by Wesley Harris
For nearly four decades, John Hays published a newspaper that people in Ruston and surrounding parishes could not ignore.
It was called The Morning Paper, though it was a weekly—small, independent, rough-edged and often fearless. It was the kind of paper people opened carefully, especially if they thought their name might be inside.
If John Hays wrote about you, it usually was not good news.
That was part of the paper’s power and part of its controversy. To supporters, Hays was a tenacious bulldog willing to dig into public business, political influence, and potential corruption. To critics, he could be unfair, profane, crude, and needlessly harsh. Some people loved his work. Some hated him. Some probably did both.
But they read him.
Hays began The Morning Paper in 1976 and kept it alive until 2013. In an era before Facebook posts, podcasts, and online rumor mills, his publication gave Lincoln Parish a different kind of public square—one where the tone could be combative, the language sharp, and the targets uncomfortable.
The paper was not large, but it had reach. At its peak, it could be found at the end of the driveway of over 50,000 homes every Thursday morning and stacked in numerous convenience stores. All for free. It could irritate public officials, expose questionable dealings, and keep stories alive after others had moved on. Hays had a habit of following money, pressing politicians, asking unpleasant questions, and refusing to let go. That persistence brought him national attention.
One early example was the Pine Tree Caper, a North Louisiana Ponzi scheme that embarrassed locals who had bought into the fraud and lost heavily. The story had everything that drew Hays’s attention: promises too good to be true, local money, familiar names, official embarrassment, and victims who learned too late that charm and confidence are not the same as honesty.
In a small town, scams often travel through relationships, and Hays knew how to follow those relationships where others might not.
Hays’s work on the Pine Tree Caper showed what The Morning Paper could do when it turned its attention to a story others might have preferred to discuss quietly. It was local, embarrassing, and messy. That made it exactly the sort of story Hays would not ignore.
It was not the only one. He also reported famously on the Towers Financial Corporation, then described as one of the largest Ponzi schemes of its time. His reporting on Towers earned him a special Gerald Loeb Award in 1994, one of journalism’s top honors for business and financial reporting.
The Towers case was no minor local quarrel. Steven Hoffenberg and associates falsely portrayed Towers Financial as profitable while investor money was diverted to cover losses and fund Hoffenberg’s lavish lifestyle. The scheme collapsed in 1993 after the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Towers with securities fraud, based largely on The Morning Paper’s stories. In 1995, Hoffenberg pleaded guilty to bilking investors out of about $463 million. Hays’s work showed a weekly newspaper in North Louisiana could push a story with national consequences.
After taking down Hoffenberg, the New York Times called Hays “a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, cowboy-booted newspaper publisher . . . a self-taught muckraker . . .”
The Towers case was Hays at his best: stubborn, relentless, and unimpressed by titles, money, or distance. If something smelled wrong, he dug. And when he dug, he did not use a spoon. He used a shovel.
But for many readers, The Morning Paper was best known for its garage sale map, which turned bargain hunting into a Saturday morning pastime for families who planned their routes, piled into the car, and searched for deals across town.
The same traits that made him effective also made him difficult. He could be blunt to the point of brutality. He did not seem especially interested in whether the people he wrote about felt bruised by the result. In a small community, that mattered. Some subjects of his stories were not distant figures. They were people seen at restaurants, offices, courthouse hallways, ballgames, and grocery stores.
Local journalism is personal. A big city reporter may write about a mayor and never see him outside a press conference. A small-town publisher may write about a city official in the morning and pass him on the street that afternoon. Hays worked in that close space, where every story had echoes and every criticism had a face.
Some remember a rawness in his character. One often-recalled example involved a tragic crash in which a little girl was struck and killed. On the front page, Hays ran a black-and-white photograph from the scene. In one of the rare uses of color in his publication, red ink was printed over the large puddle of blood in the roadway. Some police officers who had worked the scene criticized him to his face. According to those recollections, he laughed.
That story, painful as it is, belongs in any honest assessment of John Hays. It shows the other side of the fearless editor: a man whose appetite for impact could cross into cruelty. He understood shock. He used it and rarely softened the blow.
That is why Hays is hard to reduce to a simple tribute.
He was not merely a heroic newspaperman nor a crank with a typewriter. He was a complicated figure whose work reflected both the highest and lowest possibilities of independent journalism. He could expose what others ignored. He could be right in ways that mattered. His abrasive manner could cause people to dismiss him even when he had the goods.
But undeniably, Lincoln Parish was different because The Morning Paper existed.
A community needs somebody willing to sit through meetings, read documents, follow paper trails, and challenge official explanations. It needs someone who is not too comfortable with the people in power. Hays filled that role in his own unruly way.
The Morning Paper feels like a relic from another age, not because every part of it should be imitated, but because its independence and dogged persistence are increasingly rare.
The paper’s final issue in 2013 carried the headline “-30-,” the old newsroom mark for the end of a story. It was a fitting close for a publication that spent 37 years making noise in a place where many people preferred quiet.
John Hays made powerful people nervous. He made ordinary readers curious. He collected enemies. He won admirers. He embarrassed public officials, angered critics, irritated regulators, and earned national recognition for work that began in a small home office.
His legacy is not neat. His little paper was sharp. Sometimes too sharp. But it cut through things others would not touch.
And for better or worse, Lincoln Parish remembers.
John Hays passed away in 2014 at age 72.
