InkBlots

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.

A 24-year-old former Connecticut resident and her boyfriend were en route Thursday to North Carolina — thanks to a Mississippi newspaper reporter and a church that practices what it preaches — after being shipwrecked in the Gulf of Mexico last weekend. The couple spent three nights in a tent, living on food and water that they’d taken off the boat earlier, before being spotted by a passing tugboat Monday morning, which picked them up and contacted the Coast Guard.

Once ashore, Mississippi Press reporter Veto Roley brought the castaways to the Central Church of Christ in Pascagoula, where church officials fed and clothed them before buying them bus tickets for Asheville, N.C., where the couple had lived before moving to New Orleans in November.

Tunica Times publisher Brooks Taylor asked for the Board of Aldermen’s help in preserving the public’s right to know during an appointment on April 3.

“I hope you all know me well enough to receive this in the spirit it is offered,” Taylor said in presenting a letter to town officials bringing their attention to a potential violation of the state’s open meetings law.

Maury B. Breazeale has been named associate editor and publisher of the Madison County Journal. He previously worked as an account executive for The Clarion-Ledger.

Bubba Burnham returned to Clarksdale recently and took the job of editor at the Press-Register. He described himself as a happy camper. Even the subsequent loss of sports editor Larry Binz and associate editor David Owens didn’t dampen his enthusiasm.

Burnham previously served as the paper’s sports editor. Here’s the official announcement.

Dolan Media Co. has acquired the Mississippi Business Journal, a 7,300-circulation weekly tabloid based in Jackson.

Dolan Media acquired the paper from Venture Publications Inc. The asset sale included more than a dozen ancillary publications focused on law, real estate, small business and health care.

The Hattiesburg American ushered in springtime with a redesigned print product. Writes editor Kathleen Williams: “We redesigned the paper - the first in a long, long time. But we didn’t do it just for the sake of a redesign. We did it because we made substantive changes in local coverage - more of it - and we wanted to showcase that with a new and yet more classic look.”

Our Spanish may be broken, but The Neshoba Democrat’s is not. The online edition of the paper is now available translated via Google Language Tools.