The federal government announced today that reputed Klansman James Ford Seale has been arrested and indicted for the 1964 murder of Charles Moore and Henry Dee, two young black hitchhikers in Meadville, Miss. Following the announcement, AAN issued a press release noting that the Dee-Moore murder case gained new steam when Free Press editor Donna Ladd (pictured) and a team of young Mississippians first reported the news that Seale was still alive -- after the local Gannett daily and other media had previously reported he was dead. Ladd's series about the murders won an investigative-reporting award in last year's AltWeekly Awards contest.
Erin Sullivan (pictured), managing editor of Baltimore City Paper, is running for the membership chair position being vacated by Seven Days' Paula Routly, one of several spots on the AAN board that are up for grabs this year. Voting will take place on Saturday, June 17, during the annual meeting on the final day of the convention in Little Rock. AAN News put together this voting guide to help members get acquainted with the candidates.
On the JFP blog "Noise," Editor Donna Ladd noted similarities between a Marshall Ramsey cartoon in Jackson's The Clarion-Ledger and a Darren Schwindaman cartoon published in JFP two weeks earlier. Both play on the Brokeback Mountain catch phrase, "I wish I knew how to quit you" to comment on Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's veto of a tobacco tax. Ladd wrote, "We appreciate the compliment, Marshall, but a note of appreciation would have sufficed."
On Feb. 9 at Lemuria Books in Jackson, two of the Free Press' most distinguished journalists, Editor-in-Chief Donna Ladd and freelance writer Ayana Taylor (pictured), read their award-winning entries from "Best AltWeekly Writing and Design 2005." More than 25 books were sold, and the evening was an all-around success.
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.
