Supertalk Mississippi

In 1979, Steve Davenport was hired to manage the Love Communications owned Mississippi Agriculture and News Network in Jackson, Mississippi. Shortly afterward, it was purchased by Baton Rouge-based Interstate Communications and merged with Louisiana Network Inc. Soon, production of news reports and short features for Mississippi radio stations evolved to include longer lifestyle, and sports phone-in programs. Following disagreement over a $25,000 annual franchise fee for the Ole Miss Rebels, Steve Davenport and his business partners the Hanley family of Hazlehurst agreed to purchase Interstate Communications' Mississippi market business, Mississippi Networks Inc, for $300,000 in 1985. Davenport bought out the Hanley's stake in 2008. Purchases included Biloxi music stations from Alpha Media in 2018. Between 2013 and 2018, sport, and then feel-good and lifestyle programming, were added to the SuperTalk format broadcast on Telesouth's 12 talk radio stations. In 2019, the company began video broadcast of SuperTalk programming on C Spire cable. ==Radio stations==

, Supertalk's schedule includes:- Network • The Gallo Radio Show - Presenter, Paul Gallo - Producer, Perez Hodge • Coast Vue with Ricky Mathews • MidDays with Gerard Gibert - Producer, Ryne "Ryno" Montgomery • In a Mississippi Minute with Steve Azar • SportsTalk Mississippi - Presenters, Richard Cross, Michael Borkey and Brian Hadad • Outdoors with Ricky Mathews • The Handy Man Radio Show The show was briefly renamed Air Bubba, then the JT Show, and in a departure from interviewing Mississippi's state politicians in 2016, it hosted British campaigner Nigel Farage. Williamson announced he had been diagnosed with Lymphoma in 2020 and died that year. ==News networks==

, SuperTalk's general, statewide news service is carried by 48 Mississippi affiliate radio stations. Thirty-six broadcast its Agrinews package covering commodity prices and farming topics. ==College athletes' image rights==

Telesouth Communications Inc was one of the defendants in a putative class action lawsuit brought by Steven Clarke and nine other amateur college athletes. They alleged athletic conferences, broadcast networks and licensing agencies (including Telesouth) improperly colluded to exclude them from the market for their image rights, and set those fees they received at zero or lower than what they would otherwise have achieved. Judge Kevin H Sharp's 2015 decision in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee accepted that college sports was "big business", but concluded the way athletes had been required to surrender their images rights was lawful. ==References==