NYT on AJC, Tucker (& me)
Quoted this morning in the New York Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Editor Julia Wallace takes a not-so-subtle swipe at the AJC’s editorial voice under longtime Editorial Page Editor Cynthia Tucker.
“We have moved to a different kind of editorial that’s much more about community issues and less about, ‘let me opine on national issues,’ ” she said.
That “let me opine on national issues” jab mis-characterizes, by implication, the paper’s voice under Tucker, whom Wallace is transferring to Washington to be a columnist.
One can disagree whether regional papers should or shouldn’t weigh in on the war in Iraq or presidential endorsements. But the AJC editorial board that Wallace plans to deconstruct in May has distinguished itself by staking out positions on local issues, whether they were controversies involving the King family, or the state’s failure to deal with transportation problems, or local political contests. Or the Legislature’s irresponsible approach to the state’s finances. Or the ethical lapses of elected officials in either party.
Going back to the days of Ralph McGill (whose legacy, as the Times correctly notes, has been carried out by Tucker), there was nothing like an AJC editorial to stake out a position that placed pressure on the local powers that be, at least to raise the level of debate in the state and often to get politicians to temper extreme positions.
But a consistently credible institutional voice on a variety of issues takes experience, connections, time and institutional support. It’s difficult to imagine one person who’s lived here for a year and has little editorial-writing experience being able to play that role.
Tucker has spoken enthusiastically of her transfer to Washington, where everyone seems to think her talents will only become more recognized at the national level. In the NYT article, however, does offer a contrast between her philosophy and Wallace. Writer Richard Perez-Pena paraphrases Wallace as saying that she expects the editorial board to avoid “hot-button ideological issues.” Later on, Tucker is quoted as saying “editorial pages ought to draw controversy.”
The article quotes me, in all my brilliance a splendor, but — drats — doesn’t name this blog.
Cynthia Tucker most of the editorial board will be replaced in May, a move that could create a different — and perhaps less liberal — voice for one of the country’s leading regional papers.
“I think they’re trying not to offend,” said Kenneth Edelstein, a blogger and former editor of Creative Loafing, an Atlanta alternative weekly. “It’s definitely a move to the right, and it’s a real change for a paper that was the most important progressive voice in the South for a long time.”
AJC Wallace’s memo on Tucker
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Editor Julia Wallace sent a memo to the AJC staff Monday heralding Cynthia Tucker’s move to Washington.
An article by Wallace also announced “Cynthia Tucker moves on to a new stage,” although it didn’t include such details as the composition of the paper’s new editorial board.
On the same day, a separate Monday announcement by Wallace, which listed of 74 staff members who took buyouts, was leaked to Atlanta Unfiltered’s Jim Walls. Somewhere around that time, Wallace and the AJC brass presented the staff with a reorganization staff, which I’m still hoping to get a hold of.
Meanwhile, here’s Wallace’s Monday memo:
To all,
I am delighted to announce that Cynthia Tucker will be moving to Washington as the AJC’s new Washington-based political columnist. Cynthia has been a strong and vital voice in this community for more than 20 years. Now, she will take those powerful skills to Washington to write for our opinion pages about national politics and what it means to us here in Atlanta.
We began discussing this move in the fall, believing that Washington was going to change and a new voice writing about those changes would be interesting to our readers. The need for this move increased this year, as it became clear that more and more decisions made in Washington have significant impact on us. We believe our readers will benefit from Cynthia’s insights into that scene.
As you can imagine, replacing Cynthia as the editorial page editor is not easy. As we looked at how the pages have changed in the past year, we think the best solution is to divide the job into two.
Andre Jackson will become editorial editor. He will be responsible for writing the weekly Sunday editorial and bringing in related response pieces from outside, such as “Another Voice.” As we do now on occasion, he will write daily editorials. The editorials will focus heavily on making this community a better place – pointing out problems, looking at solutions and encouraging our readers to act. The AJC’s editorial board members will be Andre, me, James Mallory and publisher Doug Franklin.
Ken Foskett, currently our commentary editor, will become opinions editor. He will be responsible for editing and selecting the national and local opinion we run on the pages – working to make sure it’s a good balance on issues and political viewpoints. The regulars on these pages will be Cynthia, Jay Bookman and Kyle Wingfield. They will write two to three times a week. Jim Wooten and Bob Barr will write once a week.
Luckovich’s cartoons will continue to appear five times a week. This editor will supplement our own strong voices with nationally syndicated columnists and cartoonists, letters and op-ed contributions.We also will be creating a board of contributors – about a dozen or more local people who write for us every few weeks or so. In the search for a conservative columnist, we discovered some strong voices and want them – and others with differing views – to appear more regularly on our pages.
Please join me in congratulating Cynthia on this exciting new assignment.
Julia
Julia Wallace
Editor
Atlanta Journal-Constitution and ajc.com
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.
Ralph McGill stirs
An upcoming shakeup of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s editorial board represents the latest and most dramatic shift in the political positioning of the South’s leading newspaper. How monumental a shift it is, and how deeply it might affect the political dynamics of Georgia, is difficult to say right now.
Ralph McGill may not be rolling in his grave, but he surely is a bit uncomfortable.
The changes competed yesterday with the unannounced, but leaked, news that 74 full-time AJC newsroom employees accepted the paper’s latest downsizing buyouts. In the long run, however, the revamping of the op-ed staff — which is only a small portion of the newsroom — may prove as big a loss.
Newspaper editorialists typically bemoan their lack of influence with self-deprecating humor. But passionate, courageous editorial voices can do much to place the forces of ignorance and hatred on the defensive, and to set the tone for debates about a community’s — and in the AJC’s case, a state’s — direction. Their strength lies in their courage to tell the truth as they see it.
For all its tempering over the last few years, the AJC has performed that role admirably under Editorial Page Editor Cynthia Tucker’s leadership. She and her staff consistently produce editorials and columns that spread light rather than fear, that hold public officials accountable, and that challenge Georgians to reject demagoguery and ignorance.
Tucker, in particular, gained a reputation for shining a light on sacred cows — including Mayor Bill Campbell’s corruption and the often scandalous dysfunction within Martin Luther King Jr.’s family. She gave the lie to conservative whining that she’s some sort of knee-jerk partisan.
Primarily, however, Tucker has been a powerful beacon for progress, carrying on the tradition of the old Atlanta Constitution’s Ralph McGill. McGill was vilified in the ’50s and ’60s by the segregationists who controlled Georgia politics, in the same way that Tucker has been vilified by today’s reactionaries. Like McGill, Tucker won a Pulitzer Prize for telling the truth when the truth was unpopular.
The shakeup announced yesterday seems designed to take things in a very different direction. Tucker is moving to the Cox Newspaper’s Washington bureau, where she’ll blog and write two columns a week for the AJC. A fellow named Andre Jackson will take a trimmed-down version of her job as “editorial editor” and columnist. (Current commentary editor Ken Foskett becomes “opinion editor,” meaning that he’ll select “a good balance” of syndicated columns, in addition to the local columns he already edits.)
Jackson is probably a smart guy and a fine journalist. Unlike Tucker (or for that matter Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jay Bookman) however, Jackson’s neither an accomplished opinion writer nor someone with a lot of background in Atlanta and Georgia. He joined the AJC last year as an editorial writer after previously serving as business editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Here’s what he said about himself in a May 2008 column by then-Public Editor Angela Tuck shortly after he came to Atlanta:
I consider myself an independent politically, meaning I assess my politics based on past performance and logic, not party lines. That said, I’d classify myself as center-right on fiscal and economic issues and a centrist to slightly center-left on many, but not all, social matters.
In an August staff shakeup, Jackson moved on to become senior editor for business, federal and state news. That so soon after his arrival in Atlanta that it’s difficult to say how his self-described moderation plays out on Georgia’s conservative political spectrum.
It’s safe to say, however, that for the first time in generations, the state’s leading editorial page finally will have abandoned its mission as a progressive voice in favor of a carefully constructed mirage of “balance” — designed not to tell the truth, whether it’s unpopular or not, as much as to mollify conservative readers.
Tucker and Bookman will blog and write two columns each a week from the liberal side of the ledger, AJC Editor Julia Wallace announced. Conservative local columns will be produced once a week by Associate Editorial Page Editor Jim Wooten (even though he’s retiring from the staff) and former right-wing congressman (and libertarian) Bob Barr, and twice a week by Kyle Wingfield, who recently won a contest to be named the paper’s new conservative voice. Jackson, the self-described economic and fiscal conservative, also will write a column.
The more profound shift may appear in editorials, which carry extra weight as the institutional voice of the paper. Previously, Tucker was in charge of the editorial voice overall, while Bookman edited most of the editorials that he didn’t write. They may have been the strongest pair of editorialists at any regional paper in the country: Tucker’s won a bevy of honors in addition to her Pulitzer; Bookman’s won at least 13 major journalism awards for his columns and editorials. (Disclosure: Jay’s a friend of mine, but I haven’t spoken with him on or off the record for this story.)
(UPDATE clarifies that Bookman no longer on AJC editorial board.)
Now, Tucker is leaving the board, as is liberal editorial writer Maureen Downey, who will move to writing about education. A lot of conservatives may say: “Great! It sounds a lot more balanced to have a centrist editorial editor than to have two liberals in charge of the whole thing.” That’s obviously what the Marietta Street brass is wishing for. I doubt it will work, however.
One very basic problem will be the loss of sheer knowledge and understanding about Georgia. Tucker and Bookman each have spent at least 20 years of reporting in Georgia. They know most of the state’s influential players and are well-acquainted the narratives of various policy debates. So they’re equipped to peel away layers of bunk in an effort to get at the truth.
More significantly, imagine Jackson, Bookman and Wingfield — who will now serve together on the editorial board — trying to arrive at a consensus on any contentious issue. They’re likely to spend a lot of their time just arguing with no end in sight, before they decide to avoid some subjects entirely or to produce pro-con style essays that offer readers a patronizing posture of “balance” rather than principled, courageous insight. I’m not saying things will always turn out that way, but on the truly difficult issues, it will be hard for readers to figure out what the paper stands for.
Tucker’s departure culminates years of efforts by the paper to mollify conservative, suburban readers. Those efforts have included throwing more resources into coverign Gwinnett County than it did into Atlanta; undercutting the editorials themselves with often fatuous “Equal Time” columns; and giving desperate play to Wooten’s predictable, angry regurgitations of Rush Limbaugh talking points.
The irony is that the entire enterprise hasn’t worked. In their candid moments, high-ranking AJCers acknowledge that all the money poured into Gwinnett coverage didn’t increase reader penetration there. And just take a look at reader comments on various blogs to see how contemptuous conservative activists and politicians remain of the paper.
That could be because efforts at balance come across as what they are — a bit patronizing. But it’s also because the practice of journalism is an essentially liberal exercise in the classical sense of the word: It places faith in the ability of people to form their opinions based on facts and reasoning rather than on preconceptions and prejudice. Meanwhile, the South’s brand of conservatism — the brand that has taken over much of the Republican Party — is essentially reactionary: Any narrative, no matter how factual, that challenges a set worldview is seen as a threat from outsiders to be battled, no matter how high the cost.
If that’s the case, no amount of “balance” will satisfy those who complain so bitterly that the AJC’s editorial page is too liberal or that Tucker — who has never been anything but civil — is somehow “polarizing.” But Tucker’s departure will make it more difficult for the AJC to hold onto to its seat at the center of the community — at the very time that newspapers are finding it more difficult to remain relevant.
Cynthia Tucker is a star. Her column is likely to become more popular nationally. In Washington, she’ll be sought out as that rare talking head whose words are carefully chosen, insightful and challenging. But Washington’s gain may prove to be our loss — in a state and a region that desperately needs a counterbalance its rightward revolution.
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