Deep South Today, the nonprofit regional news network behind Mississippi Today, Verite News and The Current, is excited to announce that Northwest Arkansas-based journalist Jordan P. Hickey will serve as the founding editor-in-chief of Arkansas Today, a new newsroom serving Arkansas.
Hickey, who has worked as a journalist in Arkansas since 2013, brings more than a decade of experience reporting, editing and leading editorial teams across print, digital and audio. He will build Arkansas Today’s newsroom from the ground up, with an emphasis on in-depth and investigative reporting, coverage of historically overlooked communities, and partnerships with the state’s existing local newsrooms.
Hickey, a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, is a member and mentor with the Society of Environmental Journalists. He is fluent in English and Spanish, and is conversational in Urdu. He begins his new role effective immediately.
“When I first moved to Arkansas as a young journalist, I remember marveling at how easy it was to find good stories,” Hickey said. “Only later did I come to realize that this ease was indicative of a more pernicious systemic issue — that so many stories outside existing coverage areas were going untold because there was no one there to hear them. With Arkansas Today, I see an opportunity to address those gaps and to do something good for this place I love.”
Hickey spent more than seven years at Arkansas Life, the statewide general interest magazine published by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, rising from associate editor to senior editor and ultimately editor. Before that, he helped launch a hyper-local digital news website called Stry.us covering Springfield, Missouri.
Since 2020, Hickey has worked as an independent journalist and editor, with bylines in The Washington Post, Oxford American, Investigate Midwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Garden & Gun, Southern Living, Longreads, and many other outlets. His reporting focuses on underreported stories about rural life, food systems, agriculture and infrastructure. He most recently served as managing editor of Adventure Cyclist magazine and as a contributing editor for The New Territory. He also co-produced The Growing Season, Arkansas PBS’s first-ever podcast, which followed two farming families over a 10-month growing season to document the mental health toll of modern agriculture.
Hickey’s work has earned national recognition. He was a 2025 James Beard Foundation Award finalist for profile writing and a 2025 Food Systems and Public Health Fellow with the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. He was named Magazine Writer of the Year by the Great Plains Journalism Awards (2020) and Writer of the Year by the International Regional Magazine Association (2018), and he was the Arkansas Society of Professional Journalists’ inaugural Diamond Journalist of the Year (2016). In 2016, he received the Emerging Writer Award from the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. He is also a 2025 Fund for Investigative Journalism grantee.
“We searched for an editor who knows Arkansans and the challenges facing them, as well as a keen sense of how strong accountability journalism can surface solutions for change,” said Adam Ganucheau, Deep South Today’s executive editor and chief content officer. “We’ve got that in Jordan. His connections with so many journalists across the state, his own deep Arkansas reporting and editing experience, and his commitment to the state’s future generations of journalists makes him a perfect fit for this role.”
Arkansas Today will launch later this fall. Several new positions ranging from editor to reporter to audience staff will be posted in the coming days, and partnerships with existing Arkansas newsrooms will soon be announced.
The newsroom will have physical office locations in both Little Rock and Bentonville, with plans to spread editorial staff across the state to deeply cover stories of importance to Arkansans. The launch comes after Deep South Today spent years listening to people across Arkansas about their news and information needs.
“After over two years of planning, research, community listening, and developing support for the new Arkansas Today newsroom, I couldn’t be more pleased that Jordan Hickey will be its inaugural leader,” said Warwick Sabin, president and CEO of Deep South Today. “He brings a rich and diverse set of experiences in journalism, along with an intimate understanding of the state and its people. Most importantly, he has demonstrated a depth of thought and care for the kind of information that needs to be unearthed and conveyed for the public good, and that will make all the difference as he builds a news operation that will be truly impactful for all Arkansans.”
About Deep South Today:
Deep South Today is a nonprofit network of local newsrooms that includes Mississippi Today, Verite News and The Current. Its new Arkansas Today newsroom will launch in fall 2026.
Across the network, Deep South Today operates a centralized business and editorial infrastructure that allows local newsrooms to focus on reporting while they share the back-office capacity that keeps them sustainable at scale. The organization’s reporting has earned recognition at the highest levels of national journalism — including the Pulitzer Prize — and Deep South Today offers that coverage at no cost to other news organizations across the South, including commercial and for-profit outlets, so credible local information reaches the widest possible audience.
With this regional scale and scope, Deep South Today is rebuilding the local information infrastructure of communities across the South. Its newsrooms produce deep, nonpartisan reporting and put it in the hands of the people and leaders who can act on it together.
This article first appeared on Deep South Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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