Laura Douglas-Brown became editor of Southern Voice this year.
The vibe is laid-back and the dress code predominantly jeans at Southern Voice. Framed copies of the newspaper's front pages dot the white walls. Plants, mostly real, lean casually here and there. And you'll notice a scattering of dog dishes for canine companions that "work" no more than half-days.
Editor Laura Douglas-Brown's days are much longer than that.
Her career at Atlanta's awardwinning gay and lesbian weekly began in 1997 with a newsroom internship. She became editor early this year after stints as a full-time reporter and news editor. Her first issue hit the streets Feb. 10, featuring coverage of anti-gay protests at Coretta Scott King's funeral, a piece on May-December romances and news from the Georgia Statehouse.
"We take our office casually because we take our work seriously," Douglas-Brown, 32, likes to say.
Southern Voice has been a part of her life since she was 15 and the editor of her high school paper in Columbus. Her father, an avid Georgia Tech sports fan, had finally realized she wasn't into football or basketball and stopped taking her to games. One weekend, to compensate, he grabbed copies of all the free papers outside Tech's student union.
"If only he had known what one of those papers was or how much I would enjoy it, I suspect he would have left it on the rack," Douglas-Brown recalled in a recent column. "Yes, at age 15, having acknowledged being gay to no one in the world, I got my first copy of Southern Voice - from my dad."
That copy, hidden in a drawer and reread until it was well-worn, became a lifeline for her.
"Just knowing that there were people out there like me - and not just scraping by in existence but a vibrant community with a political world and an arts world - was so crucial to me," she said.
Douglas-Brown wants Southern Voice to continue to be that kind of lifeline. She also wants it to inspire its readers.
"I think the first step for people in fighting for their civil rights is understanding where they stand," she said. "It's very easy, especially in a city that often is as gay-friendly as Atlanta, to get complacent. It's important for people to know the very real battles that people continue to face every day."
Douglas-Brown was new to Southern Voice when she began covering the biggest story of her career: the bombing of the Otherside Lounge, an Atlanta gay bar. The place held special significance. It's where she met the woman who would become her partner.
She and Donna Douglas-Brown have been together eight years and have two daughters.
Southern Voice's mission today is pretty much the same as it was when Douglas-Brown saw her first copy: to cover news and entertainment of interest to gay readers in Atlanta and throughout the Southeast with the objectivity and professionalism expected of any media outlet.
"We do our absolute best to tell every side of every story - to call the lawmakers who introduce the anti-gay bills, to make sure our readers come away from a story knowing both sides, as much as people are willing to talk to us, and we've actually found that people are very willing to talk to us," Douglas-Brown said.
Laura Douglas-Brown and Southern Voice arts editor Mike Fleming make the final edits on an issue of the weekly Atlanta-based gay and lesbian newspaper.
She also wants the paper to continue to improve its coverage of all the constituencies that make up gay Atlanta. Her readers are "parents, drag queens and everywhere in between, and even those categories aren't mutually exclusive," she said. "It's always a challenge to be mindful that there's no one way to be gay."
Southern Voice has been around since the early 1980s and is now part of the Window Media chain, which publishes gay weeklies in Houston, New York, Florida and Washington, D.C., as well as David magazine in Atlanta. About 33,000 copies are printed each week and planted in newspaper boxes around town by early Friday. Southern Voice's Web site (www.sovo.com) is a 24-hour, seven-day operation that gets page views from all over the country.
You don't have to be gay to work at Southern Voice, but you do have to have a basic understanding of gay civil rights issues.
"Just as you would expect a business reporter to be knowledgeable in the business world, we would expect folks to have a basic familiarity with the [gay] issues that are out there," Douglas-Brown said.
The paper does ask job applicants to consider one crucial question: Can you be comfortable operating in a world that will assume you're gay - whether or not they are - simply because you work at a gay newspaper?