Editor & Publisher magazine, America’s oldest journal covering the newspaper industry, announced today that it was awarding it’s 2007 Publisher of the Year award to Walter Hussman, publisher of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. According to the story on E&P’s website, “E&P portrays a savvy publisher who prevailed in the legendary Little Rock newspaper war of that raged from the 1970s into the 1990s against two successive rivals who began with big head starts and far deeper pockets. But the owners of the Arkansas Gazette, once the undisputed market-leader, underestimated the 27-year-old who took over the sickly Arkansas Democrat, who introduced such innovations as free classified private-party ads — decades before Craigslist.”

The story also notes, “Perhaps most controversially, Hussman also urges fellow publishers to stop giving away news and information on their Web sites. The Democrat-Gazette puts most of its Web content behind a paywall when print circulation began to soften. In the most recent reporting period, the Democrat-Gazette was one of the few metro papers anywhere to actually gain circulation.”

Not long ago, New York Times reporter Kevin Sack spoke at the Clinton School of Public Service.  In his speech, he noted the challenge that sites like Yahoo and MSN, both of which provide free content, present to newspapers seeking to adapt to the digital age.  Hussman was in attendance and spoke up during the discussion on how newspapers need to manage shriking advertising revenues and the emergence of online bloggers.