ANDERSON, Ind. —
We at The Herald Bulletin last week were pleased to add a veteran reporter to our newsroom staff. Stu Hirsch, formerly of The Indianapolis Star, joined our team midweek and his byline was already appearing by Friday.
Stu’s arrival brought our staff of reporters back up to its full complement of five. Here’s a rundown of who they are and what they do:
- Sam Brattain covers public safety – more commonly referred to as cops, courts and fires. Sam has lived in the Anderson-Noblesville area for several years. This is his first fulltime job in newspaper. Sam can be reached at sam.brattain@heraldbulletin.com or 640-4883.
- Abbey Doyle recently moved from the business/northern county beat to our features writing position. A native of the Vincennes area, Abbey wrote for newspapers in Alabama and Louisiana before coming to The Herald Bulletin. Contact her at abbey.doyle@heraldbulletin.com or 640-4805.
- Melanie Hayes, like me and several others in the newsroom, is in her second stint at The Herald Bulletin. Between tours of duty here, she was a reporter with The Indianapolis Star. Melanie covers city government. She can be reached at melanie.hayes@heraldbulletin.com or 648-4250.
- Hirsch is an experienced business writer and will cover that beat here at The Herald Bulletin. He’ll also report on news in northern Madison County communities. Stu can be reached at stu.hirsch@heraldbulletin.com or 640-4861.
- Dani Palmer is a native Hoosier and did internships at the Evansville Courier & Press before coming to The Herald Bulletin for her first full-time job in newspaper journalism. She covers education and local communities in the southern portion of Madison County. Contact Dani at dani.palmer@heraldbulletin.com or 640-4847.
We invite readers to pitch story ideas directly to reporters. In addition to the email addresses and phone numbers listed above, all can be contact through Facebook and Twitter.
While each of these reporters is assigned primary beats for coverage, all of them spend much of their reporting and writing time working on articles that are not closely related to their beats. Most of them contribute regularly to our Community page. And they write for our quarterly magazines – Madison and Metro North Business – as well as the many special sections and projects (look for our 2012 Annual Report on local business and other institutions in late March) we tackle.
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Readers occasionally make the observation that The Herald Bulletin censors online reader comments. This is untrue. We do count on Facebook and other social media to run a profanity filter on comments posted to theheraldbulletin.com, but we do not make a practice of screening such comments. The Facebook filter is not perfect; for example, it sometimes flags comments where the letters “a-s-s” are used in a word, mistakenly recognizing the combination as profanity.
If you’ve posted a comment that has not appeared at theheraldbulletin.com, shoot an email to online editor Andy Knight at andy.knight@heraldbulletin.com or call him at 640-4809, and he’ll take a look at why it was flagged.
Editor Scott Underwood’s column appears Mondays. Contact him at scott.underwood@heraldbulletin.com or 640-4845.
