Bookman off AJC editorial board
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s editorial board shakeup turns out to be more significant than what I reported Tuesday.
Last week, I said the late great Ralph McGill was stirring in his grave. Turns out, he gotta be spinning.
That’s because — contrary to my earlier post — Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jay Bookman no longer will sit on the board. In other words, neither of the two most important liberal voices in the state for the last two decades — Bookman and his boss, Editorial Page Editor Cynthia Tucker — will write editorials for the AJC anymore, nor will they have a say in the paper’s editorial positions.
Instead, according to several sources familiar with the move, the board will consist of the paper’s brass — Publisher Doug Franklin, Editor Julia Wallace and Senior Managing Editor James Mallory — along with a single editorial writer, the new “Editorial Editor” Andre Jackson.
Placing Franklin on the board raises some questions in it own right. It inevitably seems a conflict of interest for a newspaper to give a seat on the board to the publisher, who necessarily has business dealings with advertisers and other companies that may become subjects of editorials. While some other newspapers — particularly small ones — engage in that practice, the AJC is large enough to avoid such an awkward situation.
More significantly, losing the expertise and insight that Tucker and Bookman brought to the board is a big blow to the Atlanta community. They’ll still be writing columns and blogging. But the AJC’s editorial page has long been among the few strengths at a paper that, like most other dailies, is seeing it’s resources rapidly diminish.
Jackson has been in Atlanta all of a year. He’s primarily a business writer and editor, who spent only a few months in 2008 on the AJC board. Wallace and Mallory have their hands full running the newsroom, so it appears that Jackson will be the only editorial writer.
Don’t be surprised if there are only one or two editorials each week in the AJC from now on. And no matter how brilliant Jackson is, it would take him years to develop the sources and background on Atlanta’s people and issues that Tucker and Bookman acquired.
This is a big deal for Georgia, because the AJC and the old Atlanta Constitution have played such a critical role as prods for progress. No one personified that better than McGill, who won a Pulitzer Prize in the 1950s for his courageous opinion pieces on civil rights. But Tucker, who won her own Pulitzer in 2007, and Bookman have carried on that tradition. Both will blog and continue to write columns — Tucker from Washington now, Bookman in Atlanta.
The Journal-Constitution brass has been somewhat discrete about this part of the editorial page shakeup. The move was made in the midst of a huge newsroom staff reduction. And Wallace’s article on the changes emphasized Tucker’s move to D.C., but didn’t describe the more changes in the structure of the board.
“Veteran editor Andre Jackson will become the editorial editor, convening the editorial board and writing the institutional editorials,” Wallace wrote, without revealing the board’s makeup.
After I wrote (mistakenly) that Bookman would continue on the board, various people familiar with the paper informed me that the board would be trimmed down to include only Jackson and the brass.
An AJC spokesman contacted me as well, asking if I needed any information. I replied that it’d be great to find out the makeup of the new board. It’s been two days and he hasn’t written back.
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Comments
5 Comments on Bookman off AJC editorial board
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Ralph McGill stirs | Atlanta Unsheltered on
Sat, 18th Apr 2009 7:16 am
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Matt J. Duffy on
Sat, 18th Apr 2009 7:21 am
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NYT on AJC, Tucker (& me) | Atlanta Unsheltered on
Mon, 20th Apr 2009 9:03 am
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Steve Barton on
Tue, 21st Apr 2009 9:30 pm
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smott on
Thu, 13th May 2010 3:13 am
[...] (UPDATE clarifies that Bookman no longer on AJC editorial board.) [...]
Perhaps the management is rethinking the wisdom of having such a left-leaning editorial board. While addressing plummeting circulation, Wallace said that she was taking concerns of bias into account:
http://mattjduffy.blogspot.com/2009/03/ajc-on-bias.html
Where is it written that a newspaper editorial board must be to the far left of the political spectrum? Removing Tucker and Bookman probably moves the board toward the center of the spectrum. Perhaps the paper will benefit from not alienating so many of its readers on the editorial pages.
[...] issues” jab mis-characterizes, by implication, the paper’s voice under Tucker, whom Wallace is transferring to Washington to be a [...]
I have (boringly) said for years that writing the subscription renewal check to the AJC was my least favorite annual payment. What Duffy says above is right, and maybe I’ll keep sending the Cox family my money for more years when the editorial section becomes more bearable…I do want to say that Cynthia Tucker’s column has been of interest when it stuck to Atlanta; her consideration of national subjects will (I am sure) be doctrinaire (remember Tom Teeper — ptui!) But Jay Bookman’s got nothing, absolutely nothing to say that is interesting. Send him off with Osterman the Sandy Springs guy to the whichever-circle-Dante-put-boring-writers-in circle of Georgia counties w/o AJC delivery.
Wishing everyone mentioned here and reading this the best (and I really mean that, boring though it is),
– Steve Barton, Dunwoody, Georgia
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