Brookhaven Daily Leader publisher Bill Jacobs has joined the National Newspaper Association board of directors. He’s the first Mississippian to serve since the late Dan Phillips, assistant publisher of The Oxford Eagle and former MPA president, was on the board and ultimately served as its president in the late 1990s.
After Tom Andrews, publisher of The Picayune Item, sent a letter to Editor and Publisher encouraging more recognition for smaller newspapers who mounted herculean efforts following Hurricane Katrina, the trade publication responded accordingly.
Reports Anna Crane on editorandpublisher.com: While there was a national focus on the struggles and rebuilding of top gulf newspapers like The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, La., smaller papers like the Sea Coast Echo in Bay Saint Louis, Miss., were also hit hard by Hurricane Katrina.
From newsblues.com: Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric who walked away with an obscene amount of “executive compensation” when he retired in 2002, is thinking about spending some of his loot to buy the venerable Boston Globe.
All the unpleasant Monday headlines in one heaping helping…The San Jose Mercury News plans to lay off as many as 101 employees over the next two months to cut costs and make up for declining advertising revenue, the paper said Friday…The new publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News told employees Friday that layoffs are “unavoidable” because advertising revenue is down and the owners need to cut costs to meet their bank obligations…From the “Whoops” file: The Herald-Tribune published the wrong photo with its story Thursday identifying the priest who may have sexually abused former Rep. Mark Foley.
When Hurricane Katrina was headed toward Pascagoula, the first thing Melanie Polk-Ellifritt packed was the film footage of Dr. Ira B. Harkey Jr. she and her husband Scott had shot for a documentary on the legendary American journalist and civil rights advocate.
The Mississippi Press is moving to Gautier as of Monday and Publisher Wanda Jacobs said the only thing changing is the address.
Ink in the morning papers over the execution of confessed killer Bobby Glen Wilcher:
Jack Elliott Jr. of The Associated Press: A Mississippi man was executed by lethal injection Wednesday for fatally stabbing two women he led home from a bar in 1982. Bobby Glen Wilcher, 43, died at 6:42 p.m. at the state penitentiary, hours after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene…
Jimmie Gates reporting for The Clarion-Ledger: Family members of two Scott County women brutally murdered by Bobby Glen Wilcher hugged corrections officials after Wilcher was executed Wednesday evening at the Mississippi State Penitentiary. It took 24 years for Wilcher’s execution to be carried out, but it took only about 11 minutes for him to die by lethal injection for the 1982 slayings of Katie Bell Moore and Velma Odell Noblin. Both mothers were stabbed more than 20 times each…
Chris Allen Baker in the Scott County Times of Forest, the local paper that has covered the Wilcher case for a quarter century: Wilcher’s last hope of a reprieve was void when word came at approximately 4:30 p.m. that the U.S. Supreme Court had denied Wilcher’s final appeal, clearing the way for the execution and ending more than two decades of state and federal appeals. Gov. Haley Barbour had said he would not halt the execution...
Clarion-Ledger Perspective editor Sid Salter, who twice interviewed Wilcher while he served on Death Row: It was in this building - Unit 17, the old death row that is now used only for executions - that I interviewed Wilcher in 1985 and again in 1988. In this decaying old building 18 years ago he told me he stabbed Velma Odell Noblin and Katie Bell Moore on a deserted U.S. Forest Service road on a rainy night in 1982 because “it felt good…“
The Christian News and Media Agency (”PR With a Higher Purpose”) continues to follow the controvery over the Pillow Talk sex advice column in The Student Printz at Southern Miss…
“A graphic sex column published weekly…is still drawing the ire of some students and faculty on the Hattiesburg campus following a column last month that was essentially a how-to article on oral sex. Although USM president Shelby Thames has condemned the content of the ‘Pillow Talk’ column, the paper’s staff has not been reprimanded, nor has the column been cleaned up.”
This week’s hard-hitting edition of the advice column tackles the hairy issue of body waxing.
And here’s something from the “Whaddaya Know File:” Bellydancing is popular on the USM campus.
Paris L. Gray, a 12-year photographer at the Courier-Post of Cherry Hill, N.J., known professionally for his compelling coverage of sensitive events and personally for his unique style of yellow-tinted glasses and eclectic hats, died Sunday morning after a battle with cancer.
Gray was one of the legions of journalists who visited and worked in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the state last year…
Jim Cortese, a retired Commercial Appeal editor and columnist, died Sept. 20 at Hillcrest-South Assisted Living in Knoxville. He was 89. He began his career as a journalist in Holly Springs…
Marty Russell, columnist for the Daily Journal in Tupelo:
“I got one of those phone calls Tuesday that every adviser to a college, student-run newspaper dreads and all of us have to deal with on a regular basis. The gist of it was, ‘Why can’t you do something about what these students are saying about us in the newspaper?’”…
Hit Any Key
