Tag: journalism

For Jobina Fortson-Evans, joining CBS Atlanta’s newsroom felt less like a career move and more like a homecoming to the city that first ignited her passion for storytelling. As a child, Fortson-Evans loved interviewing people with her camcorder. Years later, she joined the Tucker High School newspaper, which sparked her interest in a journalism career. Now she's joining CBS Atlanta’s new team.

An ex-CNN reporter turned independent journalist, Nick Valencia traveled from Atlanta to Minneapolis to report on immigration enforcement. But the tactics he saw federal agents use on protesters and press alike greatly disturbed him.

I am the first and only journalist who has been arrested and deported under the Trump administration. But, possibly, I will not be the last. And that worries me. I am still working as a journalist. My plan is to continue reporting on news from around the world. I have already done two international stories. I am a journalist, and I cannot keep quiet.

Through her editorial guidance at SoVo and GaVo, which she launched in 2010, Chris Cash taught me and others the importance of bringing our authentic selves into our reporting and the inherent value of queer people covering our own communities.

For the majority of my upbringing, I never considered myself to be any form of activist, or thought I had those qualities of leadership. But once I began my career as a journalist, I started to see how the work of social justice activists is so much more than leading protests and speaking to crowds, the actions we commonly think of as activism.

I grew up as a Northern Black during the 1960s, with the insight of a Southern Black. That’s because my parents were children of the Great Migration of the 1940s. While Dad’s family came to South Bend, Indiana, from Dell, Arkansas, Mom’s folks traveled to that same city from Palestine, Mississippi. My maternal great-grandfather was around often. Before he died in 1964 at 111, as the oldest person in the United States, he told us about his time as a water boy during the Civil War.

Author and journalist Josh Green is best-known among Atlantans for his work as the editor of Curbed and Urbanize. Recently, he published his first novel, Secrets of Ash—a propulsive suspense novel with enough twists and turns to keep you reading until dawn. We caught up with Green recently to discuss the book and how he approaches fiction writing versus journalism.

If there’s an Atlantan with something interesting to say, there’s a good chance they’ve said it to Rose Scott. Her radio program, Closer Look, which airs live every weekday afternoon on local NPR member station WABE, hosts a vibrant cross-section of the city’s movers and shakers, interviewed by Scott herself. “I always say we’re a curator of conversations,” she told me. “Community conversations.”

Leroy Chapman is leaning into this moment with a sense of awe and reverence. On March 23, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced the 52-year-old would become the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, a promotion from his role as deputy managing editor. It’s a historic first, marking the first time in the newspaper's 155-year history that a Black person has served in this capacity.

In just the past five years, Atlanta Civic Circle, Capital B, Canopy Atlanta, the Atlanta Community Press Collective, and local bureaus of Axios and the national investigative news site ProPublica have all set up shop in Atlanta. Decaturish, which turns 10 this year, is focused on repairing the old-school, community-newspaper model. Independent outlets are not only challenging revenue models—they’re changing the way local outlets approach journalism itself.