Martha Stewart Turns Her Cameras On The Bee

By Shannon Hicks

A few days after Martha Stewart announced in a New York Times Sunday magazine article that she was thinking about moving out of Westport, one of her crews showed up in Newtown. Were they scouting the area for new living quarters for one of the country’s most popular lifestyle mavens? Would Newtown become the new home base for the nationally syndicated television show Martha Stewart Living? Was Newtown about to be put on the map, for all the world to watch from the comfort of their own homes?

Well, yes and no.

A production crew from the television show Martha Stewart Living visited Newtown on April 11, but the visit was to spend time with R. Scudder Smith, the owner and publisher of Bee Publishing Co., Inc. Mr Smith was contacted by producers of the television show recently and told that they found the idea of a family-owned newspaper in its third generation of family ownership was “intriguing.” The fact the newspaper is still continuously published after 123 years of existence was also very interesting, he was told.

A day of taping in Newtown will result in an upcoming segment about The Bee’s national newspaper, Antiques and The Arts Weekly. The date of the airing has not yet been set.

The seven-member crew arrived at 8 am at the printing building of Bee Publishing Co. Tuesday morning, and proceeded to spend nearly 12 hours with the newspaper publisher and various members of his newspaper staffs. The lifestyle maven herself, Martha Stewart, was never in Newtown.

The camera crew and its producer, Linda Benya, received a day-long crash course on not only the history of Antiques and The Arts Weekly and its sister newspaper, The Newtown Bee, but also a behind-the-scenes look at how the newspapers are put together.

The crew spent the morning hours at Bee Publishing Co.’s printing facility on Commerce Road, recording the end stages of the newspaper’s process before it is delivered to the post office for home delivery or picked up by courier for vendor distribution. The crew was allowed to see first-hand the processes of plate burning, binding, bundling, and the presses themselves running off copies of issues of Antiques and The Arts Weekly dated April 14, 2000.

While Bee Publishing Co., has been producing newspapers since 1877, when the first issue of The Newtown Bee rolled off the press, Antiques and The Arts Weekly is a much newer publication. When now-publisher R. Scudder Smith returned to Newtown during the 1960s after attending college, he joined the family business. At that time, the newspaper was under the caring hand of Paul S. Smith, representing the second generation of Smith family ownership of the newspaper.

With his return to his hometown, R. Scudder Smith also brought with him a love for antiques, particularly folk art. While his father was still publishing the paper, R. Scudder Smith gained permission to devote a few pages of each week’s Bee to the antiques world. And in the issue of The Bee dated June 28, 1963, Mr Smith launched a four-page section of the paper devoted to antiques. Readers and advertisers loved it.

“I think we infringed on my father’s space in the local newspaper, though,” Mr Smith chuckled as he recalled Tuesday afternoon the small start of the now-international newspaper that is referred to by readers and admirers as “the Bible of the antiques world.”

Mr Smith sat for an interview that lasted over one hour and explained the newspaper’s workings, his personal history with the family-owned newspaper business, and the possibilities for the future for both The Newtown Bee and Antiques and The Arts Weekly.

 “We covered 176 shows last year, and between our in-house staff and our freelance stringers, we reported on 1,400 auctions in 1999,” Mr Smith told Ms Benya Tuesday afternoon during the taped interview. Over 12,500 pages were filled last year, and Antiques and The Arts Weekly prints on average 23,000 copies each week.

One of the things that most intrigued the producers at Martha Stewart Living was not only the fact the newspaper is still owned by a family, but that much of it is still put together the old-fashioned way: by hand. Mr Smith remains very much a hands-on publisher, in fact.

“We do a lot of things the old-fashioned way,” he said Tuesday afternoon. “The Bee is done mostly through pagination now, but we still do much of A&A by hand.” Mr Smith puts together a large percent of the front section of the paper every week himself, which is where the majority of the features and press releases are found; the second half of the paper is filled completely by advertising, which is laid out by the company’s production department.

Mr Smith explained for the camera how the paper is put together each week, how it is decided which stories go in and which are held, why so much of the process is still done by hand, and his involvement with each step of the process. He and the producer also discussed the idea of the family business, whether Mr Smith felt his predecessors would be happy with today’s newspapers, and the future of Antiques and The Arts Weekly.

Following the interview, the Martha Stewart Living crew spent hours shooting scenes throughout the company’s main building at 5 Church Hill Road.