I.C. Murrell has been named editor of The Pine Bluff Commercial.
He will replace Byron Tate, who is leaving the Commercial to be managing editor of Arkansas Times magazine in Little Rock.
Murrell’s first day as editor will be Wednesday.
“I’ve always prepared myself to step up when necessary because journalism is a great business,” said Murrell, “but it demands leadership, it demands responsibility and it demands people who are willing to meet the challenges head on and to serve the people.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1881.
Tate said Tuesday will be his last day at the Commercial. He begins working at Arkansas Times on March 9.
“When this thing came together, it was a bit terrifying,” Tate told the Commercial staff Tuesday morning. “Publishing seven days a week doesn’t leave much room for error. But you all — so talented in your individual ways — are forever finding the stories that give readers a reason to pick up The Pine Bluff Commercial. It has been a pleasure and an honor to lead you for what is now 5 1/2 years. And I am very excited to see that I.C. is taking over as editor. I know he will do an incredible job.”
Murrell said this is a critical time for journalism.
“People rely on the truth to have something to believe in,” he said. “This is our opportunity to step up and deliver the truth to the people because truth is light, which is what the people really want. There are people who promote mistruths because they want certain statements to be true. And we don’t mind exposing mistruths for the truth to prevail.”
The Commercial was founded in 1881. Paul Greenberg, the newspaper’s editorial page editor, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for editorials he wrote the previous year on civil rights.
Previously a stand-alone newspaper, the Commercial has been a four-page section of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette since 2020.
Tate’s hiring came shortly after the Democrat-Gazette hired Benjamin Hardy, Arkansas Times’ managing editor, to be assistant city editor.
Murrell (pronounced mer-REL) has spent a decade at the Commercial, serving in a variety of positions, including sports editor from 2011 to 2015 and senior reporter from 2021 to 2026.
Murrell, 45, grew up in Pine Bluff and graduated from Dollarway High School. He earned a bachelor’s degree in speech and communication from the University of Arkansas at Monticello in 2003.
He served as sports editor for the Advance-Monticellonian during his last year of college.
Upon graduation, Murrell spent six months as a sports reporter for The Daily Citizen in Searcy before becoming assistant sports editor at the Batesville Daily Guard, where he worked for about a year.
He spent the next year as sports editor for the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Miss.
From there, Murrell headed for the Pacific Northwest, where he was sports editor of the East Oregonian in Pendleton, Ore., from November 2005 to June 2007.
He spent the next year as a sports reporter and copy editor at the Idaho Press-Tribune, in Nampa, Idaho.
From there, Murrell moved to Oklahoma, where he served for two years as sports editor for The Ardmoreite in Ardmore before taking a similar position at the Stillwater NewsPress in June 2010.
In August 2010, Murrell moved back to Pine Bluff and spent a few months stringing for the Commercial before being hired as a staff sports reporter in May 2011. He was promoted to sports editor two months later. While working as sports editor, he also took on the duties of features editor for six months.
In July 2015, Murrell’s position was eliminated and he spent the next couple of months at the paper working as a copy editor.
“Deep down, I was still a journalist,” he said. “The change didn’t really feel natural to me.”
Murrell then took a job as sports editor at the Port Arthur News in Texas. He was promoted to editor in October 2019.
Murrell said by December 2020, he needed to move back to Pine Bluff because his mother wasn’t doing well.
“I called Byron out of the blue and said, ‘Do you have anything at the Commercial?'” said Murrell. “He said, ‘Yes, we need a reporter.'”
So Murrell moved back to Pine Bluff and began working as a senior reporter at the Commercial in January 2021. His mother Diane Williams Murrell died March 26 of that year.
Murrell said he’ll need to hire a reporter now that he is moving up to the editor position. The Commercial still has one news reporter, Eplunus Colvin, but Murrell said the paper needs two.
“I’m not going to take a lot of time to celebrate because there’s so much that we really have to tackle,” said Murrell. “I’m always in work mode.”
Tate, 70, has worked for the Commercial off and on since 1986. He has served as editor/publisher since 2020, when the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and its parent company, WEHCO Newspapers Inc. of Little Rock, purchased the Commercial from Gannett.
Tate said he thinks the Commercial was losing money under its previous owner and “they were probably ready to just close the doors, which they did in some markets.”
Then Walter Hussman Jr., who was publisher of the Democrat-Gazette, and Eliza Hussman Gaines, then managing editor of the Democrat-Gazette, announced the acquisition of the Commercial.
“They really came along and pulled it back from the brink because they didn’t want Pine Bluff to be without a paper,” said Tate.
Tate said Hussman called him and asked if he would come back to run the Commercial. He did.
By being part of the Democrat-Gazette, the Commercial could do things a paper its size couldn’t do on it’s own, said Tate. That includes social media impacts, newsletters “that help us engage with readers where they are” and having the page layout design done by the Democrat-Gazette.