Sunday AJCs do a bit of muckraking
After weeks of catching grief for its redesign, its staff cuts and the dismantling of its editorial board, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has pumped out some pretty strong reporting — particularly in its last two Sunday editions.
Not only has Cameron McWhirter done a hell of a job on two straight Sundays uncovering gubernatorial candidate John Oxendine’s questionable campaign fundraising practices (which inspired my own bloviation on our, uhm, colorful insurance commissioner), but the paper’s done some real digging on powerful business people who help determine that your tax dollars are spent for their benefit. Yesterday’s paper contained two such stories — Ariel Hart and Alan Judd’s expose on a roadbuilder who’s helped to bankroll political careers, and Ty Tagami’s article on the Sembler Co.’s request for a bailout in the form of DeKalb County tax breaks for its new Brookhaven development.
It’s difficult to say this early whether the spate of excellent enterprise stories signifies a lean, mean reporting machine whose focus makes up (at least a bit) for the staff cuts, or if it amounts to a shrinking staff running on fumes before the reporters get too exhausted to do any more than tell you the stuff that the powers-that-be want you to know anyway.
One still-ominous sign for the AJC is that two strong editorials over the last two weeks — Jay Bookman’s on high-speed rail and Maureen Downey’s on dropouts — were produced by really good editorial writers journalists who share deep knowledge about this community and whom the paper plans to remove from the editorial board. I still hope the paper Editor Julia Wallace revisits its her decision to handicap the paper’s own institutional voice.
Yes, I know: There’s no shortage of opinion on the web. But the AJC’s informed editorial positions have done a lot over the years to carry this city and this state forward in a way that would be impossible for a smaller institution or difficult even for its own individual columnists.
Still, the quality of recent news articles in the redesigned Sunday paper do the AJC proud. They demonstrate yet again that only a newspaper can afford the reporters to dig up the controversial stories we need to understand what’s really going on in our community and among our leaders.
When the paper’s redesign and organizational changes were announced last month, Editor Julia Wallace said the idea was to make the Sunday paper a longer read that offered perspective of the week behind and insight into the week ahead. Her reporters have done a good bit of that over the last couple of weeks.
By the way, this warm and cuddly post about the AJC has nothing at all — nothing at all, I tell you! — with that fact that Wallace was very friendly to me when I ran into her Saturday. Perish the thought! Shame on you for thinking otherwise.
NOTE: Crossed out words and most italics in this post represent minor edits that I should have caught before publishing.
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