Ellington

When you last heard from me, I was documenting John Kerry's choice of Southern foods in the University of Mississippi's lavish media facilities by the Ford Center. Make no mistake, after checking out the spread a few hours before the beginning of tonights' debate, there was at least a small piece of me that wished that I hadn't spent the last three days, well, doing my job, and instead hanging out in the Media Tent filling up on the copious amounts of free food and booze waiting around for some of the pseudo-celebrity national journalists. As a University of Mississippi alum, I have been trying my very best not to glowingly describe my University like a complete homer, but you have to admit, the media facilities here impressive, and most of the journalists holed up in them would probably kill for a newsroom as high-tech as the Big Tent.

But I found out moments ago that these facilities come with a cost. Like $175, per journalist, for one of the prized wireless accounts in the Big Tent. I worked about an hour trying to pull some strings and raise some cain, but no dice I'm afraid.

Now, for those of you who don't know, we are the Jackson FREE Press. We aren't cheap, but we have no choice but to be responsible with our expenditures, and paying $175 for a super-high tech experience makes absolutely no sense when you can pound out a blog post 100 yards away in The Grove, even if that means losing the opportunity to bump elbows with the media big-wigs. I'm all for my alma mater putting on it's best face for the national media, but not at the cost of pricing out smaller publications that prioritize fiscal responsibility.

Previous Comments

ID

138314

Comment

Yes, so that means I've been manning the phones here for three days helping the Oxford team post when they couldn't get to a connection. And they were fabulous. ;-) (OK, I'll have to teach them to pause every few words so I can catch up typing, but I quibble.)

Author

DonnaLadd

Date

2008-09-26T21:29:36-06:00