Billy Coleman died May 10. He was 50.
You probably didn’t know Billy, and to be honest, I didn’t really know him either. I met him once, briefly, in late 2022, when I was in Lake Providence to interview two women who had bought the local newspaper and were trying to revive it.
Billy was one of the reporters at the newspaper, then known as the Lake Providence Journal. He’d been with the paper for two decades, covering government and everything else in Lake Providence and East Carroll Parish. The roughly 7,000-resident parish, tucked into Louisiana's northeast corner, is one of the smallest and poorest in the state. It's the kind of place where the only way to get there is by trying to get there. Nobody ends up in Lake Providence by accident.
As I sat down to write my first column for The Advocate | The Times-Picayune, I got to thinking about Billy.
Billy was exactly the type of person whose story deserves more attention. He wasn't high profile. He didn't have a spokesperson. He hadn't been elected. He wasn't waiting to do a TV hit with CNN. There was little glamour, less money and negligible prestige in what he chose to do.
He was just working away in a forlorn town in a forgotten parish. Billy woke up every day trying to make the town a little bit better by writing about it in his local newspaper.
I know people read the newspaper for a lot of different reasons. Some to find out what the Legislature or governor is doing. Some to learn about their local officials. Others because they want to know about Saints training camp or LSU's transfer portal efforts. I read those things too, and I cheer my colleagues who do that important and often difficult work.
Faimon Roberts on Monday, March 28, 2022. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Some read it and get angry and write letters or spout off on Facebook. I sometimes read those, too.
Billy's stories weren't always popular. But the work he did, reporting dutifully on what elected officials were doing, was important and necessary. I hope in this column to look into the state's nooks and crannies, to tell the stories of people like Billy and the kinds of issues that don't normally hold down the front page or the A-block. Those stories are worthy, too.
So send me your Billy Colemans, your tips, your ideas, your notes and — perhaps most importantly — your lunch recommendations from all over the state. I do love lunch.
That doesn’t mean, however, that what you read here won't sometimes be drawn from some other places I covered, like Jefferson Parish or Baton Rouge. Fortunately for me, Louisiana is a target-rich environment for a columnist.
Providence Journal's Cassie Condrey, left, and writer Billy Coleman, right, discuss a story as a bat, top center, hangs out in their newsroom in Lake Providence, Louisiana on Wednesday, November 9, 2022. (Staff photo by Chris Granger, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
Back to Billy for a moment. Let me tell you a little about him. He wasn't what you might call a traditional reporter. He spoke up in meetings and shared his opinions. His sometimes quoted himself by name in stories. He wrote a weekly column that ended with his trademark phrase: "But hey, that's just my opinion!"
Importantly for the paper's new owners, both of whom are White, Billy was Black. A Lake Providence lifer, he'd lived the area's deep-seated racial issues from a perspective the paper's owners don't have. It wasn't just public officials that he held accountable; it was often his bosses.
“Billy could ask questions in our small town that are harder for us to ask,” Cassie Condrey, one of the owners, told me when I visited. “Billy kept us honest, he kept us from oversimplifying things.”
The May 16 edition of the East Carroll Banner, the first published after Billy died, included two front-page stories with headlines but no text. One had a headline that read “Police Jury committees to discuss options,” and the second “Town officials explore budget options.” Both bore Billy’s byline — those were stories he was working on when he passed. Instead of filling those spaces, Condrey and Arvin decided they would just leave them blank.
"We couldn't think of any other way" to honor Billy, Condrey said. "The biggest statement is that the newspaper is missing things right now. Those things came from Billy."
Other Billy Coleman stories that were slated to run inside the paper were also left blank. One letter to the editor expressed shock and sadness at his death.
"We are taking it a day at a time," Condrey said. "There's no replacing Billy."
Beyond Lake Providence, Billy's loss likely won't garner much notice. But it should. The things he represented and the work he did are slowly disappearing. Many people don't like the media, sometimes with good reason. But it's impossible not to respect the work Billy did, and the steadfastness he brought to it. He deserves that.
But hey, that's just my opinion!