Fresh Loaf

AIM HIGHER: Edelstein was the yeast in our Loaf.

It’s safe to say that Creative Loafing owes its reputation as the city’s smartest, edgiest, most endearing rag to Ken Edelstein, who up until last week was the paper’s editor for a decade.

The man lived and breathed the Loaf. From his disheveled mess of a cubicle, he’d impart his detailed recollection of a state Senate race circa 1998, or his vision for an Arts & Entertainment mega-section, or his adoration for a clever turn of phrase, a perfectly composed photo, and a well-crafted blog post. He was eager to talk, longwindedly at times, about the philosophy of newsgathering and his strategy for drawing readers to the Web. He obsessed on the grammar of every sentence he edited, calling out writers for their overuse of gerunds and each superfluous “that.”

As editor, Edelstein had high standards and a resume to match. His knowledge of Atlanta – its politics, infrastructure, and history – runs as deep as his desire to improve the city he calls home. In a column he wrote last year, he characterized Atlanta as an impetuous young woman, and he offered her a bit of advice:

“Too busy to hate, too busy to wait, too busy for anything but the next hustle. … You gotta clear your head of all the baggage from your past and aim a whole lot higher.”

Nearly everyone who knows him would agree that “aiming higher” is Ken’s mantra. He pushed his staff as hard as he pushes himself.

Read the rest of this column.

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Love him or hate him, former CL Senior Editor John Sugg never fails to get lips a-flappin’ with his firebrand columns — particularly one published today, under the headline “Creative Loafing’s death spiral.”

The column talks about “the demolition of the newspaper’s once-outstanding journalism” (ouch!), how “the content eroded to a state that can only be called pathetic” (egads!) and that “the big losers are the readers” (sorry, guys!).

Other than Sugg’s hyperbolic elegies, I have two issues with his column — the same two issues I had when Sugg presented the column to me three days before it appeared on the Sunday Paper’s website.

My first concern is that Sugg used his column to criticize newspapers, including the Loaf, for “hanging on to printed editions long after consumers were decidedly digital.” Basically, he’s calling out CL for putting so much of its faith (at least in the past) in its print edition. Fair enough. Yet Sugg failed to disclose that he and a crew of fellow talented journalists are currently trying to secure funding for an online-only news organization.

He and the organization arguably could benefit from spreading the online-only gospel. That, to me, is a conflict of interest — one that warranted a full disclosure. I told him so, and he agreed.

My other issue had not to do with the possibility that Sugg might profit from what he printed but, rather, that he didn’t explicitly state that he’d lost money as a result of what he described as “the erratic and impetuous” managerial style of Creative Loafing Inc.’s CEO Ben Eason. Sugg did disclose in the column that he’s a Creative Loafing Inc. shareholder, but he didn’t outright state that Eason’s supposed missteps were a blow to his own finances — or that he might harbor anger toward Eason because of that financial hit.

Anyway, you might be wondering why I read the column days before it appeared in another publication. Sugg had emailed the column to me on Tuesday night, to be printed in next week’s Creative Loafing. But as I had mentioned to him the day before, I and the rest of the staff wanted to print a column about the contributions of former CL Editor Ken Edelstein, who’d just been fired.

I asked Sugg to retool the column. He said he would — but instead wrote an entirely different piece. The original then appeared in the Sunday Paper.

At this point, the conflicts have become so convoluted that, although we’ll be running a column about Edelstein in our next edition, it won’t be written by Sugg. When I told him that, he said he understood the decision. Hey, no hard feelings.

P.S. — Note to SP editors: Your headline for Sugg’s column (and the column itself) alludes to CL’s “strategy” to “rip off articles and blogs from real content producers and paste them onto CL Web sites.” You seem to be referring to a sidebar on our website’s home page, where we link to stories we find interesting in other publications. The whole thing takes less than 5 percent of the staff’s time. It’s called “aggregation,” and it’s practiced by the New York Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and, to a greater extent, Talking Points Memo and the Daily Beast. Wake up to the Internetz!

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In a move that stunned staffers, Creative Loafing Atlanta Publisher Luann Labedz announced this morning  that Editor Ken Edelstein was fired. A tearful editorial staff followed him out of the building to say goodbye.

Labedz said Edelstein’s firing was a “confidential personnel matter” and that she could not elaborate. A call to Edelstein reached his voicemail.

“This was an involuntary termination,” Edelstein told the AJC. “I feel very comfortable that I did the right thing, and I love my staff.”

Atlanta Magazine senior editor — and former CL staffer — Steve Fennessy has been covering CL’s ongoing Chapter 11 filing and has more details on Edelstein’s firing, including comments from John Sugg, a former CL editor.

Edelstein joined CL’s staff as a senior writer and became managing editor in 1998. Two years later, he was named editor of the paper. Prior to joining CL Edelstein worked 10 years for the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer and was a freelance journalist in Washington, D.C., Australia and Mexico.

During his decade leading the editorial staff, the paper has won more than 30 regional and national awards for investigative reporting, news writing, columnists, criticism, food writing and other categories. While at the helm, Edelstein helped shift the paper’s focus on listings to more hard news and investigative journalism. Recently, Edelstein has led a dedicated effort to increase CL’s online presence despite budget restraints and cuts to his team.

No word yet on Edelstein’s replacement.

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We combined two CL forces of nature — Editor in Chief Ken Edelstein and intern Dustin Chambers — and went out amongst the coffee-drinking people of Little Five Points to ask a very important question: what’s your problem?

Answers varied but, strangely, no one seemed to have a problem with McDonald’s filming a commercial that morning in the same parking lot that houses Aurora Coffee and Junkman’s Daughter. Go figure.

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