Ellington

Today, I heard that the Killen trial media was gathering in the afternoon and headed over to Neshoba County to see what was up. The town seemed very calm, other than the mass of cars around the media center, which is in the old Magnolia restaurant on Walnut Street a block from the courthouse. It's a loft-like building with low-hanging loft lights and a really rustic, yet hip interior with exposed brick. It's too bad this place closed; it was probably hard to compete with the casino restaurants.

There are media here from all over, of course. Apparently, the courtroom will only hold 28 media folks each day, so there will be a lottery for the seats each morning between the media folk who show up at 7:30 a.m. to be in the lottery. Hopefully, I'll manage to show up at lease one morning. Otherwise, we can sit in this VERY air-conditioned room (the coldest winter I've ever spent is indoors in Mississippi in June!). Here we have wireless Internet (perfect for blogging, of course) and big-screen TVs piping in the courtroom action. In the courtroom, you can only get up between witnesses and can't have any electronics turned on, not even a Blackberry, one report seemed chagrined to hear.

The media are being handled by Patsy Bromfield, of the Mississippi Daily Journal, who is tough and Southern. She packs a big punch in a little package. I wouldn't want to get on her bad side. Her first minor dust-up with a journalist came during our media meeting Sunday afternoon. A young woman from WJTV in Jackson — no, not an obnoxious New Yorker — got upset because Patsy was trying to get the reporters to agree to a system that would make it more likely that everyone gets in the courtroom at least once, rather than one news outlet winning the lottery over and over. The WJTV reprorter kept talking loudly over Patsy into her cell phone (apparently to her news director) and then became very ornery that they would take their chances in order to be in the courtroom every day! We took a vote, and she was the only one who objected to a fairer system. The meeting ended with it unresolved. It doesn't really matter until after jury selection is over, which starts Monday. We can't fit in the courtroom anyway early in the week.