Noted Atlanta Editor Resigns in Dispute With Cox

Atlanta Journal and Constitution Editor Bill Kovach, a former New York Times Washington bureau chief whose attempts to improve the influential Southern newspapers gained national attention, abruptly resigned Friday, citing “irreconcilable differences” with the management of the Cox media chain.

Kovach said in a prepared statement that he had tried to build “shared values and mutual trust” with management, but “it became clear no such relationship existed.”

Journal and Constitution Publisher Jay Smith said: “Irreconcilable differences in management styles surfaced in a discussion this morning.” He said those differences led him to accept the editor’s resignation.

Kovach’s departure elicited a strong reaction from the papers’ staff. In announcing the news to other editors, Assistant Managing Editor Wendell Rawls Jr.--who was one of many well-known journalists hired by Kovach--said: “The dream is over.”

More than 100 reporters and editors at the papers delivered a petition to the owners of Cox Enterprises Inc., asking the company to “reconsider and convince (Kovach) to stay.” And then they used their own money to buy a full-page ad in today’s editions expressing their sadness and anger over Kovach’s leaving.

Kovach’s two-year tenure in Atlanta seemed to reflect some of the larger tensions afflicting the growing Southern capital itself.

According to sources within the papers’ management, Cox officials had on several occasions warned Kovach that members of Atlanta’s downtown business Establishment were upset with his aggressive style of journalism. The papers recently had published a multipart series exposing the local financial community’s systematic refusal of loans to residents of poor black neighborhoods.

The papers’ recent business coverage also has been critical of Coca-Cola Co., the Atlanta company whose chairman sits on the board of Cox Enterprises.

In recent months, Kovach also had been locked in confrontation with Cox management over budgets. “It was one confrontation and crisis after another,” said one highly placed source.

“Like a lot of people, I am considering what lessons to draw from this about a paper that had committed itself to raising the standards of an historic paper, found a great editor to do it and now had let him go, or perhaps had forced him to go,” said Dudley Clendinen, another former New York Times correspondent whom Kovach had brought to the papers as an assistant managing editor.

The Journal and Constitution once enjoyed a reputation as the enlightened journalistic conscience of a segregationist South when editorial writer Ralph McGill worked there. But for much of their history, the papers seemed to function as an adjunct of Atlanta’s closely knit business community.

Differences Mounted

Kovach’s arrival two years ago was seen as a serious attempt to change that tradition. He put more emphasis on reporting and less on local columns and assigned eight reporters full time to cover the presidential race. During the Democratic Convention last summer, Kovach ran a quarter-page color photo of a local Ku Klux Klan member in full robes over a story about how a local park had just been named after him.

Management at both Cox and the newspapers refused to comment for the record, as did Cox Washington bureau chief Andrew Glass.