InkBlots

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.

Dr. Luke Lampton, chair of the State Board of Health until it was recently shuttered, told Clarion-Ledger reporter Jerry Mitchell the board ordered Dr. Brian Amy, embattled head of the state health office, not to make disputed personnel changes, but Amy did anyway. “It was essentially an unapproved reorganization of the department,” he said.

Lampton is also editor and publisher of The Magnolia Gazette. He is past president of the Mississippi Academy of Family Physicians and current editor of the Journal of the Mississippi State Medical Association.

An autopsy has been ordered in the death of a Corinth man whose body was found floating in the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway near Iuka. Donald Owen Beatty Jr. worked for the Daily Corinthian, where he was mailroom supervisor.