach, now curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, resigned. Management insists it did not buckle to pressure from targets of the newspapers’ reporting. While no one disparages Kovach’s editorial talents or disputes the triumphs of his tenure, the implication that the Atlanta papers were weak and riddled with incompetence before his arrival is rejected by many who worked there. And although the papers now show the influence of USA Today, Martin clearly has not turned them into regional versions of his colorful former publication.

The papers are owned by Cox Enterprises, which also owns a television station and two radio stations in the city. While the newspapers publish a combined edition on weekends – with a Sunday circulation around 700,000 – the Constitution comes out on weekday mornings and the Journal in the afternoon. The papers, which share the same news staff, differ mainly on the front page and section fronts and on the editorial page (the Journal is considered conservative, the Constitution liberal).

The Constitution has a rich history. In the 1880s legendary editor Henry Grady launched his vision of a “New South,” a region rebuilt following the Civil War, on its pages. During the Civil Rights era, editor Ralph McGill and his paper were lonely voices favoring integration in a South resistant to change. McGill created a journalistic tradition carried on by his successor, Eugene Patterson.

Although there are dailies in two of the area’s largest suburban counties, there are no other major metro papers to provide competition. And in the past six years, a captive audience has watched the papers’ style swing back and forth as Martin and Kovach applied their disparate approaches to presenting the news.

Contrasting Styles

The contrast between Ron Martin and Bill Kovach is illustrated by the advertising slogans used to promote the papers during their tenures. Under Kovach, it was “Now You Know.” Under Martin, it’s “Today’s Paper.”

Kovach, who turns 60 this month, grew up in east Tennessee and made his name in the media circles of Washington, D.C., as the New York Times’ bureau chief. He is described – by an admirer – as “an irascible, barbed-wire kind of guy.”

Martin, 54, is a soft-spoken Midwesterner who has spent much of his career working for Gannett, which owns USA Today. He helped launch Florida Today, the prototype for USA Today, and also spent seven years at Knight-Ridder’s Miami Herald.

Martin says he is uncomfortable with people dwelling on the perceived gulf between his style and Kovach’s; he says the differences are “overstated.” Martin describes his initiatives as part of a continuum, bringing in modern techniques and combining them with traditional hard-news coverage.

“I think it’s simplistic to suggest that a paper can only do things one way and that there is only one way to do things,” says Martin. For him, the most important barometer of success is what readers think of the papers and what they get out of them: “I’m looking for a feeling that the paper is making a difference in people’s lives. [We want] to help them understand the issues of the day and help them in living their lives.”

While he says he wouldn’t mind winning a Pulitzer, the thought “doesn’t enter my consciousness for more than three seconds a year. You can have fun and have some heart and not take yourself so seriously. But you can still be serious.

“I’m not one of those who thinks papers are bad and getting worse all the time,” he adds. For Martin, the mission of newspapers hasn’t changed, but he believes they have to make themselves more relevant in an age when people can turn to television and other information sources. “The competition for time is out there,” he says. “You have to get people to pay attention to what you think is important.”

To attract readers’ attention, Martin instituted the use of more color and graphics, and long stories have given way to shorter pieces with a number of sidebars. All of this, he says, is an effort “to get the information off the page and into people’s heads.” The papers also are more formatted than before. “I didn’t think the paper was as well organized as it should be,” he says.

On one Thursday last May, the front page of the Constitution was dominated by news that the crew of the space shuttle Endeavor had captured an errant satellite. The space above the fold, except for the left-hand column index, was devoted to the story – including a color photo, a graphic explaining how the satellite had been rescued and returned to orbit, and a 72-point headline.

In the bottom left corner was a story that might well have led the paper if Kovach were still around – the tale of how an Atlanta-area consulting company helped Iraq import the machine tools it needed for its military buildup.

Martin’s changes have not been just cosmetic. He has decided to put more emphasis on health, lifestyle and personal finance issues. To involve readers, the papers now use surveys – both scientific samples and call-in polls – to track political races and gauge sentiment about a wide variety of topics.

While Kovach wanted fewer personal opinion columns in the papers, Martin has started new ones, including a column on traffic and an “around town” column called Peach Buzz (which first was given a prominent position on page two but has since been moved to the lifestyle section). One of the papers’ top reporters, Jane Hansen, was given a column that alternates with humorist Lewis Grizzard’s.

The newspapers also have not been afraid to do a little cheerleading. When the Atlanta Braves made it to the World Series last year, their exploits frequently were page-one news. And when the city was picked to host the 1996 Summer Olympics, the front page screamed, “It’s Atlanta.”

“Some people call that boosterism,” says Martin. “I think what you’re doing is reflecting the enthusiasm that exists in the city.”

Martin says the days when a reporter went out, gathered information and then sat down and wrote a story are over. Instead, reporters work as part of a team, with editors and artists, to come up with “packages.”

“There’s a great premium on coordination and cooperation,” says Andrew Glass, the Washington bureau chief for Cox Newspapers. He says Martin wants stories that anticipate future events and explain complicated situations.

If the success of Martin’s approach is judged by circulation, then his changes seem to be working. In the first two years of his tenure ending in mid-1991, the Constitution’s circulation rose by 51,000, or 10 percent. Although circulation has dropped since then, it is still higher by 15,000 daily and nearly 34,000 Sunday since Martin took over.

Martin believes that newspapers need to compete with television and other media sources; Kovach argues dailies should concentrate on filling a niche television does not – providing strong, in-depth coverage of political and economic issues that affect people’s lives. He cites as an example the Philadelphia Inquirer’s nine-part series on the state of the economy, “America: What Went Wrong?” and talks admiringly of its “24 pages of dense, solid reporting.” The series boosted Inquirer circulation when it ran, attracted thousands of requests for reprints and became a bestselling book.

“The readers are looking for that kind of information,” says Kovach. “They’re starved for it.”

The former editor argues against rigid rules dictating what goes where and how long it should be: “Every time you lay in a rule, you dictate the substance of a story.” Content should drive design, he says, not the other way around.

Enter Kovach

Kovach was hired as editor in December 1986, shortly after the New York Times’ Washington staff won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Challenger disaster. His hiring was widely viewed as an attempt by Cox management to upgrade the papers’ reputation. (In the movie script, the character based on Anne Cox Chambers, chairman of the Atlanta newspapers, decides to hire Kovach after she overhears Washington Post owner Katharine Graham laughing at her papers in the women’s room during a Pulitzer Prize reception.)

“The Cox people who came to Washington and recruited me said they wanted the world’s next great newspaper. That was their description, not mine,” Kovach says. He says he took the job to move back to his native South and to give the Atlanta papers a voice in national and international affairs at a time when the South was coming of age politically.

“The only interest I have is public service, public interest and public information journalism. I am not a marketer and never will be,” he says. “The business of journalism is protected in the Constitution for a reason …and if you choose to publish a newspaper, you inherit that obligation.”

Kovach brought in two top editors who had worked with him at the New York Times – then they went on a hiring spree. During the next two years, the budget for the editorial department swelled by 38 percent. Kovach says his goal was to strengthen reporting in the core city and suburbs, as well as to add a regional, national and international perspective. One of the papers’ first projects was on a famine in the Sudan. Although stories about Kovach’s tenure in Atlanta often focus on national and international coverage, he says there also was more – and more hard-hitting – local news during his regime.

Kovach limited the number of columns in the papers and restricted columnists from breaking news stories. Chafing under the new regime, several long-time fixtures left and Grizzard, the widely syndicated star columnist, was said to be very unhappy.

A number of staffers clearly resented what they perceived to be the new management’s condescending attitude toward them. “There was a great deal of alienation because there was a genuine lack of respect for some very fine newspaper people,” says Lee Walburn, a columnist and feature writer at the time and now editor of Atlanta magazine.

Yet Kovach was able to build an extremely loyal following among many writers, who came to believe that anything they wanted to accomplish was possible.

Under Kovach, the papers took on some of the look and tone of the New York Times. Bucking the trend toward simple leads and truncated stories, the papers contained articles with elaborate lead paragraphs and stories of 70 inches or more. The papers even began using “Mr.” in second references to men.

Kovach stopped using color photos on page one and limited the use of color elsewhere – not because he has anything against it but because he thought the papers’ color reproduction was abysmal. New presses were being installed just before he resigned.

Under Kovach, the papers’ prestige skyrocketed. In 1987, cartoonist Doug Marlette won a Pulitzer Prize, the first for the Atlanta paper in nearly 20 years, for work at both the Constitution and the Charlotte Observer. The next year, five of the Atlanta papers’ stories were Pulitzer finalists, a feat achieved only once before by any newspaper. In 1988, the papers ran a series disclosing that banks in Atlanta were not issuing home loans in areas with high minority populations. The series, by Bill Dedman, piqued the interest of federal regulators and won the papers another Pulitzer.

But soon Kovach would be gone. The specific event that precipitated his departure was an argument with Publisher Jay Smith over the relationship with the Cox Newspapers’ Washington bureau (the bureau serves all of Cox’s papers and bureau chief Glass did not report to Kovach). But on a more fundamental level, Kovach’s philosophy of newspapering may have been simply incompatible with that of Cox management. He admitted as much in his resignation statement, in which he said he and the Cox hierarchy didn’t share the same values. Despite the critical success while he was at the helm, Smith has referred to Kovach’s tenure as a “miserable disappointment.”

While Martin may not emphasize investigative and enterprise pieces to the extent that Kovach did, it is hardly fair to say that the Atlanta newspapers no longer do significant, hard-hitting stories.

In 1989, reporter Jane Hansen spent six months investigating Georgia’s child welfare system and found that in one year 51 children under state protection died from abuse. The series led to major changes in the system. In 1990, medical writer Steve Sternberg and photographer Michael Schwartz followed AIDS patient Tom Fox for 16 months until his death, resulting in a moving 16-page package on what it is like to live with AIDS. And throughout 1991, reporter Sallye Salter documented the financial problems of John Portman, the developer who shaped Atlanta’s skyline.

But the papers haven’t won a Pulitzer since Kovach left. Martin, a former Pulitzer juror, says he doesn’t think the newspapers’ reputation in the wake of the Kovach flap is the reason, but clearly they are no longer the media’s darlings.

“The papers got an extraordinary amount of attention in the Kovach era. They had a high national profile when [he] was there,” says Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz. But Kurtz says the current low profile “may just reflect the insularity of the Washington-New York media corridor.”

Even so, decisions over which stories are pursued, and where they are placed, can send Martin’s critics and some readers into apoplexy. One day the dominant story on the Constitution’s front page was on a report concluding babies should sleep on their sides or backs rather than their stomachs. A page one story one Sunday disclosed that baby boomers were going to bed earlier.

Conversely, when a cyclone hit Bangladesh and killed 125,000 people last May, the story wound up inside the front section. The front page included stories on the opening of a McDonald’s at the city’s public hospital and a dispute between the city and caterers who provide food at concerts at an Atlanta park. That led one reader to ask in a letter to the editor, “Hello, is anyone home?”

In response to such criticism, Martin says he believes in emphasizing stories the papers can do best and those that answer questions the readers are asking. “You can’t do everything every day all over the world,” he says.

And when the world comes to Atlanta, Martin believes you have to be reader-friendly. For example, when Mikhail Gorbachev visited, Martin says it was important not only to cover the event but also to tell readers whether it might disrupt traffic and whether they would have a chance to glimpse the former Soviet president.

Martin says he does see room for improvement. He wants to make the papers more consistent, and says one of his priorities is building a stronger writing staff.

Many of the people brought in by Kovach – including Pulitzer Prize winners Marlette and Dedman – have left. As might be expected given all the turmoil of the past four years, morale is up and down.

A joke told by a staffer reflects some of the angst: “How many people does it take to write a story at the AJC? Fifty-three. One to write it, 50 to edit it and two to write the correction.”

The move to lighter, brighter and tighter has chagrined some staff members and prompted others to depart. “I left because of creative differences – I wanted to be creative, and they wanted something different,” says longtime feature writer Kathy Hogan Trocheck, who is now writing mysteries. Even columnist Grizzard, who comes off as a bumpkin and a villain in the screenplay, has been saying nice things about Kovach after Martin refused to run several of his columns.

That is not to say everyone is upset by the new era. Cox Washington Bureau Chief Glass, for one, says the change in atmosphere and Martin’s new emphasis are “stimulating” and that the Atlanta newspapers are not forsaking journalism for fluff. “You don’t have to take my word for it,” he says. “You can just pick up the paper.”

Atlanta, the Movie

Looming on the horizon is “Above the Fold,” a movie that, if produced, could put a spotlight on the Atlanta newspapers yet again. The movie rights are controlled by Warner Brothers but no date has been set for production. Robert Redford won’t be available until next year.

The screenplay was written by two Kovach partisans – novelist Pat Conroy (who was so miffed by Kovach’s departure and the subsequent changes at the Atlanta newspapers that he moved to San Francisco) and Wendell “Sonny” Rawls Jr., a top editor under Kovach. Some familiar with the screenplay say it is more in the style of Oliver Stone’s “JFK” than “All the President’s Men.”

The screenplay turns on this premise: Cox management, under pressure from bankers and business people who received unfavorable coverage, conspired to maneuver Kovach into a position where he was forced to quit to maintain his integrity. It is a charge Cox officials have repeatedly denied. Without that spin, says Publisher Smith, it’s a movie nobody would want to see.

Glass, skewered in the screenplay as a marginal, mediocre journalist protecting his turf, says the premise is bogus.

“The myth really rests on the assumption that Bill sought to produce world-class journalism and that he was thwarted from doing so by timid ownership and a timid publisher,” says Glass. “If that happened, then Cox has a lot to answer for. If it didn’t happen, people shouldn’t go around saying that. And it is not true.”

CB Hackworth, an Atlanta journalist who has written about the screenplay, says its “treatment of Kovach has him riding this white horse into town and bringing journalism to Atlanta.” In several instances, stories that the screenplay suggests were broken in the Atlanta papers were in fact first reported by local television stations, according to Hackworth.

Hackworth also says he found the characterization of major players to be off the mark. “It is all so black and white,” he says. “The characters were either Truth, Justice and the American Way or they were something that crawled up from out under a rock. The reality of the situation was not that stark.”

While Kovach may look like a white knight if and when “Above the Fold” makes it to the screen, no one in newspaper management is calling on him to come to the rescue. He says he doesn’t expect to be named editor of a paper anytime soon.

“I’ll miss the newsroom for the rest of my life,” he says. “But I don’t think many newspaper publishers today are particularly looking for journalists who think the way I do.”

State investigating North Little Rock over rejection of adult care home

Posted on by

House of Three project undermined by bureaucracy, according to owner

By RICH SHUMATE
Arkansas Times/May 22, 2014

arktimesThe stately gray brick house with black plantation shutters sits alongside a quiet, curved street in Little Rock’s upscale Leawood neighborhood, indistinguishable from the homes around it. Inside, two of the women who live there sit around the kitchen table, family style, with their caretaker and two visitors, enjoying a lunch of roast beef and potatoes, washed down with iced tea. A partially finished jigsaw puzzle rests on a table in the adjacent dining room.

Meanwhile, a dozen miles away on Arlington Road in North Little Rock, a more modest red brick ranch house in the Lakewood neighborhood that was in the remodeling process sits half finished and abandoned. Weeds poke up through the concrete in the driveway, and a giant dumpster outside overflows with construction waste.

Koy Butler owns both of these houses. He intended the second to be like the first — a place where up to three elderly disabled people receive around-the-clock care in a home setting, surrounded by their own furniture and prized possessions, rather than the sterile environment of a nursing home. But Butler’s House of Three, as he calls it, ran into a bureaucratic buzzsaw in North Little Rock, fueled by neighborhood politics, leaving him marooned with an unfinished project.

Frustrated, Butler filed a complaint with the Arkansas Fair Housing Commission, which is now investigating whether the city violated state and federal fair housing laws by requiring Butler to seek rezoning of the property for his adult care home, which both the Planning Commission and the City Council rejected.

Butler and his attorney, Dana McClain, contend the federal Fair Housing Act prohibits cities from using zoning rules to treat housing for the disabled differently from housing for anyone else. Butler now wants the city to pay $553,000 to make him whole financially.

“I just don’t see why the city is dragging their feet,” he said. “I’ve got so much invested in that house that I can’t move forward until that’s off my balance sheet.”

To add insult to injury, on one of his many trips to City Hall to untangle the mess, he was hit by a car on Main Street, leaving him with a cast on his foot.

In an interview, North Little Rock City Attorney C. Jason Carter conceded “absolutely” the city could have done a better job of dealing with Butler’s request. But he said the root of the problem was that the city had never previously been faced with a project of this type in a residential neighborhood.

“I’d call this a case of first impression in North Little Rock,” Carter said. “And we were stumbling our way through it.”

Butler, who has worked in the nursing home industry and is also an alderman in Lonoke, opened his first House of Three in Leawood in 2013. It’s a for-profit business, but he said it’s also something of a mission.

“It’s just more of a personable option, and I just wanted to take care of them more individually,” he said. “I want to make a living taking care of people. That’s what I’ve always done.”

W.C. Maynard’s wife, Jenny, is a resident of the Leawood home, which he said was a vast improvement over her previous care environments.

“It’s the best place we’ve ever found,” he said. “That’s why we’re here. I’d give (Butler) an A-plus”

The House of Three is what is known as an adult family home, designed as an alternative to institutional care. The residents live together as a family with an in-house caregiver.

“We know that seniors want to live in their own homes, or, short of that, in their own communities,” said Krista Hughes, director of the Arkansas Department of Human Services Division of Aging and Adult Services. “All data shows that people would like to remain in the least restrictive environment possible.”

These types of homes, while well established in other parts of the country, are fairly new to Arkansas. Hughes said there are only three homes of this kind in the state specifically approved for Medicaid funding, although there are likely many more homes like the House of Three where elderly disabled people are paying for their care privately. The total number is unknown because state law only requires care homes to be licensed if there are more than three people living there.

An aging population is increasing the need for long-term care for the elderly. Statewide, there are more than 21,000 elderly and disabled people who use Medicaid long-term services, with thousands more receiving private care. And people in nursing homes often don’t actually need the intensive level of care they provide, Hughes said.

“In many cases, it’s simply because there were not options available in their communities,” she said. “We are trying to develop this model of supported housing.”

Hughes, who spoke on Butler’s behalf before the City Council, said she was concerned the city’s denial “could easily discourage other people” who might want to provide such housing alternatives.

“What Koy is trying to do is simply have an extended family environment for people who want to live there,” she said.

Butler also ran into red tape in Little Rock when he first sought approval for the Leawood House of Three. The city initially told Butler he would have to get a special use permit but eventually decided an adult care home fits within the city’s definition of a family residence — and that the federal Fair Housing Act prevents the city from placing restrictions on housing for the disabled that it doesn’t place on housing for the people who are not.

So last August, Butler decided to buy the house on Arlington Road, which was zoned R-1, the most restrictive category for residential housing in North Little Rock. Before he could complete the purchase, he sought confirmation from Planning Director Robert Voyles that the House of Three would be allowed under the existing zoning.

“I am of the opinion that your description of the House of Three complies with the definition of family as described in the North Little Rock Zoning Ordinance,” Voyles replied in an email.

A week later, Voyles wrote Butler back to say that based on consultations with the city’s legal staff, “I retract my previous statements.” He informed Butler he would need to get the property rezoned to R-2 and get a special use permit.

The city’s objection was that Butler was operating a for-profit business. Under North Little Rock’s zoning ordinance, a family residence is defined as nonprofit. However, R-1 zoning does allow home-based businesses, as long as they are subordinate to the residential use and don’t change the “residential character” of the structure. (City business licenses have been issued to a telemarketing firm and a plumber located within a block of Butler’s Arlington Drive house.) And if Butler were merely renting out the house as a landlord for a profit, he could rent to up to five unrelated people without having his property rezoned.

Why the different treatment for Butler?

“I think because he’s not just renting the property out. He’s providing services,” Carter said.

Carter also said city officials were unclear whether Butler would also be providing housing to elderly people who aren’t disabled, who would not be eligible for federal disability protection. But Butler said he always made it clear House of Three residents would all be disabled. A letter he sent to Voyles in August said all residents “will have a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, thus leaving them handicapped by the Fair Housing Act.”

By the time Butler learned of the city’s objections, he had already purchased the home and begun renovations, based on Voyles’ initial email. Carter conceded the city sent Butler mixed signals.

“You never want to give people conflicting information. You always want to be as clear as possible. And obviously, this is not one of those cases,” he said. “Local government needs to have predictable processes, and that’s how we could have done this better.”

However, Carter also pointed to a 1997 Arkansas Supreme Court case, Russellville vs. Hodges, in which the high court ruled against a property owner who built an illegal trailer park based on a faulty interpretation of zoning regulations by a city official. The court ruled the city could force the trailer park to be removed because the official didn’t have the power to waive the regulations on his own.

But McClain said the Russellville case isn’t applicable because his dispute with the city isn’t about zoning, it’s about housing discrimination against the disabled.

After the city’s change of position left him no other option, Butler did apply for the rezoning and special use permit. When his neighbors in Lakewood found out about it, they started to object, complaining an adult care home would lower their property values.

“I had people call and leave me ugly messages on the phone and send me emails,” he said.

Among the groups objecting was the Lakewood Property Owners Association. Ken Sullivan, the association’s executive director, said “our objection is that we didn’t want it to be rezoned.”

Asked if the association would have objected to the city allowing the House of Three to operate as a permitted use under R-1 zoning, as was done in Little Rock, Sullivan said “I can’t really speak to that.”

“We were opposed to it being rezoned as a business,” he said.

When the rezoning came up last December, it drew a standing-room-only crowd to the City Council chambers. Most of those on hand, including family members of House of Three residents, supported Butler. But the City Council voted 6-2 against the rezoning, based on the concerns about precedent of allowing a business use in what is an R-1 neighborhood. That’s when construction on the half-finished House of Three came to a halt.

The question now before the Arkansas Fair Housing Commission is whether North Little Rock violated fair housing laws. Butler believes the city did, pointing to a document on the U.S. Department of Justice’s website that lays out the following scenario:

“Suppose a city’s zoning ordinance defines a ‘family’ to include up to six unrelated persons living together as a household unit, and gives such a group of unrelated persons the right to live in any zoning district without special permission. If that ordinance also disallows a group home for six or fewer people with disabilities in a certain district or requires this home to seek a use permit, such requirements would conflict with the Fair Housing Act.”

In 2011, Jonesboro lost a federal court case after it denied an application to house eight handicapped children and two house parents in a group home. It cost the city $90,000.

In 2003, the city of Sedona, Ariz., was forced to pay $530,000 to the operator of a residential home for recovering drug addicts, who are considered disabled under federal law. After the home had been purchased, the city turned down a use permit when neighbors complained.

The Little Rock City Board of Directors initially balked at applications by Oxford House Inc. to set up group homes in residential neighborhoods for recovering drug users and alcoholics, but relented once it became familiar with the Fair Housing Act. Its defining ordinance for home occupancy does not include the nonprofit requirement.

The Arkansas Fair Housing Commission was expected to issue a ruling on Butler’s complaint in mid-March but extended the deadline “to make additional efforts to conciliate [settle] the complaint,” according to a letter the commission sent to Butler. A decision still has not been reached.

Carter said city officials have met with the commission’s staff, which has already prompted a change in the way North Little Rock will handle these types of requests going forward.

According to Carter, the city was informed it was required by federal law to have a process in place for making reasonable accommodations for housing for the disabled, which the city lacked. So under a new procedure approved by the City Council in March, a property owner who wants to operate a home for disabled residents can make a free application for a “reasonable accommodation” to the city’s Board of Adjustment.

Applicants have to prove they are entitled to protection under the Fair Housing Act, show how the city’s regulations inhibit that protection and prove the accommodation they are seeking is reasonable. Rulings by the Board of Adjustment can be appealed to Pulaski County Circuit Court. While that takes the City Council out of the loop, the city can still appeal rulings it doesn’t like.

Carter said that had a reasonable accommodation policy been in place when Butler sought approval of the House of Three, the problems he experienced could have been avoided.

“When we didn’t have one, we steered Mr. Butler in the best direction that we could have steered him,” Carter said.

Alderman Murry Witcher, who supported the House of Three when it came before the City Council in December, said once the state investigation is complete, he expects the council to consider additional changes to accommodate adult group homes, which he believes are needed in the city.

“At that time, we’ll have to address it,” he said. “I think whatever that language is, it will be something that both the [state] folks and the city attorney will agree.”

In a memorandum prepared for North Little Rock Mayor Joe Smith in January, Voyles suggested three options: Removing the “nonprofit” requirement from the definition of family housing, amending the zoning ordinance to allow group homes as a defined under federal law as a permitted use or allowing adult care homes to operate as a home business. So far, none of those changes have been adopted.

McClain said she believed the city’s new reasonable accommodations process still didn’t meet the requirements of the federal law.

“It’s quite vague in terms of how they’re going to actually proceed with it,” she said, adding the new process still puts an “overly cumbersome” obstacle in the way of disabled people who need housing by forcing them to get permission from the Board of Adjustment or appeal to Circuit Court.

Carter disagreed.

“I don’t think that it does run afoul of the Fair Housing Act, and I don’t think it’s too vague,” he said.

As for Butler, he said he had so soured on his experience dealing with North Little Rock that he no longer wanted to operate the House of Three on Arlington Road. However, he does want the city to purchase the house from him, reimburse him for the money he spent on remodeling it and pay his legal fees and other expenses — a bill that, as of this writing, exceeds $553,000.

He said he also wanted assurances from the city that what happened to him won’t happen to anyone else.

“I wasn’t surprised that there was some opposition because it’s a change,” he said. “I was surprised the attorneys for the city didn’t take a closer look at the Fair Housing Act.”

Love Is A Money-Splendored Thing

Posted on by

Want to cash in with the perfect romance novel? Keep your bodices unripped, avoid the “P” word and for God’s sake, give ’em a happy ending.

By RICH SHUMATE
Atlanta Magazine/January 1992

atlanta magazineKatrine Campbell screamed and tried to make a break for it. But her kidnapper, Raith MacLean, quickly grabbed Katrine, clamping a hand over her mouth.

“Try that again,” he whispered, “and you’ll become intimately acquainted with my dirk.”

Intimately acquainted with his what? I was only on Page 10 of “Tender Feud.” They couldn’t be ready to do that already. Where were the pages and pages of verbal foreplay? Where was the plot line where boy meets girl, they hate each other instantly, then fall in love, then deny their love, then accept it, then lose each other, then meet again for passion and happily ever after? And what was going to happen in the other 290 pages? Extended afterglow?

I scrambled for my dictionary, only to discover, much to my relief, that dirk is a Scottish term for a type of dagger. This made sense, given that Tender Feud was set in the Highlands in the 1760s. It seems Raith was threatening to kill Katrine, albeit in a way that was suggestive of something else, something that perhaps would be more pleasurable.

She was indeed frightened now. She was scared out of her wits. A knife at her throat, a hard male body pressing against hers — surely enough to disturb the natural sensibilities of any gently reared young lady!

Surely.

Katrine quaked. Did he intend to murder her?

Surely not.

For in the world of Raiths and Katrines, the endings are always happy. It is the cardinal commandment of romance writing, one authors are loathe to violate because readers will not brook such transgressions. So even though Raith holds Katrine hostage, even though their families have been bitter enemies for generations, we readers know he will do her no harm. The story is as time-honored as the tales of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, where deliverance lies in the triumph of love between a strong man and a good woman.

A predictable conclusion? Yes. But the woman who created Raith and Katrine says the mandatory uplift at the end is not a limitation, but rather the genre’s attraction.

“It’s the idea of love being able to conquer all,” says Anne Bushyhead of Duluth, who writes romances under the pen name Nicole Jordan. “The good things in life triumph over the bad.”

Of course, the good things in life do not always triumph over the bad. We all know people do evil stuff to each other, and fate is frequently unkind. So it would be easy to dismiss romance novels as unrealistic fluff, as many of the genre’s detractors are quick to do.

Easy, except for the fact that these books sell. Romances account for 40 cents out of every dollar in paperback sales, some $200 million a year. While their genesis reaches back into previous centuries, when Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela” and, later, Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” established a pattern for writers, romance novels began to enter big-time popular culture in 1958, when Toronto-based Harlequin Enterprises began mass producing paperback romances, heavily marketing them and selling them at a reduced cost. At one point, they even gave them away in boxes of detergent.

Now, some of the biggest names in publishing — Bantam, Penguin, Warner Books, HarperCollins — have a romance subsidiary. About 120 titles are released each month for a readership, estimated at 22 million, that is extremely loyal. And the audience has spread beyond America and into languages other than English.

Upon learning these tidbits, my questions were twofold. First, what are the inherent intricacies that make these novels so popular and such a cultural phenomenon? And, more importantly, what would it take for me to write one and cash in?

Well, let me preface my tale of how I learned to write the perfect romance novel by suspending reality just a bit.

The three Georgia romance writers whose brains I picked all informed me that anyone who wants to write romance novels should both be familiar with them and enjoy the format. Patricia Potter, who writes three to four novels a year at her home in Stone Mountain and whose works have been translated into Portuguese, Swedish, German, Italian and Japanese, says she gets somewhat offended by people who think they can just plop themselves down and whip out a romance for the money — in other words, people who attempt what I’m about to attempt.

“The good ones are written by people who enjoy doing it,” she says. “You have to want to write one.”

So I proceed from this point, with apologies to Patricia, by admitting that I was not a romance aficionado prior to setting out on my quest to learn how to write one. We’ll just have to pretend that I know what I’m doing — we’re writing fiction, after all.

Of course, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. So I had to spend several weekdays propped up on my couch, a package of Oreos at my side, reading books entitled “Tender Feud,” “Follow the Sun,” “Rainbow” and “Twice Blessed” — much to the chagrin of my friends who have to work for a living at real jobs.

But hey, all this skipping back and forth through history is tough work. I went from modern-day California to 18th century Scotland to the antebellum South and then to the New Mexico Territory, circa 1878. I met geriatric Swedish diamond thieves, slave owners involved in the Underground Railroad and a Texas ranger who faked his own hanging.

“You can do bizarre things. The quirkier you can be, the more you stand out,” says Deborah Smith, a romance writer from Dahlonega who once worked as a reporter for the Marietta Daily Journal and whose books have sold more than a million copies. And Deb knows quirky. In her book “Follow the Sun,” the heroine starts out as a jewel thief’s widow living on a boat in Long Beach who rediscovers her Cherokee heritage in north Georgia and then learns that she is actually the rightful heir to the throne of a small, albeit fictitious, Scandinavian country.

When she frets about not really knowing where she belongs, the hero — whose name is Jeopard Surprise — has the answer:

You can be a Cherokee and a Scandinavian queen at the same time.

Yes, dear reader, you can have it all.

The next task I faced was to find a pseudonym. Many romance writers write under a name that is not their own. This is not, I discovered, because they are ashamed of what they are doing. In fact, they believe their craft is getting a bad rap from those high-and-mighty critics who dismiss, with an upward turn of the nose, anything that does not meet their definition of Literature with a capital L. After all, they sniff, Danielle Steel is the role model here, not John Steinbeck.

“We’re sort of like Rodney Dangerfield — we don’t get any respect,” says Potter, who believes the writing in romance novels is equal to or better than that in other genres. “It’s a matter of educating people to take a look at them.” She’s now got her 82-year-old father reading them.

“I frankly make no apology for what I like to write or what I like to read,” says Bushyhead.

“I think the readers are more sophisticated than before. And the writers are more sophisticated. They treat this as a business,” says Smith. “Nobody’s taking this lightly.”

The Barbara Cartland-esque image of romance writers as matrons reclining in lacy gowns, dictating their fiction between bonbons and sips of tea, or as bored housewives dashing off a chapter between the dusting and the laundry, don’t hold true. Indeed, today’s romance writers insist they are serious, driven professionals.

“We hate Barbara Cartland,” insists Smith. “That image has done us more harm than anything.” She and Potter came to romance writing from careers in journalism. Bushyhead has a civil engineering degree from Georgia Tech and worked for Procter & Gamble, overseeing the production of Pampers, before deciding to write her first book. For these women, this is clearly more than a way to while away free time.

“I want to be on The New York Times best-seller list, and I want to be rich,” admits Smith.

And today, romance writers such as Sandra Brown, LaVyrle Spencer and Jude Deveraux do get their books published in hardcover and do make the vaunted best-seller lists. Potter’s newest book, “Lawless,” is coming out in hardback.

And while everyone breathing in Georgia knows of the phenomenal punch of Alexandra Ripley’s “Gone With the Wind” sequel, many may not realize that her previous books can be found in the romance sections of local bookstores.

Faced with outside skepticism despite their commercial success (many prominent book critics still refuse to review romances,) romance writers have banded into a close-knit community. About 250 published and unpublished writers in the Southeast are members of a group called Georgia Romance Writers. Nationally, the Romance Writers of America organization has 5,000 members. It even has its own award for excellence, a la the Oscar, called the Rita.

Local romance writers get together weekly to critique and edit each other’s work — a process they refer to as “tough love” — with published authors helping newcomers get started. It’s a camaraderie born of a common calling.

Or, as Smith puts it, “When you’ve spent your whole day thinking of a euphemism for penis, you need to get out and talk to somebody who understands.”

Many romance writers use pseudonyms because some of the publishers in the field, including Harlequin, still the industry’s giant, require them to do so. The publishing house then keeps the right to use the name. (Romance readers tend to follow particular authors, and the pseudonym system keeps writers from taking their followings with them if they switch publishers. Not surprisingly, writers are not big fans of the process.) In other cases, a pseudonym is used when two people collaborate on the same book. And some writers who work for publishers that would allow them to use their names create pen names anyway to foster the image that goes with their books.

“Bushyhead is an old Cherokee name. It is not a particularly romantic name,” says Bushyhead, who chose Jordan because it is her middle name and Nicole because she liked the sound of it. (Smith and Potter use their own names.)

I had to pick a pseudonym for another reason as well. Most romance writers, and virtually all of the genre’s readers, are women. Though a few of these books are written by men (3 percent of the membership of the Romance Writers of America is male,) you’ll find few masculine names on the covers of the romance section. Male romance writers usually take a female pen name.

So what will it be? Well, let’s follow Bushyhead’s lead. My middle name is Louis. That’s not really a last name, unless we change the spelling to Lewis. For the sake of continuity, let’s use a first name that starts with an R. Rebecca? No. Something more dignified and regal, perhaps. Regina? Yes, Regina Lewis. A new star in the literary galaxy.

Now, Regina is faced with the task of naming the two characters who must be in any romance novel — the hero and the heroine.

These protagonists don’t go by names like Sam Smith and Jane Jones. Nothing so mundane is permitted. In romance novels, you’re more likely to run across Meara O’Hara and Quinn Devereux.

“Most women are married to men named Bill and George,” says Smith. “Women are looking for something they don’t see every day.”

And just how do authors come up with these unusually melodramatic monikers?

“You want to know the real secret? We all have those baby name books,” says Potter. Telephone books are popular as well. The idea, the authors say, is to create an image through the name.

Of course, the names picked will also depend on the type of book being written.
While there are degrees and slight variations, romances generally fall into two broad categories, historical and contemporary. From here, the process is further refined.

Romance publishing houses have what they call “lines,” series of books that come out under the same title, such as Harlequin’s Superromance, Bantam’s Loveswept, Silhouette’s Desire, Signet’s Regency or Berkley Books’ Second Chance at Love. Books in the same line contain common elements to appeal to the same audience. Smith, for example started out writing in the Loveswept line, contemporary romances with an emphasis on humor that are “highly sensual,” according to the publisher’s introduction. Bushyhead has written a number of Regency period novels, a particular segment of romances that are all set in early 19th-century England and fall in line with the very formal manners and mores of that era. Readers buying a particular line or a particular author know in advance what to expect from the book.

There are also two different formats for the novels. Many of the books that hold to a particular line, particularly contemporary series books, have fewer than 200 pages and come out with a stock cover that varies little from book to book. They have a unique title but, given the large number of titles produced each month, are also given a number (Smith’s story of Jeopard and the Cherokee-Scandinavian princess is also known as Loveswept No. 326.) Writers are required to write to a particular length, and editors make sure that the books don’t stray from the guidelines.

Those thicker paperback books you see in the grocery store — frequently emblazoned with a muscled, shirtless hero and a heroine whose silky bosoms are straining against her bodice — impose less structure on the author. The plots are generally more complex, and, in the case of historical novels, the research more elaborate.

Potter has a stack of obscure reference books, with pictures of popular fashions through the ages and the weapons of the Civil War, materials to which she refers when writing in an effort to keep the details as authentic as possible. When she decided to send the protagonists in her book Rainbow to Murray, Ky., she called its Chamber of Commerce.

“For my plot, I needed woods,” she explains. “If that part of Kentucky didn’t have any woods, I would have gotten letters from Kentucky. Readers will write you if you do not have your history correct.”

Yet, in these historical romances, it is the romance, not the history, that takes center stage. The historical details — the proper clothes, the proper weapons — are but props for propelling the hero and heroine into each other’s arms. These are not epics like Herman Wouk’s “The Winds of War,” where the romantic entanglement between two characters is interrupted by chapters of commentary on military strategy and where the protagonists interact with Hitler, Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt. For in “Winds” and other works of historical fiction, the characters are the props, used to impart the historical details to the reader in a compelling fashion. The fact that the characters fall in love is a sideshow.

Thus, that quintessential Southern epic, “Gone With The Wind,” would not be a romance novel under the strict definition of the term. The story of the death of the Old South was as much the focus of the book as was the romance between Rhett and Scarlett. Besides, Scarlett was carrying a torch for Ashley, and neither relationship ended happily. (But then, if Ashley had fallen into Scarlett’s arms after Melly was dispatched to the Great Beyond, professing his love for the Irish vixen, we would have to reconsider. In the next sequel, perhaps.)

In their quest for accuracy, authors also have to be careful not to use any slang terms that were not actually being slung during their character’s lifetimes. And when picking names for a character, the writers have to check their etymology, being careful not to give a Jewish surname to an Irish Catholic. Contemporary characters need contemporary names, and it is not a good idea to call your 16th-century French heroine Debbie. Raith, the name of the hero in “Tender Feud,” was actually in use in 18th-century Scotland. (Bushyhead says she had few good choices for that character. Men in that time frame usually went by not-so-dashing names such as Hector.)

The argument could be made that your average 20th-century American romance reader would not be sufficiently versed in the history of Georgian Britain to know a name was incorrect. That’s not the point. The writer would know.
“I hate to make historical errors,” says Bushyhead. But she admits she did rewrite history on one point. People in the time frame of “Tender Feud” did not bathe. They thought water would make them ill. Katrine, however, takes a bath in the book because, Bushyhead says, “I just didn’t want a dirty heroine.”

Now at this point, Regina is a torn woman. She can’t decide whether to go contemporary, put her characters in 1840s Oklahoma or in an early 20th-century Western mining town (cut her some slack — she hasn’t been doing this very long.) Awash in indecision, she decides to take a shortcut and pick her names form the Bible. Yes, those should be adaptable to just about any setting in the Western world in the last 2,000 years. Besides, basing the names on the Good Book opens up an array of catchy titles possibilities — “Biblical Interlude” and “Scriptural Fire” come to Regina’s mind.

For the hero, how about Philip or Andrew? Both are noble names that can be shortened into nicknames quite easily. (This is something romance characters seem to have a penchant for doing. Jeopard becomes Jep. Meredith becomes Merry.) No, these are just a little too plain. Jesus? Regina thinks that might get her in trouble. Herod? Well, he did have some blood on his hands, but the name connotes ruling strength combined with a wee bit of roguishness and danger. Yes, that will work. And for the heroine? Esther and Bernice will have to be rejected. Mary? No, she needs more fire, a name that’s more esoteric. Drusilla? Voilà. Herod and Drusilla.

Now, it’s time for a plot.

Back in what many romance writers consider the bad old days, shading in the outlines of Herod and Drusilla and sending them out to wind their way through a romance would have been simple. Until the early 1980s, these novels were written according to a strict formula from which writers had little freedom to vary.

The central focus had to be on the heroine. In fact, the entire book, while written in the third person, had to be told from her point of view. If Regina were constricted in this fashion, readers would never get inside the head of Herod or any of the secondary characters, only Drusilla. They wouldn’t know what he was thinking — they would only know what she thought he was thinking.

The women, pre-1980, were generally in their late teens or perhaps early 20s, from a lower socioeconomic background, pretty but not overtly beautiful. The men were in their mid-30s, wealthy and extraordinarily handsome. They were complex, often brooding, with a secret in their past. But they were also Supermen, without flaws, possessing an unwavering, sturdy character. Worldly problems — alcoholism, handicaps, social disease — never intruded on the fantasy. Virginity on the woman’s part was usually a must, although the man was more, shall we say, worldly. And in the relationship, he was clearly in control.

These novels also came to be known as “bodice rippers” because the hero frequently raped the heroine, who promptly fell in love with him. Today, in times of raised consciousness on the issue of violence toward women (at least, raised in comparison to a decade or two ago,) rape is rarely an element in the interaction between the hero and heroine. But the impression created by this outdated tradition of assault continues to dog modern romance writers, much to their consternation.

“I’ve never had a bodice ripped in any of my books,” says Potter. “It’s an image we are trying to fight.”

The rape scenes, and plot lines where women were the victims of gratuitous violence, stopped under pressure from both readers and writers. And during the 1980s, authors were also successful in convincing the powers-that-be in romance publishing — mostly men — that the audience, while enjoying the basic format, would accept and, indeed, appreciate more sophistication, with better plots and better writing and characters more richly drawn. Smith says the emergence of more female editors, who better understand what women want in romantic fiction, also helped lead to the changes.

The traditional plot elements have not disappeared. Writers still use them, but they are no longer required to incorporate all of them. The focus must still be on the relationship between the characters, and the ending must still be happy. But other than that, there are few hard-and-fast rules or verboten subjects.

Today’s romances are told from points of view other than the heroine’s. We now know what the hero thinks, and the writing can even be from the villain’s point of view, formerly a major no-no. However, there is one caveat to this, according to Smith. When a female writer tries to put herself inside a male character, she has a tendency to create a man who reacts emotionally in the way women want men to react to them, not the way they actually do. “If I wrote a man who acted like men really do, (readers) would probably hate him,” she says.

Oh, I see. What I have to do is to use a female mind-set in writing Herod so that he will think in the way a female thinks he ought to think, rather than the way I would have him think, operating from my male point of view. Of course, in putting myself in the female mind-set, I will probably make the female react like I would want her to react, instead of the way she would really react. (Regina is getting a headache.)

Today, the women in romance novels can have a sexual past. They are also stronger, more of a partner with the man than his handmaiden. “You’re also less likely to find a hero who has bedded everything female,” Smith says. The distasteful side of the real world intrudes as well. Heroines are former prostitutes. Heroes can be recovering alcoholics or dyslexic — or perhaps both. Jeopard Surprise whips out a condom during a love scene with his Cherokee-Scandinavian queen (however, the “c” word itself is not used — it’s referred to as “a small package that she recognized immediately.”)

However, there are still a few things that are frowned upon in the romance genre. While a heroine can have a sexual past, she cannot hop from bed to bed between the covers of the book. Clinical names are not used for sexual organs, particularly male sexual organs (thus, we read about Raith MacLean’s “splendid arousal.” No mention of the “p” word.) After they meet, the hero and heroine rarely become romantically involved with anybody else. And Drusilla, it seems, should not be caught cussing like a sailor. Our star-crossed couple must adhere to certain standards of proper conduct.

“You don’t have your heroine going around smoking dope,” Bushyhead says. “You might have a secondary character do that, but there would have to be some reason (in the plot.)”
Also frowned upon by many authors is gratuitous sex. The explicitness of the sex scenes in these novels varies from extreme to tame, depending on the author and the line. But all three writers insist on having a mutual attraction and affection between their characters that motivates them to have sex — and the aspect is as important as the actual description of what’s going on between the sheets.

“They may be going at it like bunnies, but you talk about the emotional side of it,” says Smith. Bushyhead describes it as “the difference between (writing about) making love and copulation.”

However, one bizarre plot device still pops up frequently in romance novels. The hero, it seems, has a penchant for kidnapping the heroine, who subsequently falls in love with her abductor.
In “Tender Feud,” Katrine is accosted in the first paragraph. Seventy-eight pages later, she makes the observation that was crossing my mind as I kept seeing kidnapping as a prelude to affection:

It would be imbecilic in the extreme to develop an attraction for her lawless captor.

Yet Katrine proceeds to do just that.

“It’s a fantasy, but it’s also possible,” says Bushyhead, pointing, as an example, to the case of Patty Hearst, the California heiress who joined the terrorist group that kidnapped her. Indeed, the abduction scenario is an illustration of a long-held observation about romance heroines; namely, that the woman’s attraction to the man is not willfulness on her part, but rather something that is out of her control.

And what the readers also know that the heroine doesn’t is that the hero is usually doing her a favor by kidnapping her. Jeopard kidnaps his Cherokee-Scandinavian queen to save her from assassins sent by a smarmy, wicked pretender to the throne named Olaf. She, of course, forgives Jeopard when she finds that out, even though he chained her up in a cave.

Believe it or not, romance novels have actually been the focus of collegiate study. Yes, the ivy-covered halls of academia have thundered with discussions of whether these novels are yet another tool of male oppression of women — whether the escapism they represent is harmful or helpful.

An assistant professor of film and literature, Tania Modleski, in a book subtly titled “Loving With a Vengeance,” put forth the theory that the books are a way for women to deal with the men in their life. A common feature in romances is that the hero, even after he falls in love with the heroine, refuses to admit his love and acts with hostility toward her as a defense mechanism. Modleski subscribes to the notion that, by showing male hostility as a manifestation of love, these books allow women to believe that male hostility in their own lives has the same motivation. (Regina thinks Tania ought to lighten up a bit.)

The authors themselves — the people from whom, after all, these novels spring — subscribe to theories that are not as psychologically deep.

“This is the one genre that speaks to women’s fantasies and doesn’t degrade them,” says Smith. And she rejects those pundits who believe women become addicted to these novels in an attempt to escape the deficiencies in their own worlds. “We know the difference between fantasy and reality.”

Bushyhead attributes the popularity to the “feel-good” aspect of the books, believing her readers are simply people who “don’t want to wallow in pain and agony (when they read.)” And Potter hits upon what might be the most basic reason of all.

“They’re good entertainment,” she says. “They have likable characters, and they are generally pretty fast-paced.”

So the bottom line appears to be that Herod and Drusilla have to be likable, redeemable and, despite twists and turns and tension that keep them apart, desperately in love with each other. He will probably kidnap her at some point — but only for her own good. She won’t spend her idle time chugging tequila or watching porno movies, but she won’t be sitting in her room doing needlepoint and waiting for her prince to come, either. When they make love, the experience will be ethereal, not carnal. And, of course, they will live happily ever after.

Regina has her marching orders. See you on The New York Times best-seller list.