What has your life been like since leaving Southeastern? What do you do for a living? And have you married and/or had children?
Holding my newborn son Julien in one arm and my SLU liberal arts degree under the other, I bolted out of Hammond in 1996 to the southern end of the Mississippi Delta to begin my first full-time newspaper job with The Vicksburg Post. Three years later, my hometown newspaper The Times-Picayune gave me a job, and Daina and I moved home. During my more than 16 years there, during which our daughter Isabella was born, I covered everything from midnight murders in New Orleans to courts to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – albeit from home. I was part of the Pulitzer-winning staff for its Katrina coverage and saw firsthand the newspaper’s transition from a daily to the digital-first business model. I witnessed many friends lose their jobs, a fate I met on the morning of Sept. 17, 2015, when I was laid off. Although my news career ended, the ink is still in my blood. Today, I am the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office first-ever public information officer, a job that still involves information dissemination. Interestingly, as the office’s media liaison, I get to see how reporters make their sausage. Sadly, it isn’t always pretty.
What do you remember most about your time at Southeastern and working with student publications?
My yearlong editorship and the camaraderie I felt with likeminded colleagues as I was bitten by the news bug. From afar, I watched my fellow students move up in journalism, proudly.
John Emeigh’s “Coffee & Cigarettes” column in which he accurately described The Lion’s Roar deadline Wednesday nights in Strawberry Stadium, where the cigarette smoke was so thick you couldn’t see the “No Smoking” sign on the newsroom wall.
My almost getting into a fist fight with the SGA vice president in SGA offices after the GOP-run association, angered that I wouldn’t expand Greek life coverage, made a move on controlling student self-assessed fees and thus asserting control over student publications (they dropped it).
There’s so much more.
Give me your back story. How did you wind up at Southeastern and interested in working with student publications?
Having bounced aimlessly through life, thinking I’d like to write and had something important to say even though I had absolutely no talent and, in truth, was somewhat illiterate, I decided in late 1988 that newspapers were the way to go. My first semester in college was at SLU, housed in Hammond Hall and studying industrial technology. I made new friends and left Hammond after that one semester. I attended UNO on and off in the following years and learned cabinetry. I needed to at least get an undergraduate degree. SLU was just up I-55. Hammond lacked New Orleans’ distractions and ghosts but wasn’t too far from them. And so one morning in 1991, I emptied my French Quarter apartment into a U-Haul and that evening I was in an off-campus apartment complex filled with loud kids. I found my way to The Lion’s Roar and eventually was fortunate that Vic Couvillion named me its editor – three semesters of stressful fun.
What would you say is the biggest thing you learned while at Southeastern?
As far as newspapering goes, I’d say that I walked away with a solid newsroom work ethic, thanks to the practical experience that Joe Mirando brought to the classrooms. For instance, he told us to never return from an assignment empty handed. Be a dependable bread-and-butter reporter, he told me. And he hammered into me the difference between “its” and it’s” (to this day, I still think of Joe when I type those words). I also learned later that my bylines in The Daily Star are what got me my first job, not my involvement in The Lion’s Roar. Those miserable nights covering Tickfaw board of aldermen meetings for $20 each paid off. Thank you, Lil and Joe!
Southeastern Student Publications Alumni 