N.Y. Look in Atlanta : Paper Stirs Up Southern Inhospitality

Georgia political analyst Claibourne H. Darden Jr. explained all the hoo-ha about the newspaper in town this way: “This new editor is from the New York Times, and they were on the wrong side of the recent unpleasantness of 1861 to 1863.”

Talk radio host Tom Houck was more inflammatory. “These White Knights from the New York Times,” he said on a recent program, stretching the words out like taffy to make his irony clear. “They’re bad people. Bad people. These people are not to be trusted with our community.”

Some of Houck’s callers disagreed just as fervently. “Atlanta is changing” said Robert from mid-town, “and the newspapers have to change with it.”

‘Good Ole Boy Journalism’

“I’m happy that the age of good ole boy journalism in Atlanta is dying out,” Janet said.

“You,” Houck answered accusingly, “don’t like Southern writers.”

The subject on radio talk shows, in local magazines and on television here of late is the change occurring at the city’s powerful newspaper, the Journal and Constitution, flagship of the Cox family media empire of Atlanta. Last December, as part of its long-term plan to improve the paper’s reputation, Cox hired William Kovach, the highly respected former New York Times Washington bureau chief, as editor.

In the months since, Kovach has given the paper a more serious look, added more national and foreign news, reshuffled staff and cut back on local columnists. The paper’s two senior political writers have resigned, and its popular entertainment writer was fired.

Intense Attention

And Kovach in the process has attracted intense public attention. Last month, when the paper’s renowned humor columnist, Lewis Grizzard, nearly quit to protest the changes, TV news programs lured viewers with teasers saying: “‘Will Lewis Grizzard leave the paper? Details at 6 p.m.”

The Journal and Constitution--once separate newspapers--is among the city’s and the South’s great institutions, like Coca-Cola, Rich’s department store and University of Georgia football.

And to many here, the debate over the paper has much to do with the struggle over the identity of the new Atlanta, one of America’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas, the capital of an economically and politically emerging South.

Since 1970, the population of Greater Atlanta has grown by more than 40%, a magnet to Northerners and Southerners alike. Companies such as RJR Nabisco have moved their headquarters here, and federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control have helped turn it into something of a medical research capital.

For many years, said former Constitution Editor Eugene Patterson, “missing (in Atlanta) was a vision of a great newspaper of the South speaking for a region that needed an enlightened voice from its largest city.” The Cox family has signaled, Patterson said, that it now has that vision.

This is not the first storm about Northerners and the city’s newspapers. The Cox family aroused similar passions when it first bought the afternoon Journal in December, 1939, the same week the city was readying for the opening of “Gone With the Wind.”

James M. Cox was from Dayton, Ohio, a former Ohio governor and the Democratic nominee for President in 1920 with Franklin D. Roosevelt as his running mate. The rival Constitution took out ads heralding itself as “Georgia owned and Georgia edited.”

But Cox stuck, and 11 years later bought the Constitution. Today, Cox Enterprises, headquartered in an enormous tree-hidden red-brick building on the northern outskirts of the city, is Atlanta Establishment. And according to Forbes magazine, the governor’s daughters and the company’s principal owners, Barbara Cox Anthony and Anne Cox Chambers, are the richest women in America.

For years, their flagship Atlanta Constitution did enjoy some reputation in the North as an enlightened conscience amid Southern segregation.

Voice of Reason

The editor was the famed Ralph McGill, whose brooding column, hopeful yet indignant, appeared on the Constitution’s front page, a paternal voice of reason, like Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“We love the South,” McGill wrote during the civil rights movement, “with a fierce, protective passion such as parents have for a crippled child.”

McGill, however, actually ran only the editorial pages, and beyond his section, many journalists say, the papers’ reputation was undeserved. During the civil rights era, for instance, the Atlanta papers failed even to cover the sit-ins in Birmingham, Ala., or the voting rights march on Selma, Ala.

Until recently, Journal and Constitution Managing Editor Glenn McCutchen recalled, Atlanta was really still a small town “literally run by five people: the mayor, the head of Coca-Cola, the head of Trust Co. (the Coca-Cola bank), the Citizen & Southern Bank and whoever the top lawyer in town was at the time.”

Partner of Elite

The papers were this elite’s partner. The man who ran the Cox papers in the 1970s, Jack Tarver, was “a very close colleague of the entrenched business interests here,” said one key Cox family member privately. “Those feelings colored his actions,” and the papers’.

(Tarver declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Until 1978, indeed, the front pages of each section of the Journal and Constitution were reserved largely for ads from important downtown merchants. Other than Page One and the editorial page, the comic page was the only one in the paper without ads.

Although the papers were profitable, a closer look revealed that their flagging journalistic performance was seeding financial danger. When Atlanta began to grow explosively in the 1970s, its population climbing by 20%, the Atlanta newspaper’s circulation actually dropped by 15%. Whereas eight in 10 Atlanta homes bought the paper in 1970, only five in 10 did so by 1980.

“We had allowed ourselves to slip,” conceded Cox President Jim Kennedy, Gov. Cox’s grandson.

By 1980, company officials explained, a new generation of Cox officials was determined to improve the family flagship. But “before you can do great newspapering you better be working with a pretty strong base for circulation to support it,” said Journal and Constitution Publisher Jay Smith.

They brought in new management, merged the staffs of the two papers to save money and budgeted $130 million for new presses, not yet fully installed. Circulation since 1980 has risen by 10% weekdays to 453,000 and by nearly 30% Sundays to 546,000.

Then-Editor Jim Minter also made efforts to improve the paper editorially, adding bureaus around the state and the South, building a science and medicine staff and hiring sports columnist Dave Kindred from the Washington Post.

But Cox wanted more, and in 1986, when Kovach was passed over for the New York Times’ editorship, the company leaped at the chance to bring him South.

“I don’t deny there is a (negative) perception among outsiders about the Atlanta papers,” said Cox Chairman Garner Anthony. “That fact has been one of the motivating factors to get a person like Bill Kovach.” We wanted “to bring ourselves abreast of the times, to bring a city of this size and stature a newspaper it not only needs but demands.”

Kovach, an immigrant’s son from eastern Tennessee, had earned wide respect as one of the country’s most aggressive journalists, a frank, no-nonsense manager who greatly strengthened and stabilized the Times’ Washington bureau.

In Atlanta, Kovach quickly hired two other Southerners from the New York Times as his deputy managing editors, keeping McCutchen on as No. 2. Wendell (Sonny) Rawls, who handles news, has a reputation for sometimes harsh candor and a penchant for aggressive reporting. Dudley Clendenin, who handles features, is a Vanderbilt graduate who was highly regarded as one of the New York Times’ best writers.

His first week, Kovach ordered color pictures off Page One, since he thought the paper’s presses still unable to handle them. Color had been integral to Minter’s USA Today-imitation design for the paper.

Then Kovach shifted all local news that did not make Page One back into the local section of the paper, including Grizzard’s popular column and the political column of Richard Allen, who has since resigned. And Kovach started putting more national stories on Page One generally.

If Kovach had plans to go slowly, he abandoned them when the Democratic Party chose Atlanta to host its 1988 convention, “the first real Southern convention in this century, discounting Miami.”

What he envisions, Kovach said, is the paper becoming a regional force, much as the Boston Globe helps define New England. But “because the region we’re located in is so strong,” Kovach said, “we’ll become world-class,” and he does concede a more national emphasis on Page One.

But it is this, the phrase world-class, the prospect of change, the possibility of becoming somehow different, somehow Northern, that breaks people here into camps. Some hope for greater sophistication. Others seem suspicious of the word.

George Pike and his wife, Sandra, owners of Pike’s Picks Fine Gifts, even tried to run an ad, which the papers rejected: “To the editors of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution . . . If you want to publish a New York newspaper, Delta flies to New York every day and sells one-way tickets.”

“There is no question we could have improved,” Grizzard said in an interview, “but if that means putting a guy in China, I don’t give a damn about China. I don’t get up in the morning wondering about China. The minute I see a dateline with a lot of Xs and Ps I don’t read it.”

“A lot of my friends would like to see Grizzard float away down the Chattahoochee (River) and never be heard from again,” one reporter on the paper said privately.

“He represents the worst instincts of the South,” another said.

Others think the paper and the city need to strike a careful balance.

“In their movement to make the paper more representative of what a major paper should be, they were not yet aware that despite its becoming a cosmopolitan city Atlanta is still quite provincial,” said Lee Walburn, a former columnist and feature writer for the paper.

‘Pretty Good Pulse’

“I answer the phones around here and get a pretty good pulse of things. A lot of people out there ain’t happy,” said one administrative staff person at the paper, referring to outside the building. “In here, they’re thrilled.”

Kovach also attracted opposition when he reduced the number of columnists--one Sunday he counted 34, including syndicated writers. In part, he worried that sources were manipulating news in Georgia by leaking stories to columnists they knew would be sympathetic.

Those columnists, his critics charge, gave the paper its regional flavor.

Kovach, who still speaks with a Tennessee twang, is mystified by the charge that he is trying to ignore the community or the region.

“The evidence is so much to the contrary,” Rawls said. “When Kovach came, there was one person covering City Hall. Now there are four,” and Kovach has added roughly 30 more full-time suburban reporters and nine more specialists or regional reporters.

Two Writers Resign

The debate over the “New York Mafia” and its alleged national focus intensified when the papers’ two most experienced and prominent political writers resigned.

Kovach himself had appointed one of them, Bill Shipp, a writer well-connected with Georgia’s old-time political Establishment, as political editor. But the new editor asked him to report, not write a column. Shipp, however, said his new editing job carried no real journalistic responsibility, and even some of Kovach’s supporters on the paper agree.

Next, political columnist Allen resigned. Allen, who was unavailable for an interview, has said he felt unwanted. Kovach denies it, though Rawls said candidly: “To say I didn’t have any respect for him as a journalist is correct.”

Their departures, however, signaled that Kovach, who has spent most of his career as a political journalist, intended to change the way the papers cover Southern politics.

To some, that was bad news, and they said so in well-attended parties of political and business leaders held to mourn the old guard’s passing. “I think the people they’ve lost were more in touch with the local Atlanta, Georgia and Southern scene than perhaps any other writers on the paper,” said Don Sweat, president of Central Atlanta Progress Inc., a private development agency representing downtown business interests.

But others in Atlanta considered the papers’ political coverage among its weaknesses. The papers, for instance, had failed to cover the U.S. Senate primary in Georgia between Wyche Folwer Jr., who won the seat, and former Jimmy Carter aide Hamilton Jordan until a month before the election.

They also ignored the nationally recognized House campaign between civil rights advocates John Lewis, who won, and Julian Bond until only weeks before the election. The paper even used a Washington Post story to explain how the campaign was dividing Atlanta’s black community.

“It’s basically been good ole boy journalism,” said Michael Lomax, chairman of the Fulton County Commission and the second-most powerful black political leader in Atlanta after Mayor Andrew Young. “Political analysis was largely done over a beer at the local pub and amounted to people repeating personal observations to one another.”

The debate intensified when Kovach fired entertainment writer Ron Hudspeth, who wrote a gossipy nightclub, restaurant and celebrity column. Hudspeth had decided to start a private newsletter, which Kovach felt would create a conflict of interest.

Hudspeth’s firing prompted Grizzard to quit, although publisher Smith persuaded him to come back within a few hours, and suddenly the brouhaha in Atlanta had gone national. Grizzard, a good ole boy-style humorist syndicated in 200 newspapers, is a sought-after speaker and the author of eight books.

“What I hope public reaction to our leaving really accomplished,” Grizzard said, “is to say let’s not become a world-class newspaper and leave the people of Atlanta hanging.”

Even some reporters on the paper who resent what Grizzard epitomizes worried about what losing him might mean. “If he got into a very public fight and left, it would be bad for Kovach,” one reporter said privately.

Many reporters, particularly the young, seem ecstatic about Kovach’s arrival. “A year ago, I could count 15 people within a 30-foot radius of my desk in the newsroom seriously looking for work, including me,” said one reporter in his early 30s. “Now I can’t count any.”

Some reporters and black political leaders do accuse Kovach and company of naivete in their coverage of the recent Bond scandal, in which the well-known black leader was accused by his wife of drug use. Bond denied the accusation, which was later recanted, and has not been charged. The papers, the critics charge, seemed too willing to believe undocumented testimony from questionable police sources that Young also might be involved, accusations that turned out to be false.

Some here wonder, though, whether the relationship between Kovach and the Cox family can last. Jim Kennedy, heir to the Cox chairmanship, says corporate support for Kovach is unequivocal. But his answers do have a cautionary tone. “I want the best foot forward,” he said, “but I don’t want to have our newspapers in turmoil either.”

By most accounts, they are not. And many are pleased the South may now gain an important voice at a critical time: “The civil rights era per se has ended,” Patterson said. “The new story is economic rights and opportunities,” and the South as an emerging political power. “It is a great Southern story, a great national story.”