Jim Prince, editor and publisher of The Neshoba Democrat and president of Prince Newspaper Holdings, has been named by Governor Haley Barbour to a commission overseeing a new state civil rights museum…Commercial Dispatch reporter Joey Vaughn has been named assistant city editor of the Columbus afternoon daily…The second editon of the Greenwood Commonwealth’s annual Leflore Illustrated has hit the streets.
We’re a little behind the curve on this one: The Clarion-Ledger, under the direction of new business editor Kevin Richardson, has increased local business coverage while cutting back on some other features, including the full stock report. The C-L reported it will now only include stocks of local interest and directed readers to its Website for the full report.
Ramblings and rumblings from Mississippi writers of late…
Patsy Brumfield of the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal in Tupelo: “It seems some members of our City Council have been meeting in private to talk about, well who knows what — no one from the public was there to know.”
Mark Thornton, editor of The Star-Herald in Kosciusko: “Would you want to know about a rash of burglaries in your neighborhood? Or a series of purse-snatchings at a local shopping center? Or a rapist stalking a certain area of your city? Of course you would.”
Tim Kalich, editor of The Greenwood Commonwealth: “It was a terrific letter, just the kind that drives up the readership of (the editorial) page. It was about a controversial local subject, written by a local person. The writer was taking a potentially unpopular stand, and she was speaking with conviction…It was a good letter. It was, unfortunately, also a dishonest one.”
Charlie Mitchell, managing editor of The Vicksburg Post: “Whenever I get ready to return to Vicksburg from anyplace north of Memphis, I often say something like, ‘I need to get back to a place where people don’t have accents.’ That quip isn’t particularly funny, but may help make a point about a topic close to my heart: media bias.’
Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal business editor Dennis Seid on the week he spent recently with a local delegation exploring trade opportunities abroad: “I could devote a year’s worth of columns about what I experienced in a week in China…My impressions of China are almost impossible to put in a sentence, much less a single word. However this one will suffice for now: “wow.”
Writes Sid Salter in his Sunday column for The Clarion-Ledger: “Mississippi’s newspapers aren’t interested in getting forensic criminal evidence details on every crime and they aren’t interested in publishing information that causes crimes not to be solved. But providing basic information about crimes is a central mission of journalism in the role of alerting the public to dangers or potential dangers.
Howard Ball, author of “Justice in Mississippi: The Murder Trial of Edgar Ray Killen,” writes on George Mason University’s History News Network Website it’s high time for a Truth and Reconciliation Committee in the Magnolia State.
Writes Ball: Again and again…from the Philadelphia Coalition’s Statements; and from journalists such as Donna Ladd, the Editor-in-Chief of the Jackson Free Press, the idea of a TRC-type process in Mississippi is seen as the way to reconciliation and greater equality…
Clarion-Ledger investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell, fresh from being given the Lovejoy award at Colby College in Waterville, ME, is profiled in this Concord Monitor piece for his “18 years pursuing justice” in the Magnolia State.
Writes columnist Mike Pride: “(Mitchell’s) work has resulted in the jailing of four Ku Klux Klansmen who were involved in some of the most horrific killings of the Civil Rights era. The four are the assassin of Medgar Evers; the man who ordered the firebombing that killed Vernon Dahmer, a leader of the NAACP; one of the church bombers who killed four girls in Birmingham, Ala.; and a man involved in the killings of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner on the day after they arrived in Mississippi.
Writes correspondent Pam Firmin in The Sun Herald: A beautiful just-released coffee-table book, “Proud to Call Mississippi Home,” about famous Americans from Mississippi makes the local reader very proud and a little bit crazy at the same time. It’s a post-Katrina effort to show a viable Mississippi. The book is both contemporary and traditional and it uses glitz and glamour as glue. The book’s lyrical theme is that Mississippi is a state of mind and a good place to call home.
Pulitzer-prize winner William Raspberry, a native of Okolona, is referenced in the volume.
State Farm has ordered an independent investigation into one of its vendors and suspended work with Haag Engineering Co. based on an Oklahoma jury’s finding that the insurance company used Haag reports to maliciously deny policyholder claims, The Sun Herald reports. The Insurance Journal trade newspaper is following the story.
Today’s Jack Sunn column in The Clarion-Ledger address a reader query pertaining to the airport in Tylertown, which, according to the C-L and the Tylertown Times, is named in honor of the latter’s longtime publisher Paul Pittman, who died in 1983.
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