Delta (Mississippi) Democrat Times sports reporter

If you want to gamble, i'd go to tunica before greenville, though. The D-2 school is Delta state, which has some top-notch athletics.

 

Blues Festival sounds real nice

 

Who owns this paper?

 

It was a Freedom Publication for the longest time, but bought by some outfit called Emmerich Newspapers, Inc., a few years back:

http://www.allbusiness.com/north-america/united-states-mississippi/882479-1.html

 

I'm guessing that company also owns the paper in Greenwood, Miss. I'd resisted posting this until now, but I'd recommend reading "A Confederacy of Silence" to get an idea of the environment in this area. Most of the anecdotes are nearly 20 years old, but I get the idea little has really changed since then. It's...interesting.

 

It's not a real thriving, forward-thinking area, but this paper has a legacy of taking bold stands against the power structure. And I'm talking 40-45 years ago, when that was an invitation for gunplay in rural Mississippi.

 

Not forward-thinking ? (sigh) .. .. I'm not sure that's a good assessment of the area.
Rural and depressed in some ways and with a good portion of the populous undereducated .. I'll buy that.
And Confederacy of Silence is a good read, for sure, if you want to get a capsule of the social structure in Greenville.
The majority of the blacks and white mix on precious few occasions there.
Blacks send their kids to public schools in and around Greenville. O'Bannon High and Greenville High.
Whites go to Washington School (Academy) and Greenville Christian School.
A mix of kids attends St. Joe, which is a Catholic and (thought-to-be) private-style school that exists nonetheless within the Mississippi High School Activities Association.
Hollandale has public Simmons High and private Deer Creek School (Academy)
Leland has Leland High and Deer Creek as options
Ray Brooks High and West Bolivar are public schools up Highway 1 along the river. White folks from there or Cleveland send kids to Bayou Academy or another of the private school options.
Understand, some of these parents will traverse long distances to get their kids to private school classrooms each morning.

The section (and Mr. Treasure is a white sports editor, FWIW) has as it's main challenge, getting all its schools covered.
The white parents at some of the academys help with advertising revenues, when their businesses buy ads.
This also creates a need to treat the academies with the same bold coverage as the public schools.

So, there's lots of schools to give coverage to and very little on-staff workforce.
That's why it will be essential to have a good stringer network and to convince local coaches from golf, bowling and other small sports (plus all the big sports) to particiapte and call in their results when staffers AREN'T present.

And yes, the history of the DDT's in-print racial stands (see Hodding Carter and family) is well-chronicled.
I loved my time in the Delta. I'd recommend it for a single person.
When you are single, you have more time to explore and research things at your own pace.
A young writer would learn lots here. The staffers I mentioned earlier are good news people.

I worked there when Dan Way was the managing editor and he used to tear City Hall a new one, whenever they needed a new one.
Keeping tabs on Greenville's City Hall and the various municipal workforces, and doing the same surrounding communities, is a challenge in itself on news side.

 

This sounds like a really interesting place for a single guy like me.

 

The history of taking a stand is admirable, though bear in mind it'll probably also lead to a lot of conversations with, um, locals in which you introduce yourself as a reporter and get met with a ... less-than-favorable response. By that, bear in mind, I don't mean they'll be hostile to you. In fact, they'll probably be quite friendly. They'll just disparage the newspaper.

I remember having a conversation several years ago with some friends of my father's, Koreans, I believe, from Brooklyn. When I introduced them to the concept of private academies in the South, and what they enabled, they looked at me as though I had antlers.

 

Well, let's all be clear on this.
And I'm saying it because I've been there. So believe it.
There are no cross burnings at halftime of the private school football games.
There are no cross burnings of any kind that I was aware of.
This is 2008 in the Mississippi Delta --- the races use the same bathrooms and eat at the same restaurants.
They get along, but they just don't do lots together.
You rarely hear the "N" word tossed around there, unless it's kids doing it.
What happened in the pre-Civil Rights era and later during the 50s and 60s is past-tense.
That's the way it is in most U.S. havens which used to espouse that sort of stuff.

The South is not the way a lot of you think it is.

 

The one thing I have heard from a number of my friends down there who I am looking to move closer to is EAT AT DOE'S.

I hear the steak is to die for?

 

I'm not saying it's not a lot better than it used to be. What I am saying is that any part of the world in which institutionalized segregation, at least in the schools, has been replaced by de facto segregation is not a part of the world that has finished making the great leap into the 21st century.

And I also understand that such things happen in parts of the country that are a long plane ride away from the deep South. In that regard, we are more unified than perhaps many of us realize.