I was worried this would be a 20th anniversary column of Hurricane Katrina, something I really didn’t want to write about.
Anybody in Mississippi or Louisiana who went through it has their own story to tell. Mine is not much different from anyone who was in McComb: We thought it would be bad, didn’t expect it to be so bad this far inland, didn’t expect the storm to take all danged day to move past us, and then the long cleanup began.
But this was one of those weeks when a better column idea wasn’t coming to mind. I had pretty much resigned myself to a hurricane retrospective when the Enterprise-Journal news staff came through for me wonderfully.
Last week our website rolled out a copyright watermark on photos that we own and publish. You’ll see it soon if you haven’t already.
Well, our sharp-eyed sports editor, Parker Gilliam saw the new feature last Thursday morning, and he beat me to showing the rest of the staff how to handle it.
I’m not complaining one bit. In addition to being a really good guy, Parker has helped improve our website with a regular sports podcast. He’s young and he has ideas, and I need ideas as we continue our march into the digital age.
It seems like every few days, often during a routine conversation, I tell somebody that a 63-year-old editor who grew up with newspapers may not be the ideal person for this digital assignment. But those are the cards that have been dealt.
As Parker told Matt Williamson, April Sowell and David Money about the new photo copyright feature, I came out of my office to explain why we’re adding it.
Then Parker said that when we post stories to the website, we really need to include more links to related stories. Which we do. They are standard on many websites.
This suggestion produced a little grumbling, and I understood it. Because when you’re posting five stories to the website at the end of the day, the last thing you want to do is look for links to prior stories. But we’ll get there somehow.
Parker, Missouri class of 2024, recognized the resistance, and came through with a great observation. I wish I could remember the exact quote, but he said something like, people “from the end of the last century” don’t understand certain internet stuff.
The rest of us giggled like sixth graders. Matt is in his 40s, April is near 50, I am 63, Ernest Herndon is late 60s and David is in his early 70s. We are not children of the internet generation.
“Parker, you know when you got here, you brought the average age of the newsroom down to about 28,” I said.
My math skills are better than that, but it’s true — he is so much younger than us and he looks at things differently. And I value that.
I had not given this any thought, but when he told me he was born in late 2001, I realized he was not even around for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It’s hard to believe, but people under 25 have no memory of that event.
He would have been close to his 4th birthday when Katrina hit, and probably wouldn’t remember much about it. Whereas for the rest of us in the newsroom, it is seared into our memories — just like Pearl Harbor was for those born a few decades before we were.
“I want to thank you guys for coming through with a column idea for me,” I said.
The conversation reminded me that time moves slowly but steadily. Can anyone believe Katrina really was 20 years ago? In some ways, it still seems like yesterday.
But keep an eye on my man Parker. He’s more than a sports editor. He’s a smart guy, he’s doing a fine job and, as a man of the new century, he is seeing things that the rest of us aren’t. What’s not to like?
