In the same year that Ayana Taylor served as a diversity intern for the Jackson Free Press, she wrote three news stories that won her a first-place AltWeekly Award. She believes it's her persistence that has made interview subjects open up to her, even when they didn't want to talk to the media. This is the 15th in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
The editor-in-chief of the Jackson Free Press never intended to write the story that won her a 2005 AltWeekly Award for Feature Story. She'd assigned it to another writer. And then she ran into one of the subjects of the piece, they got to talking, and over the next six months she developed her heart-rending account of a family that suffered at the hands of a priest. This is the second in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
In an unsigned article titled "Negress Awarded for Interviewing Nationalist," the Mississippi-based Nationalist Movement takes a swipe at one of the three pieces that netted Ayana Taylor of Jackson Free Press an AltWeekly Award earlier this year. Richard Barrett, editor of the group's Web site and the subject of Taylor's profile, "X Marks the Boycott," calls the story "light on accuracy," claiming he was misquoted and that Taylor "editorialized considerably in the article." Barrett also says he had "trouble understanding (Taylor)," and congratulates himself for "departing from precedent in which pro-majority activists invariably refused to speak to Negroes."
A team of reporters from the Mississippi alt-weekly and a documentarian from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation accompanied Thomas Moore during his recently concluded trip to Jackson, Miss. Moore's brother, Charles, and his friend, Henry Dee, were killed there by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. During his visit, Moore convinced U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton, who served under Moore in the Army, to commit to forming a task force to re-investigate the case. Read the Free Press story here.
Free weeklies like the Planet Jackson Hole of Jackson, Wyo., remain in the competition to publish towns' legal notices, thanks to action in the Wyoming State Legislature last Wednesday. A provision to a proposed bill that would have required towns to print their legal notices in papers that have paid circulation of 500 or more was shot down even before it got out of committee, Planet Jackson Hole reports. Planet Publisher Mary Grossman said the proposed bill was a rushed attempt by a paid-subscription newspaper in the same market and its Wyoming Press Association lobbyists to squelch competition.
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