Thirty-five years ago this week, I walked into The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newsroom as a newbie reporter, the least senior of 500-some newshounds.
I am now third on the seniority chart out of almost 200.
The stories from my arrival on July 2, 1990 speak of another time:
— Longtime sports columnist/editor Furman Bisher, who once interviewed Shoeless Joe Jackson, was in Ireland covering a horse race and working his way over to Wimbledon because newspapers’ purse strings were then very loose.
— Columnist Lewis Grizzard, the Southern humorist with a bite, especially for know-it-all Yankees, weighed in on the failure of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
— And a story noted Republicans were optimistic they could win a few seats in the legislature and move Georgia, then in the grip of conservative Democrats, into a two-party state.
Bisher and Grizzard no longer walk the earth, but Georgia’s GOPers are still stomping about and, for 20 years, have had their own iron-grip on the state.
Being employed at any company for 35 years, a span that the Bible measures as half a lifetime, is a rarity. Surviving at one newspaper that long now approaches man-bites-dog category.
In that time, we’ve seen countless newspaper bankruptcies, vanishing classified ads, layoffs, buyouts and an all-around gutting of the business.
The AJC has weathered better than most and has still been hiring thanks to the Cox family, which has been in newspapering for 127 years, and has a soft spot for the business.
I called Mike King, once the head of our Pulitzer-winning health team and later the Metro editor. He’s a classic newspaperman, suitably thoughtful and ornery in equal doses.
“In 1990, we were heading into the salad days of American newspapering,” he told me. “You had to (screw) up to not make a lot of money. And we made a lot of money. Next to selling drugs on the street, it was the most profitable thing you could do.”
The art of newspapering — of going out to report on events, write them up, print them up on paper and drive the terrestrial product to people’s homes — is a 19th century manufacturing process and increasingly an anachronism in a 21st century digital world of limited attention span.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
The staff way back then was largely young, even younger than 31-year-old me, many of them Ivy Leaguers hired by former New York Times editor Bill Kovach who came to town to create a NYT South.
By the time I arrived, Kovach was gone and I convinced Hyde Post, then the chief of most of the news operations, that guys from directional schools (Southern Illinois University) could cover news, too.
There have been many stories: The 1996 Olympics, the sensational murder of Sara Tokars, 9/11, Atlanta City Hall corruption, the whipsaw changes in Georgia politics. I’ve bylined 3,344 stories.
Through my time here, perhaps a couple thousand journalists, a transient lot, have come and gone. Some left for different papers or other careers. Some retired. Others got laid off. Or quit. Or even died.
Now, just three of the 1990 crew remain, the others are a couple stalwarts: investigative reporter Carrie Teegardin, who came in 1989; and editorial cartoonist Mike Luckovich, who rolled in right after her. (My old buddy, Bill Rankin, our legal affairs mope, was here at the time and complained about being left out of this article. But he retired last month.)
Luckovich has won two Pulitzers and Teegardin has been a finalist once. (I can claim being a bit player in a Pulitzer entry finalist after Brian Nichols went on a killing spree at the Fulton County courthouse in 2005. But a couple dozen of us humped copy on that, so my ownership is pretty thin.)
Credit: AJC
Credit: AJC
Teegardin grew up on an Ohio farm and came to Atlanta at age 24, fresh from a gig in Florida. She remembers driving up the interstate to her new city.
“I saw the skyline, it was like Mary Tyler Moore,” she said evoking the 1970s TV fave where the heroine was overjoyed to finally land in the big city.
Credit: AJC file photo
Credit: AJC file photo
Teegardin has carved out a career as a journalistic hound dog, digging into troubling subjects, often for months, before delivering hard truths.
She recently shared a National Headliner Award, not her first, with reporter Danny Robbins for relentless exposés of Georgia’s dangerous and dysfunctional prison system.
“Some things outrage me; if you see something wrong, you can change things,” she said. “Some of these investigations mattered. We’ve had laws changed.”
It can be rough, dwelling on the negative, she said, and that’s where the camaraderie of the newsroom comes in.
Newsrooms, especially decades ago, were staffed with an inordinate share of oddballs.
“All the characters, all the crazy stuff,” she recounted. “The profanity, the dating, people who were eccentric and passionate.”
Today’s HR departments would implode if transported to 1990.
Credit: AJC
Credit: AJC
Through the decades, Luckovich has cranked out four and five cartoons a week. It’s a dream job but grueling.
“It’s like being married to a nymphomaniac,” he says. “It’s great at the beginning, but you gotta keep doing it.”
Luckovich’s caricatures and takedowns of the high and mighty — Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Zell Miller, etc. — are often deliciously brutal. One cartoon of Newt in 1994 was so eviscerating the new Speaker-to-be would not speak with his hometown paper for months.
“It’s not an occupation, it’s a vocation,” Luckovich said. “If I can show people what’s happening without the spin and lies and cut through the BS, and do it in a way that’s clever, amusing and hard-hitting, then that’s what I’m here for.”
I’ll nod in agreement with our impish-faced doodler. It sure beats working.
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