Huckleberries: Ex-Hagadone journalists count off

We put together an all-star team of ex-Hagadone newspaper journalists at Huckleberries Online (HBO) last week. Yeah, yeah, we didn’t have anything better to do during Turkey Week. The final product was impressive. Did you know that L.A. Times/ESPN sports columnist T.J. Simers cut his teeth at the Coeur d’Alene Press? In fact, Simers made Brand X lore by trying to establish if Duane Hagadone existed. He tried several different ways to verify Hagadone’s existence before finally cornering him in a hotel hallway. Simers made the HBO Ex-Hagadone Newspaper All-Stars as the sports editor, with Dave Boling (Tacoma News Tribune), Jim Meehan (Spokesman-Review) and Dale Grummert (Lewiston Tribune) as his assistants. Other ex-Hagadonites named to the team by prospering elsewhere, and their team positions, include: editor/columnist – Doug Clark; news editor – Ric Clarke; copy editor – Mike Feiler; City Hall reporter – Keith Erickson; courthouse reporter – Erica Curless; cops/courts reporter – Taryn Brodwater; education reporter – Shawn Vestal; reporters – David Bond, Oliver Staley, Bill Graves, Brent Andrews, Jeff Sele, Sara Leaming and Susan Cuff; business editor – Bart Smith; business columnist – Nils Rosdahl; photographers – Dan Hyde and Lance Murphey; editorialist – Me? Public relations – Jim O’Day, the young man I hired as my sports editor at the Kalispell Daily Inter Lake in 1980 who is now the University of Montana athletic director. No Hagadone publisher was considered journalism-minded enough to be nominated.