2012 Groundbreakers - The Future Issue - Atlanta Magazine
 
 
Groundbreakers 2012

Author Betsy Riley

  • Betsy Riley

    Executive Editor

    The editor of Atlanta’s former shelter magazine, Atlanta Magazine’s HOME, she specializes in lifestyle topics such as home and garden, education, healthcare, real estate, travel, and shopping. She also writes occasional narrative features. On the broadcast front, she is a regular contributor to local NPR affiliate WABE’s “Weekend Preview” segments. Before joining the editorial staff ten years ago, Riley was a freelance editor for the magazine for another ten years. During that time, she wrote many features and edited the magazine’s monthly “Atlanta Life” section. She has also written for other regional and national magazines, including O (Oprah’s magazine), Ladies Home Journal, Town & Country, Parenting, and Southern Living. With former Atlanta magazine art director Elaine Hightower, Riley is the author of the award-winning Our Family Meeting Book. She began her career as a medical journalist, eventually becoming publisher of national award-winning newsletters produced by a division of Medical Economics. A graduate of Wake Forest University, she and her husband Mark have lived in Atlanta since 1980. They have two college-age sons.

Profiles from the August 2012 issue

Rosalynn Carter

For protecting the rights of the mentally ill

by Betsy Riley
Rickey Wingo, fifty-three, suffered from schizophrenia and got agitated due to a side effect of his medicine. The final time it happened, workers at Northwest Georgia Regional Hospital pinned him to the ground and beat him to death, according to the state’s chief medical examiner, who ruled Wingo’s death a homicide. No staffers were charged or punished. Wingo’s case was just one of 115 suspicious deaths and incidents uncovered in a five-year Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation of Georgia’s state psychiatric hospitals. No, this wasn’t Jack Nelson’s 1960 Pulitzer Prize–winning exposé about abuses at Milledgeville’s Central State. This series was published in 2007. Do you remember it? Read More

Linda Matzigkeit

For sounding the alarm about childhood obesity

by Betsy Riley
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta has admitted patients who weigh more than 500 pounds, and the pediatric facility treats type 2 diabetes, hypertension, liver disease, and sleep apnea—diseases once seen only in adults. When Children’s started asking questions, it was stunned to discover that although 40 percent of Georgia children were overweight or obese (second worst only to Mississippi), more than 70 percent of parents considered their kids’ weights normal. Read More