Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Donna Ladd

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was nomination withdrawn (see [1]). Mr.Z-man 03:05, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Donna Ladd

Donna Ladd (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

Does not meet WP:BIO. Flagged Notability in Feb 2007. Reads like a PR piece. -- ALLSTAR ECHO 11:38, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

• Keep: She's appeared on CNN and in a well-known journalism journal (ha!), she's also been profiled several times. Could use a re-write tho. Yngvarr (t) (c) 11:55, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

• Comment: No source for CNN. Assuming you mean Society of Professional Journalists as the well-known journalism journal, as is sourced in the article, that's a blog hosted by SPJ and not actual SPJ writing/coverage. -- ALLSTAR ECHO 12:00, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

comment - It's a regular column in blog form, for a very tough audience. I'd say it meets WP:RS. --Orange Mike 00:39, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

• Keep but rewrite - a bit less hagiography (a common failure of journalist when writing about our own) would be more encyclopedic. What do her foes and competitors say about her? --Orange Mike 00:39, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
• Comment: as has been pointed out to me, I don't think the article meets WP:N either, even though there is discussion ongoing of merging WP:N and WP:BIO, but as it stands now, they aren't merged and are seperate. Therefore, this article fails both. If anything, this person is of local interest, local being in Jackson, Mississippi where her free weekly paper is distributed. -- ALLSTAR ECHO 01:15, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

• Reply - I think the James Ford Seale case makes her and the paper qualify for notability. It got national press, unlike most of the local newsreaders and talking heads that populate the obscure backwaters of this wiki. --Orange Mike 02:28, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

• Her paper, Jackson Free Press, definitely deserves its rightful place/article, but I feel a page for her, herself, is unnecessary, at least in it's current form. Just about everything in her article can be found in the JFP article. And while the Seale case got national attention, she herself didn't other than being the owner of a free 16,000 distribution once a week paper that did some investigative work and reporting when then Gannett owned state newspaper The Clarion-Ledger didn't. As the old saying goes, "what have you done for me lately?" -- ALLSTAR ECHO 12:20, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

• Back on topic, Ms. Ladd was inteviewed on many national and interntional news outlets about her series of investigative stories on the old civil rights murders in our area (Charles Moore, Henry Dee). Her work is sited numerous times in the trial transcripts. I remember hearing audio for BBC, NPR, seeing her on CNN, and reading media in multiple news reports. Her site mentions interviews on CBS radio and Canadian Broadcasting, and her race work has been discussed in several journalism trade publications. Her race work has been discussed in at leasst one book about Mississippi. She also is the only strong female political voice in the state if that counts for anything, more recently taking on Haley Barbour, and she led the reporting that got the mayor in Jackson indicted, attracting national attention (and did a crazy series of interviews with him known as "the Melton tapes." I agree though that the page looks like a glorified bio. Will go try to dig more stuff up and make it more standard and complete. Would appreciate help! Msnatchez 17:33, 23 September 2007 (UTC)--Msnatchez 17:33, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
• Please note that my concern about the bias of "Allstarecho" was deleted by that user. It is not meant as a personal attack. He has made his personal issues with Ms. Ladd very public. I don't have a problem that he feels that way, or criticizes her. But it feels inappropriate for him to lead an effort to have this page deleted from Wikipedia, possibly as part of a campaign against her. <Msnatchez 17:34, 23 September 2007 (UTC)--Msnatchez 17:34, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

• WP:NPOV Read it, live it, love it. I addressed your concerns on your talk page. Please keep the discussion on topic. -- ALLSTAR ECHO 16:41, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

• I'm not sure how a witchhunt concern is off topic here, and you didn't really address my concerns. I also see that you found another critic of Ladd on Wikipedia and asked them to come post here. But I have no desire to spar with you. I'll give you credit for adding a piece of new information to the page, though. At any rate, I've done some searching and found material to help update the Ladd page and did some re-arranging to make it looks like a press release. There is still more material that should be fleshed out better, like what the "national diversity chair" of AAN does. I also haven't found all the links to the BBC and other audio files, but I'm looking. There's out there somewhere if those stations didn't take them down. I thought they were linked to the JFP site but haven't found them yet. Msnatchez 17:34, 23 September 2007 (UTC)--Msnatchez 17:34, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

• What part of "it's not a witch hunt" do you not understand? Donna Ladd is the last person I think about routinely, I assure you. The fact is, that as a Wikipedia editor from the Jackson metro area, I read alot of Wiki articles having to do with things in and around Jackson. I decided to see if JFP had an article in WP after having looked at ClarionLedger's article. When I found the JFP article, I even said to myself "cool" because I didn't want the CL to be the only one on WP. Via the JFP article, I came to Donna's article. I found that most of the information in Donna's article was in the JFP article as well and the info that wasn't could be merged, which is why I tagged the JFP article as not citing any references or sources - do you know why articles are tagged like that? It's so other editors can work on the articles and add references and sources such as you have done to Donna's article. After tagging the JFP article, I then put Donna's article up for deletion review, because as I said, in its form at the time, 1) it wasn't notable, 2) was already covered elsewhere 3) had already been tagged in February as The subject of this article may not satisfy the notability guideline and 4) failed to meet numerous guidelines for inclusion in WP. I've kept a NEUTRAL POINT OF VIEW, aka WP:NPOV throughout because I knew questions such as this would arise. In all honesty, you'd done such good work referencing and sourcing Donna's article that it now meets the February tag. I'm still not sure she deserves a page on her own since I still believe most of what is in her article is fully mergeable with the JFP article, but that wasn't the point of all of this. -- ALLSTAR ECHO 19:27, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

• Sorry to belabor this, but you have an interesting wikipedia history, allstarecho. Your only deletion recommendations to date seem to be Ladd, her JFP partner Todd Stauffer (who has published 40 books) and the Jackson Free Press, although you changed your mind and edited it to just challenge the paper's references. But you say above that the JFP should have a page. Confused here. Otherwise, I worked on the Ladd page some and added some controversy per Orange Mike's request. There seems to me to be a lot here, but I'm not the expert some of you are. If my questions to allstarecho here are inappropriate for this page, I apologize, but this seems to need some daylight. Msnatchez 18:57, 23 September 2007 (UTC)--Msnatchez 18:57, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

• I'm fairly new to WP. Sorry I haven't had time to build up a deletion history to prove why any other articles should be deleted. And to correct you, the Jackson Free Press article was never tagged for deletion. Go back and look at the history. I originally tagged it as {{Notability|date=September 2007}} and then realized that wasn't correct and re-tagged it as {{Unreferenced|date=September 2007}} - the difference between the 2 being the box you see at the top of the article page that says:

This article does not cite any references or sources.

Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.

Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Please know the differences between the tags before calling someone out for something they didn't do. -- ALLSTAR ECHO 19:27, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.