Tim Kalich wrote a personal column over the weekend for The Greenwood Commonwealth explaining his choice of Barack Obama for President. We suspect the column has drawn more reader feedback on the Commonwealth Website than any other at the Delta daily.
The Gannett Company, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, will lay off about 10 percent of its work force by early December, company executives said on Tuesday, a few days after Gannett disclosed another sharp drop in revenue and earnings.
The layoffs will not apply to the company’s flagship paper, USA Today, but to the company’s 84 other daily newspapers in the United States, and more than 800 small, nondaily local papers. The announcement does not include Gannett’s hundreds of small papers in Britain.
In Mississippi, Gannett publishes The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, The Hattiesburg American, and a number of non-daily newspapers and other publications.
With Barack Obama leading in national polling and GOP contenders and incumbents facing tight congressional races in a number of states, including Mississippi, conservatives are coming to grips with the possibility of a filibuster-proof Democratic regime in the new political year.
This story predates the debates at Oxford. So we are behind the curve. But it’s worth a read…
Everyone in Mississippi, which is 37 percent black, understands that racism lives on. And what of the rest of the country, which is 12 percent black? In a recent AP-Yahoo poll that found racial attitudes could cost Obama a close election, 55 percent of whites said “a lot” or “some” discrimination exists, while almost all blacks felt that way.
The flower pickers were out in force in Starkville to exonerate a late, great country singer a second time for alleged wrong-doing over 40 years ago.
The Johnny Cash Flower Pickin’ was started by Robbie Ward, 30, a gangly Cash enthusiast who arrived as the Starkville correspondent for a regional Mississippi newspaper. He was struck by how few here appreciated their town’s connection to Johnny Cash, or knew of the “At San Quentin” album that features “Starkville City Jail”:
They’re bound to get you.
‘Cause they got a curfew.
And you go to the Starkville City Jail.
Ward soon wrote an almost mystical story about that long-ago May night. A man named Smokey Evans claimed that when he was 15 and drunk, he was thrown into the same cell as Cash. After Cash broke his toe but before he left, he recalled, the singer handed him his black shoes and said: “Here’s a souvenir. I’m Johnny Cash.”
Dan Davis writes in Sunday’s Hattiesburg American: “At 86, Bill Minor has slowed down a good bit. But there’s still a twinkle in those clear blue eyes and his mind is sharp. And he’s still writing about Mississippi politics - and jabbing politicians when they deserve it - 61 years after he came to the state as a correspondent for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
“It was Minor that more than 100 people gathered to honor recently at the University Club in downtown Jackson. They came to recognize the accomplishments of the man who has covered practically every historical event in this state, starting in 1947 with the funeral of Theodore Bilbo.”
What had been a minor newspaper rebellion against The Associated Press suddenly grew much more serious last week, when the Tribune Company, one of the largest newspaper chains, said on Thursday that it would drop out of the association, followed by a similar The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch.
Tribune, which owns nine daily papers including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, joins a growing list of newspapers that have sought to end AP contracts, or given notice of that, following plans to introduce a new controversial rate structure in 2009. The notice was given earlier this week.
The woman whose folksy writings and persuasive sales approach defined Oxford’s community newspaper for half a century died Oct. 7 on her 88th birthday.
Nina Bunch Goolsby, co-owner of The Oxford Eagle, was editor of the newspaper from 1961 to 2006 and has since held the honorary title of editor emeritus.
“She was just an outstanding citizen,” said Don Waller, founder of Waller Funeral Home, who grew up near the Bunch family in the Burgess community in western Lafayette County.
Goolsby’s history with The Eagle dates to 1942, when she started out in bookkeeping under editor Curtis Mullin. She soon became the society editor and later moved into advertising.
After a one-year departure to work as office manager for North Mississippi Savings and Loan, she purchased the paper in 1961 along with partners Jesse Phillips and W.S. Featherston.
Bob Robbins, former publisher for Gannett in Jackson and Hattiesburg, will retire Nov. 30 as publisher of the Palladium-Item in Richmond, IN…University of Southern Mississippi graduate Steve Doyle has been named editor of The Sentinel News in Shelbyville, KY…Former Mississippi newspaperman Charles Fischer has been named publisher of the Roswell, N.M. Daily Record…Garthia Elena Burnett has been named news editor at The Commercial Dispatch in Columbus. She formerly was the afternoon daily’s assistant news editor.
The Mississippi Press in Pascagoula is cutting back from seven pub days to four per week. In announcing the move, new publisher Gareth Clary said readers would receive a Mississippi edition of The Mobile Press-Register on pub days the Pascagoula paper is eliminating.
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