InkBlots

Scott County Times publisher Brian Blackley acknowledges the job isn’t always easy, particularly when someone you know is at the center of a difficult news story…”Because my responsibilities here at The Times involve managing the overall operation of the newspaper (and the newsroom represents about a fourth of that in terms of personnel), I don’t get in the middle of most news stories. But sometimes no matter how hard I try, I get pulled in and generally, when I do, it stings…

“For our part, this is the kind of sensational stuff that we’d just as soon not touch. You see, we know these folks are not just people whose names are on investigation reports. We know their families and we’re their friends...”

The Starkville Daily News announced plans to relocate its offices to a renovated former car dealership and move its press from the Daily Times Leader in West Point to the facility.

SDN editor Brian Hawkins in a Sunday column: “The move, which will involve moving printing operations to Starkville, will be a big one for the Daily News and will allow us to expand what we offer you as our readers…

“And you get to be a part of the expansion. During the summer months, we will be creating a reader advisory board to help guide us as we make plans for a redesign and to generate ideas of ways we can continue to improve and grow our community newspaper.”

The West Point and Starkville newspapers are owned by Horizon Publications. The refurbished six-unit Goss Community Press will reportedly have two units added when it is moved.

Samir Husni tipped us off to his new blog during a recent visit with us at the Silver Em ceremony in Oxford. Check it out.

Described as a “jack of all trades” for The Vicksburg Post, where he had worked as a reporter for 38 years, and a lover of “the great outdoors,” Fred Messina died Thursday at his home. He was 61.

“He knew everybody, always worked to get his stories right and was a lifelong fan of life in what he would call ‘this neck of the woods,’” said executive editor Charlie Mitchell, who worked with him for 32 years.

The Clarion-Ledger’s Rick Cleveland on the passing of David Halberstam…“(His) reporting was exhaustive. He didn’t blow you away with flowery prose; he just got to the heart of whatever subject matter he tackled. He left no telling anecdote untold. He left no fact uncovered.”

The Delta Democrat Times‘ Ross Reily on Halberstam’s connection to the Delta…”He wasn’t from the Mississippi Delta, but Mississippi Deltans were quick to claim Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam this week upon learning of his untimely death in an automobile accident in California.”

Bill Minor, dean of the Mississippi political writers, on Halberstam’s early days in Mississippi…”Knowing that the West Point editor was an arch-conservative, and a strong backer of the segregationist Citizens’ Councils, my guess was a Harvard-educated young New Yorker wouldn’t last long…Only 10 months on the job, and a few days before his 22nd birthday, Halberstam called and said he’d been fired.”

Yours Truly on the Pulitzer winner’s West Point connection and acknowledgment of his abbreviated tenure…”We are what we remember. More to the point, the memories we collect through our lifetimes are really what define us as individuals. David Halberstam knew this…Halberstam, who died Monday in a car crash at age 73, must have recalled with some fondness the 10 months in the late 1950s he spent as a reporter at the Daily Times Leader.”

Stanley Dearman, retired editor and publisher of The Neshoba Democrat, received the University of Mississippi’s highest journalism award last week and was recognized in tributes as a legendary newspaperman who displayed raw courage over a career that spanned four decades.

A three-judge appellate panel has denied breach of contract claims by a retired Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics agent against The Clarion-Ledger.

David Halberstam, the Pulitzer-prize winning author who began his career at West Point’s Daily Times Leader, died Monday in a car crash. He was 73.

Nashvillepost.com has excerpts from historian John Egerton’s interview with Halberstam regarding the author’s early career: “I was full of idealism and eagerness to cover what I thought would be a big story that was just then beginning to unfold. My destination was Jackson, but the job I had been sent there for didn’t materialize, so I ended up as the only reporter at the Daily Times-Leader (circulation 4,000) in West Point, Mississippi…I lasted ten months.”

The Madison County Journal is making podcasts available of its weekly content available for download from the newspaper’s Website.

The Daily Journal editorial board on the pomp and circumstance over a certain automaker…”Toyota officially and ceremoniously broke ground Wednesday for its $1.3 billion Highlander SUV assembly plant near Blue Springs, and in the process gave an unstinting, ringing endorsement to the regional development process leading to the giant automaker’s choosing Mississippi over two dozen other states.”

Robert Lee Long of the DeSoto Times Today on the tobacco issue…“Somewhere in Washington D.C. at a high-powered law firm, lobbyists, lawyers and tobacco company executives are lighting up cigars in celebration of the demise of a Partnership For A Healthy Mississippi. Ditto for jubilation over the state’s failure to pass out a cigarette tax hike this year.”

Clarion-Ledger Perspective editor Sid Salter has a couple of worthy reads from the past week, including this verbose correction to a series of errors in the April 15 edition of the C-L. Also, he puts in the VA Tech massacre in context with past tragedies and current fascination with the unimportant.