Fresh Loaf

Well, Julia Wallace and her dwindling crew have finally unveiled their kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamline baby, the redesigned print AJC. Hmm. Since every change as radical as this requires a period of emotional adjustment, I’ll stick mostly to random observations:

1) I’d been told the paper was planning to use fewer large photos, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a major daily apart from the Wall Street Journal that doesn’t have at least one two-column photo above the front-page fold. That’s pretty radical.

2) Moving the table of contents and front-page briefs column out of the left-hand gutter and into the middle of the page is, well, just plain weird. I understand why they did it — it enables them to run two sets of headlines just under the section banner without “bumping heads,” a no-no in newspaper design. But it still feels weird.

3) The Community News page seems more readable now; it’s easier to spot individual communities. But I’ve wondered for a while now, Do people read this page?

4) I can’t help but worry that the reader-driven push for “clearer headlines” and subheds — and sub-subheds — is because many people would like to be able to skim off kernels of information without actually going to the trouble of reading the articles. Isn’t that why God created local TV news?

5) What’s with the promise of “More optimistic, positive stories” in the Living section? Simply having a lifestyle section filled with fluff wasn’t good enough? Now it’s gotta be feel-good fluff? What’s next, treating each issue with a light dusting of Xanax?

Anyway, what does anyone else think of the new redesign? And, please, keep it decent.

Bookmark It

Doug Blackmon, the Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta bureau chief, can now add a Pulitzer Prize to his long list of accomplishments.

Blackmon today was named the general non-fiction award winner for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

The critically acclaimed book revealed the difficult lives of thousands of former slaves who were thrust into a brutally unfair world of forced labor and physical torture — decades after American slavery supposedly ended.

Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of “free” black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.

Pulitzer judges called Blackmon’s book “a precise and eloquent work that examines a deliberate system of racial suppression and that rescues a multitude of atrocities from virtual obscurity.”

Congrats, Doug. Well deserved.

(Book cover image courtesy Doubleday)

Bookmark It

Hudgens

State lawmakers are fearing another Nadya “Octomom” Suleman, the California single mom who recently birthed octuplets — as well as six other children — through in-vitro fertilization. As a result, legislators have introduced a controversial bill regulating fertility treatments. It reportedly won’t go anywhere this session.

“The taxpayers are going to have to fund the 14 children [Nadya Suleman] has. I don’t want that to happen in Georgia.”

— Sen. Ralph Hudgens, R-Hull, in the March 3 Wall Street Journal.

“It’s the right of the person who has gone through this procedure to decide what they can do with those embryos, not their doctor, and certainly not the government.”

— Barbara Collura of Resolve, a national infertility association, in the March 3 WSJ.

“One crazy woman out of a population of 300 million. Can we say overkill?”

— A comment by “grouse” in response to a March 4 Augusta Chronicle article.

(Courtesy Senate Press Office)

Bookmark It

There’s nothing new about Georgia lawmakers meddling in women’s choices about what they do with their bodies.

In fact, a legislative session doesn’t really feel like a legislative session if one or two of the Gold Dome’s resident Bible-beaters don’t propose legislation that would ban abortion or exempt fetuses (feti?) from paying property taxes. These proposals usually don’t generate much attention because they usually don’t go anywhere.

But two pieces of state legislation have bucked that trend and are generating an interest under the Gold Dome. The first, called the “Ethical Treatment of Human Embryos Act,” is co-sponsored by some of the state Senate’s biggest names and would limit the number of eggs that could be fertilized and implanted in a woman. The other, which would create a legal mechanism to adopt an embryo, is penned by state Rep. James Mills, R-Gainesville.

This time, state lawmakers have a news story on which to peg these bills. Yep, Nadya Suleman, alleged Angelina Jolie-wannabe and mother of 14 more commonly known as “Octomom.” Some folks are concerned these bills could have far-reaching implications — and just might have legs.

(more…)

Bookmark It

Alejandro linked to it below in this morning’s Newsdome, but I’ll save you the guessing game! From the Wall Street Journal:

ALPHARETTA, Ga. — Fourteen miles north of Atlanta is a suburb of wide boulevards, sleepy cul-de-sacs and bustling red-brick shopping centers. It also is the bank-failure capital of the U.S.

In just 13 months, three banks based within a few miles of each other went bust. Three more in other Atlanta suburbs were seized by regulators in 2008, as the region was haunted by overabundant home building, years of risky lending and one of the most relaxed regulatory environments in the U.S. for starting new banks, according to some experts.

…

Alpharetta Mayor Arthur Letchas bristles at the city’s distinction as an epicenter of bad banking, noting that 22 other banks have at least one office here. Technically, Integrity doesn’t count as Alpharetta-based, Mr. Letchas says, since its headquarters were just outside the city limits in Johns Creek, Ga.

Bookmark It

Dr. Charles Nemeroff

Documents released in a U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearing in September suggest that Emory University officials tried to downplay the controversy surrounding an esteemed but embattled faculty member.

Dr. Charles Nemeroff, one of the nation’s leading depression researchers, is under Senate investigation for allegedly failing to disclose $1.2 million he received from pharmaceutical companies from 2000 to 2007. In some cases, Nemeroff gave talks or published research that bolstered the companies’ products.

In July 2006, the Wall Street Journal published an article stating that Nemeroff failed to disclose payments he received from a company, Cyberonics Inc., whose product he wrote favorably about in a prestigious medical journal where he served as editor. Nemeroff later said he submitted a detailed disclosure about his relationship with the company, but it didn’t make it into print.

The day after the WSJ story ran, Nemeroff received an e-mail from Claudia Adkison, executive associate dean of the Emory University School of Medicine. The e-mail was released several weeks ago by the Senate committee:

“In working on handling the reporter, I tried to make this story go away because Emory’s name is in the middle of it. I have been grateful that the reporter was not sophisticated enough to ask all the right questions.”

Adkison also wrote that the reporter “was mostly right. He just doesn’t know all the facts.”

(more…)

Bookmark It

Rupert Murdoch’s influence? Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal op-ed page featured this jaw-dropping editorial, which reads as if they’d picked up an Onion piece by mistake.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Maybe the WSJ edit board decided to rewind after the election by smoking peyote.

(HT to Nobel laureate Paul Krugman.)

Bookmark It

Attention all wonks! Atlanta is once again featured in a story about the changing faces of cities. The Wall Street Journal reports cities nationwide are seeing whites moving back into cities in large numbers as African-Americans move out. Big shock, I know, but they’ve got great numbers to prove it.

From the article:

Today, cities are refashioning themselves as trendy centers devoid of suburban ills like strip malls and long commutes. In Atlanta, which has among the longest commute times of any U.S. city, the white population rose by 26,000 between 2000 and 2006, while the black population decreased by 8,900. Overall the white proportion has increased to 35% in 2006 from 31% in 2000.

The WSJ focuses heavily on Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, but we get a little play in there, even a mention of how the next mayor’s race may feature the first competitive white candidate since the 1980s.

For an Atlanta-focused — and well-written — take on the the city’s gentrification, check out this article by Governing Magazine’s Rob Gurwitt.

(Many thanks to the mysterious “Christa” at PecanneLog for the find.)

Bookmark It

Doug Blackmon, who heads the Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta bureau, has made the New York Times Best Seller List with his historical expose Slavery by Another Name.

(A quick aside: Does anyone know the proper way to reference the list? Should “best seller” be two words? A compound? Hyphenated? Plural??? And is “list” capitalized? I just wasted 10 minutes Googling that, with no apparent resolution.)

Anyway … Blackmon’s book, published by Doubleday, placed no. 34 among best-selling non-fiction hardcovers. Go Doug!

Publisher’s Weekly called it “a groundbreaking and disturbing account of a sordid chapter in American history — the lease (essentially the sale) of convicts to ‘commercial interests’ between the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th.”

If you want Blackmon to sign a copy — or to help him celebrate his success — go to Manuel’s Tavern next Wednesday Tuesday (July 22) between 6 and 9 p.m.

Bookmark It