Arth, business weekly pioneer, has died

Marvin Arth, a journalist who was one of the leaders of the emerging weekly business newspaper trend in the early 1980s, has died, according to multiple sources.

Arth, who once won  a Walter Matthau look-alike contest, had been living in Kansas City.

Arth had worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Times in the mid-1960s and then as news director of WDAF-TV in Kansas City as well. But he was one of the first editors of the Kansas City Business Journal when it started in 1982 as the first newspaper of what became American City Business Journals. Arth was a friend of Don Keough, who founded the company with backing from investors.

Arth was editor of a newsletter for newsletter editors but began hanging around the Business Journal offices to help Keough, said Steve Woodward, who was also an early employee of the paper.

“He was really experienced and serious about his craft,” said Woodward. “But he wasn’t a serious person. He was what I would call old school. He had such a diverse background and had been in Kansas City for so long, so he knew where all the bodies were bodied. He knew everybody in town, and everybody knew him.

When Woodward left Kansas City to start the ACBJ paper in Portland, Ore., Arth took over as its editor.

“He wasn’t an investigative reporter, but he could go out and get any story,” said Woodward. “And he was very good at directing other reporters. That was the part of him I saw.”

When ACBJ began opening papers across the country, Arth would travel to those cities and help the staff get off the ground.

“Keough relied on him heavily because he knew how to run and get an operation started,” said Woodward, who later ran the San Francisco Business Times. “He was fascinated with computer systems.”

ACBJ went public in 1987 and owned 36 papers by that time. It was sold to a group led by former Dow Jones & Co. president Ray Shaw in 1989.