CLARION-LEDGER,
from page 15
THE CLARION-LEDGER
Service, one of the highest honors any U.S. paper could nab. Overby, 65, grew up in Jackson. When he was a boy, he delivered The Clarion-Ledger to homes. He wrote for the Jackson Daily News in the 1960s when he was in high school and in college. He studied journalism at Ole Miss, where a $5 million grant from the Freedom Forum created the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics in 2007. After he left Ole Miss in 1968, Overby went to Washington to work for Sen. John Stennis of Mississippi. Later, he was Washington correspondent for the Nashville Banner. When Gannett bought the Nashville Banner, Overby met Gannett owner Al Neuharth. By 1989, Overby became president and CEO of the Gannett Foundation, later called the Freedom Forum. In 1991, Overby became chairman of the Freedom Forum. He still holds these titles today as well as CEO of the Newseum, Gannett’s interactive news museum that opened in 2008 in Washington, D.C. The highlight of Overby’s career, though, was winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 and popping that cork. If it’s the only thing ever mentioned in his obituary, he’d be pleased, he told the JFP. It wasn’t just a high point in his career, it was The Clarion-Ledger’s best moment. After decades of racist action and inaction, the newspaper had climbed to a moral high ground and journalistic excellence.
Reporter Dudley Lehew was shocked to read the headline on his own story.
still at the office working on his latest issue and wasn’t expecting a request to talk about the paper he remade all those years ago. He sighed heavily. “I haven’t talked about The Clarion-Ledger in years,” he said. He needed to think about what he might say. He hasn’t called back.
September 7 - 13, 2011
The High Point Almost every reporter and editor watched Charles Overby carry a case of Champagne into the newsroom. It was Monday, April 18, 1983, the day the Pulitzer Prize committee was set to announce winners. Overby, the executive editor of The Clarion-Ledger at the time, knew its nominated series on education reform had a shot at winning the biggest award in print journalism. It was still early in the day. “Do you know?” a reporter asked him. “I don’t know,” Overby said. “I just know it deserves to win.” “Will we drink it if we don’t win?” “We’ll have to wait,” Overby told them. They didn’t have to wait too long. At 18 2:30 p.m., Overby popped the cork on the
first bottle to celebrate the win. The party in the newsroom continued all the way into the night and traveled to George Street Grocery. “It was great,” Overby told the JFP. “But what was important was that education reform passed. We didn’t have any idea about entering (the Pulitzer competition) when we started.” Gannett Co. Inc. had bought The Clarion-Ledger in April 1982, just one year earlier, and made Overby its editor. The news staff, many recruited under Rea Hederman, continued coverage supporting then-Gov. William Winter’s push to lift Mississippi’s public education system out of its separate-but-unequal status—which the paper itself had helped keep in place not so many years before. The paper reported what Overby calls the “shenanigans” of the Legislature in its special session in December 1982, when members opposing kindergarten and other basics, such as required science classes in high school. Overby wrote an editorial placing, by name, specific legislators in the “Hall of Shame.” The series of stories and editorials won The Clarion-Ledger the 1983 Pulitzer for Public
‘We Had So Much Fun’ In 1976, Hood returned to Jackson to work at The Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News. He was sports editor of the Jackson Daily News from 1978 to 1983. “In sports, we had so much fun. We would come in (the newsroom) our days off just to hang around,” Hood said. “Writing 800 words on deadline at a night football game … in 30 minutes—there’s nothing like it.” The peak of the golden period was 1983, the year the Pulitzer came to Jackson. During those heady days, Hood attended a national Associated Press gathering. The Washington Post sports editor acknowledged that other newspapers did a better job than his, referring to St. Petersburg, Fla., and Jackson, Miss., as two cities with top-notch daily newspapers. In 1983, The Natchez Democrat wanted a guest columnist to write about the city’s annual pilgrimage events. They asked for Hood. Charles Overby, editor at the time, thought writing a column was a great idea for Hood. “It won awards,” Hood said. After that, he started writing a regular column “Charles didn’t have to ask permission (to make me a columnist),” Hood said. Hood’s column was positive, human and folksy. He wrote about everyday heroes, people who overcame the odds and the little triumphs that made his fans smile. He often wrote about his family with humor and sentiment. When his Aunt Kitty died, he wrote a column in 2008 about going to the funeral and expecting to see a coffin. “Aunt Kitty had gone and gotten herself cremated,” he wrote.
The Era of Big Brother Frank Gannett and partners bought the Elmira Gazette, a New York newspaper, in 1906. He started buying up local papers and merging them to increase advertising revenue. By 1923, he bought out his partners and founded Gannett Co. Inc. His new company started looking regionally for more newspapers to acquire in the northeast. Gannett died in 1957, but the company thrived. It started its own wire service, Gannett News Service. It started a new statewide paper in Florida in 1966 with no pretense of covering local news. Florida Today was the prototype for USA Today, which launched in 1982, with its short, punchy, often superficial news coverage. Gannett Co. Inc. went public in 1967 with investors expecting big profits. In the 1970s, Gannett took a bold step forward as a corporation. The New York-based publishing company pushed to become a national media conglomerate by buying up other regional publishing companies. It increased its number of television stations, too. Its next big thing was starting USA Today in 1982, a national newspaper with lots of color, graphics and shorter news items. Critics called it “McNews.” But many of those same news outlets began copying the use of graphics and short tidbits in a pre-Twitter universe. USA Today didn’t make an annual profit in its first 10 years. Gannett continued to invest in it, inflating its circulation numbers by giving away the newspaper at hotels, counting each room as a subscriber, a criticism the company has faced over the years and most recently reported in Forbes. It got lots of big advertising deals and did post some profitable quarters, but it was the 86 regional newspapers that carried the financial load. In 1982, the bold, brash media company bought The Clarion-Ledger, Jackson Daily News and The Hattiesburg American. (The Daily News merged completely with The Clarion-Ledger and ceased printing in 1989.) Gannett implemented policies that encouraged women and minorities to take management positions in the newsroom and in all aspects of the publishing business. “Those were Gannett’s goals, but those goals were more universally shared. We had an egalitarian staff under Rea Hederman,” Hood recalls. Rea Hederman not only brought in talented journalists from good schools—he wanted a diverse staff. The trend in journalism schools postWatergate and 1960s race strife was teaching diversity in coverage and hiring as a best practice in the newspaper industry. After Gannett bought The Clarion-Ledger, the staff was upbeat at first. “For a year or two, they were still great. Some good things happened. Salaries went up,” Hood said. “Then every year, we’d lose a person here and there.” Those people weren’t replaced. Gannett Co., now based in Tyson’s Corner, Va., became a public company in 1967. Its mission is, first and foremost, is to keep stock prices high. Employees are an expense that can get in the way of high profit margins.