Weekly, but Never Weakly

A Mississippi muckraker

Bill Minor no longer checks under the hood of his car before turning the ignition key, although he sometimes thinks he should. Not too long ago, friends advised him that there was a contract out on his life. Last January a cross was burned in front of the one-story brick office he rents in the warehouse district of Jackson, Miss. The same night, hoodlums hurled a brick through the window with the warning, "You are being watched by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan."

Wilson F. Minor, 56, bought the North side Reporter, a small suburban weekly, in 1973. With the help of a handful of regular advertisers and a skeleton staff, he has transformed it into the still small but unabashedly aggressive Capital Reporter (circ. 6,000). Politics is the paper's forte, and Minor's love. His uncanny eye for wrongdoing, along with a slew of sources developed during his 30 years with the New Orleans Times-Picayune, has breathed life into the paper's catchy motto: ONCE A WEEK, BUT NEVER WEAKLY.

Says Minor, who contributes some 3,000 words to each eight-to twelve-page issue: "I'm not going to write about the little people who foul up. I'm interested in people in the public trust. When they abuse that trust, they lay themselves open. Sometimes they are my friends."

One of those friends was a prominent banker whom Minor implicated in a scheme to fix a jury. "I liked him," Minor says, "but sometimes you have to put aside personal friendship. Once I get my hand on a document, I know it's got to be brought out."

A story on the resurgence of the K.K.K. apparently provoked the brick throwing and crossburning that have left the office with half its front window boarded. Mississippi Governor Cliff Finch called Minor a "political assassin" over another story, on an automobile accident; the highway patrol car in which Finch was riding bumped a black youth on a motorcycle, and the police report was buried until Minor received one of the dozen or so tips he gets each day. The Finch administration has been the target of Minor's reports of slush funds and campaign contributions from out-of-state engineers. Several advertisers boycott the Reporter, including Mississippi Power and Light; the paper accused its president and other company officials of entertaining two members of the state public service commission on a duck-hunting trip.

Minor's major worry is not the threats, criticism or boycotts, but money. Paid subscriptions have grown from 115 five years ago to 4,000 now, but advertising revenue rarely reaches $6,000 a month, and the paper breaks even only four or five months a year.

Long-range plans to hire a full-time business manager and an experienced investigative reporter will have to wait, and it will be some time before Minor's goal of building the paper into a statewide political journal is reached. Already, though, he argues, "The Reporter is as good a small newspaper as you can find." Others agree. Last spring Southern Illinois University singled out Minor as the best editor of a weekly newspaper in the U.S.

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