Arkansas Times: Cease & Desist
We are forced to go public to save our business.
The Reckoning lives or dies based off just a few factors.
Paid subscriptions is the only source of revenue for our small business. When a reader upgrades to a paid subscription and shares our work, it goes a long way toward keeping us here working for a better Arkansas.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is also a critical component for any business in today's fast-paced digital world.
South Arkansas Reckoning, Inc. was established in July 2023 at the Arkansas Secretary of State's office with a name unlike any other media. It was intentional. We do not want to be associated with mainstream, legacy, or corporate media outlets. We will call out unethical editors and reporters.
In February 2024, Suzi wrote and published a “Dear Sarah Letter” that got a lot of traction on social media. It was very SEO friendly. Big names attract higher volumes of traffic. The names in the story: Sarah Sanders, Taylor Swift, Super Bowl. The byline? Suzi Parker.
Suzi investigated the story first, and the Reckoning published it on Feb. 13.
In a fantasy world where ethical journalists would still exist, every version of a Super Bowl story with a reference to our governor would generate attribution to the Reckoning with a link connecting readers to the original source, the Reckoning.
That did not happen.
Enter, the Arkansas Times.
They first ran a version of the Super Bowl story written by Austin Gelder, the Arkansas Times editor, on Feb. 27. Their main source: a Talking Points Memo story. On Feb. 29, the Arkansas Times ran a second Super Bowl story by Gelder.
Standing up for ethics, Suzi publicly shamed Talking Points Memo on Feb. 29 for failing to give attribution to the Reckoning.
Something, though, was off.
During early March we began to notice our web traffic fluctuating erratically — up and down.
We pushed on during the following months with stories about: Bryan Malinowski's death, Philip Reynolds’ murder acquittal, Travis “Joey” Posey and the Fordyce Mad Butcher shooting.
The Reckoning received international coverage of the Fordyce mass shooting. Each outlet asked for permission and gave proper attribution to our work.
During spring and summer, we worked hard seven days a week. Our web traffic was still fluctuating.
August was a hard month for the Reckoning. Richard and his son spent the month in North Carolina for cancer treatment. It took a toll on the two of us at the Reckoning.
We regrouped after Richard returned and began covering the infighting among the Grassroots Patriots of the Republican Party.
Suzi began researching our SEO and looking for plagiarized content over the previous months in an effort to find out what was affecting our business.
She immediately discovered a huge problem. Our name was at the top of the Google search engine, but a link to our site was not.
Clearly we are NOT — and never have been — and never will be in business with or associated with the Arkansas Times at all. Diving deeper, we discovered a unique cluster in Google Images.
The two men holding the watermelon are connected to the Arkansas Times. They are not connected to us. We have never written about Trio's, Entergy or the court building in Little Rock. We have no idea who took these photographs or owns the copyright to them. We do not.
We had only written about the governor at the Super Bowl. The picture of Gov. Sanders was posted on her Instagram account.
Investigating the photos further, when we clicked the photos, every single one linked back to this page on the Arkansas Times.
Click this screen recording to hear Google read the page to you. It's interesting.
At this point, we realized the Reckoning brand was attached to images on the internet that clearly were not associated with our site.
We also realized that the information we had discovered could confuse potential subscribers to our website — again our only source of revenue — who were searching for the Reckoning.
Something was wrong.
We contacted the law offices of Gregory Payne in September 2024 to send a cease and desist letter in hopes of correcting the issues we had discovered.
Here is a screen recording taken at the time, showing the arrangement captured on the Google search engine. Note the never-ending loop using our name “South Arkansas Reckoning”. Clearly the use of our name did not send traffic to our site.
We also discovered that the Reckoning Archives looked as if they were owned by the Arkansas Times and by subscribing to the Arkansas Times newsletter a person would receive access to the Reckoning archives. That is simply not the case, folks. When anyone hit the “Visit” button it took that visitor to their site not ours.
In the days following this letter, Payne spoke to representatives at the Arkansas Times. Under his advisement and in good faith to resolve these issues we contacted Austin Gelder, the Arkansas Times editor. You can listen to that conversation here.
During the conversation, some of the photos with our name attached to them on Google Images disappeared in real time.
The Sanders Super Bowl article was removed from the page titled “South Arkansas Reckoning”. That page remains live with our company's name stating “Nothing found.” Yet, ads continue to run on that page even at the time of publishing this article. The url is:
https://arktimes.com/tag/south-arkansas-reckoning
We have received many weird messages, and frankly, many weird looks since March 2024. At one point a person even solicted Suzi to write a story in hopes of landing the cover of the Arkansas Times magazine. She quickly informed the person she was not connected to the Times. That person was clearly confused.
A few days after our call with Gelder, another trove of new images appeared. Again, we do not know who took these pictures or who owns the copyright to them. We do not, but our business name is attached.
One picture appearing in Google Images was extremely concerning. It was a photo of a Little Rock pro-Hamas rally bearing the words “South Arkansas Reckoning Archives - Arkansas Times.” There were other random photos, too. See the screenshots below from Google Images.
None of these images are connected to any Reckoning story or social media post. The Reckoning was also tagged online in the Arkansas Times’ October print magazine cover. However, we could not find our business name mentioned in the magazine — and we looked. We still want to know why.
Realizing that our good faith efforts to resolve this problem had failed, we began searching for a legal team. That search led us to Mitchell Williams.
Another letter was sent.
Arkansas Times owner Alan Leveritt responded to the letter.
The South Arkansas Reckoning page remains live on the Arkansas Times site with a rotating advertisement appearing above our name and ads also run vertically down the page.
A page that is not live seems to appear like this.
No ads are on that page.
We do not accept the response our lawyer received from the Arkansas Times.
We can no longer wait for or expect a simple resolution to the problems we are facing.
But we can do what we do best, be transparent.
According to Leveritt's response: “We believe this is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of how google works.”
We totally disagree.
Further, according to Leveritt’s response, “Google sets up an Archive page.”
Again, we disagree. See the code below from the Wayback Machine.
We appreciate the Arkansas Times’ efforts, thus far, by removing some of the problem content.
We demand that the Arkansas Times take down the website page bearing our name immediately.
We demand that the Arkansas Times clarify to our readers — and to theirs —how this happened and continued to happen after receiving the first cease and desist letter from our lawyer in September.
We demand that the Arkansas Times make a good faith effort to resolve all issues.
If you unfortunately subscribed to the wrong website, we want to know. Email us at southarkansasreckoning@proton.me.
Attention, readers. Now more than ever we desperately need your financial support.
Please help us continue publishing by upgrading your free subscription to a paid subscription for $33.75 a year. We cannot turn back the clock to February 2024. It’s up to each of you to step up if you want us to survive.
For those of you who believe in the United States Constitution and believe in maintaining a truly free press, we need your help. Share our work. Please tell your friends and family about South Arkansas Reckoning.
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The legal fees are real. This is not the only issue we face. We promised our readers transparency, and today we are making good on that promise. We need your financial support.