Tom Arviso Jr.

Publisher, The Navajo Times & CEO, Navajo Times Publishing Company

Tom Arviso, Jr. majored in journalism at Arizona State University. He became managing editor of the Navajo Times in October 1988, editor and publisher in 1993, and was named CEO of the Navajo Times Publishing Company in 2004.

Arviso is a former board vice president and treasurer of the Native American Journalists Association’s Board of Directors, a member of the Arizona Newspapers Association’s Board of Directors and a board member of UNITY – Journalists of Color. He has received numerous awards such as the John Peter and Anna Catherine Zenger Award for Freedom of the Press and the People’s Right to Know, a John S. Knight Fellowship in Journalism in 2000-2001at Stanford University, the Arizona Newspapers Association Freedom of Information Award, and The Native American Journalists Association’s Wassaja Award, for extraordinary service to Native journalism.

[AZ 0401] - The Story of The Navajo Times (10:12)

Tom Arviso, Jr., CEO, Navajo Times Publishing Co., publisher, The Navajo Times, says The Times started as a Tribal Council newsletter in 1958. The Navajo Times newspaper was copyrighted as a weekly in August 1960. It was converted to a 5-days-a-week, daily newspaper: The Navajo Times Today -- in 1984. Then Peter MacDonald, the Navajo Nation president, forcibly shut it down in 1987. MacDonald got in legal trouble and the newspaper came back as a weekly in 1988. In January 2004, The Times was incorporated as an independent, for-profit newspaper, which is how it operates today. The newspaper’s path has been a long struggle, and Arviso tells the story.