A year later, a goodbye to the Chronicle

More than 20 years ago, when then-editor David Rubinger left Atlanta Business Chronicle for a career in public relations, he wrote a goodbye column recalling his career at the paper and the things he’d covered. I wanted to do the same thing someday when it was my turn to leave. Now, a year after I retired from the Chronicle, I’m ready.

Atlanta, of course, has grown remarkably during the 22-plus years I worked at the Chronicle, and I had a front-row seat. The economy and population exploded. The Beltline went from a far-fetched idea to a game-changing economic development project. Delta Air Lines went bankrupt and almost was acquired, re-emerged as a powerhouse, and lately has had to struggle again, this time from the pandemic. And people moved back to the city in droves after tiring of Atlanta’s famously long commutes. The city built three sports stadiums during my time at the Chronicle, plus such notable projects as Ponce City Market.

One of the biggest stories we covered at the Chronicle during my tenure was former Gov. Roy Barnes’ plan to build an outer perimeter highway, The Northern Arc, stretching from I-75 in the northwest to I-85 in the northeast. The idea was to ease traffic on I-285 by rerouting truck traffic farther north of the city. The Chronicle wondered whether some of the city’s real estate developers might have purchased land near key intersections of the proposed highway, land that the Northern Arc would make more valuable. So we put a just-hired young reporter named Sarah Rubenstein on it, and she scoured land records for two months. We were shocked to find that it wasn’t real estate developers, but public officials, who were trying to profit from the project, including a member of the Atlanta Regional Commission Board and the son of the Georgia Department of Transportation’s board chair. The Chronicle’s exclusive stories by Rubenstein and partner Walter Woods (“Woodstein”), which we ran every week for nine weeks, led to Gov. Barnes July 5 announcement that he was canceling the $2.2 billion road. Barnes had believed the road would be his legacy, and he called killing it “a bitter pill to swallow.”

We tangled with Gov. Barnes on another series of stories in the early 2000s involving $100 million in tax breaks the state had given companies who had promised to create new jobs. We wondered which companies got the tax breaks, and whether they had created the promised jobs, but the state refused to disclose the information, despite Barnes’ reputation as a proponent of transparency and open records. We argued the public had a right to know how its money was being spent. The state of Georgia said tax information was confidential. So we sued the state, got a law changed, and found out the five companies that got the tax breaks. When we revealed that one of them, the phone company Alltel Corp., had failed to create the 785 jobs it had promised, it gave back $11.5 million to the state, and declined another $17.2 million in tax breaks over the next three years. Staff writer Meredith Jordan’s dogged reporting spanned more than a year.

Another controversial series we did centered on Atlanta’s beloved home improvement giant, The Home Depot. We started out doing a series of stories on workplace accidents and deaths reported by OSHA, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. But we found a surprising number of accidents involving not workers, but customers, at Home Depot. Getting injured at the job is one thing, but you don’t expect to get hurt while shopping. Our reporting showed that a number of people across the country people had died or were injured, mostly when heavy objects fell from storage shelves. A box fell off a shelf and hit a Maryland woman in the face. A set of patio doors fell from a pallet on a floor and killed a 6-year-old boy in Texas. And a 68-pound drill press fell from a shelf more 10 feet above a NASA astronaut who was shopping for screws, badly injuring him, according the stories we published in 2003.

We heard from lawyers around the country, who were more than curious about our reporting because they thought their client was the only one who had ever been injured in this way. But our own readers were annoyed with us for picking on Home Depot, and they made their feelings known. After 17 stories on the subject, we stopped, comfortable that we had made our point. Today, when you walk into a Home Depot, you’ll see items on upper shelves chained off and well-secured, and when work is going on in an aisle, it is fenced off to keep customers away. I believe our stories kept countless people from being injured or killed, and I applaud Home Depot for making the needed changes.

We did another incredibly controversial story in May 2008, “A Life, Foreclosed,” about an aspiring 42-year-old real estate developer who drove to his planned 27-home subdivision in Forsyth County, laid out a blanket, and took his own life. At the time, the housing market had slowed, but no one realized that the decline would culminate months later in the devastating Great Recession. We saw the story of the developer whose project had failed as an “uh oh” indicator that maybe this housing crisis was worse than people feared. We took care to write the piece, by reporters John Manasso and Joe Rauch, with great sensitivity, but some people, even inside the Chronicle offices, thought writing about a suicide was something we just shouldn’t do. I may be more proud of that piece than anything we’ve ever done.

We also reported about the city’s overheated condo market in 2006, and we warned that banking regulators were concerned the city’s banks were too invested in real estate projects. The Great Recession made it clear they were.

In the summer of 2009, we obtained financial statements from one of our sister papers showing that Novare Group, which had created the intown condo market in Atlanta, was deep in debt. According to the documents, Novare was in default on a substantial amount of debt and was working with lenders to restructure at least $100 million in loans for projects across the Southeast. We reported that the company owed $713 million in debt outstanding and $81 million in debt through joint ventures. The privately held company was pretty unhappy that we were about to report in detail on their dire finances. To be as fair as possible, we agreed to publish a letter from their CEO in the same issue as the story. Unknown to me, one of our advertising representatives had a meeting scheduled with Novare a couple of days after our story came out. And though the story hit hard, the company took it well. The ad rep told me the meeting went well. We do what we have to do.

Another rather amusing example of a potential conflict between advertising and editorial was in 2002, when we published a story on the top of Page 3 saying a local General Motors Corp. supervisor whose wife died from hepatitis was suing the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co. claiming that he, his wife and other GM employees contracted the disease at the Ritz hotel in Cancun, Mexico, in June 2000. On the very next page of the paper we had a full-page ad from The Ritz-Carlton, which I'm sure was not amused by the hepatitis story. I’ll never forget our ad director shrugging it off when he saw the story. He understood that sometimes, stuff like that happens.

One of the toughest stories we had to dig out was about the financial troubles of the famous Sea Island resort, which had hosted the G8 economic conference in 2004. I got a tip one afternoon from a former Chronicle ad director, who had been vacationing at Sea Island with her family for years. She said the company that owned it had borrowed millions of dollars to renovate its Cloister hotel, hoping to shift its business from middle class families to the wealthier international set. But the $500 million redevelopment had failed and the company, long owned by the family of William “Bill” Jones III, was in trouble. I assigned two different reporters to work on the story, but both were unable to get it. Finally in December 2008, Maria Saporta, who also heard about Sea Island’s troubles from a wealthy source of hers, was able to break through the protective news barrier the Sea Island Co. had erected in the community. A week later the Times of London followed Maria’s story with a much weaker piece. They just couldn't duplicate Maria's reporting. In August 2010, Sea Island Co. filed for bankruptcy protection.

Another time I picked up a tip that became news was when in 2006, someone told me the supermarket industry was going to lobby the state legislature to lift the ban on Sunday alcohol sales in Georgia. With more customers doing their grocery shopping on Saturdays and Sundays, the industry was losing too much money not being able to sell beer and wine on one of those days. We expected the religious community to oppose the idea, but were surprised that liquor store owners opposed it as well. They didn’t want to open on Sundays. But a couple of years later, the effort succeeded and the long-time ban was gone. Reporter Ryan Mahoney turned that tip into a front-page scoop.

In 2011, a Rotary colleague told me he’d heard that the city of Atlanta was looking to move the historic Cyclorama from the grounds of Zoo Atlanta, possibly to the Atlanta History Center. Reporters Doug Sams and Maria Saporta got that one.

One of the most memorable days in the Chronicle newsroom, and in the lives of many people, was on a fateful Tuesday morning in September, 2001. I’d been driving to work when I heard the news on the radio that a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. When I got to the office, we were stunned to learn the full nature of the attack. We had already planned out the stories we were going to run in that Friday’s paper, but it was clear we weren’t going to do any of those stories. We ripped up our plan and got to work reporting, and on Friday, Sept. 14, we published a series of stories headlined “Terror’s toll in Atlanta,” about how we believed 9/11 would upend our city.

We often used the Freedom of Information Act to look for information. One of my favorite examples was in 2004, when reporter Mary Jane Credeur discovered that restaurateur Tom DuPree, who had pledged $19 million to Georgia Tech to put his name on its business school, wasn’t going to make good on that pledge. DuPree’s company, Avado Brands, was struggling, so we wondered whether DuPree still had the money to fulfill his commitment. Credeur filed an open records request with the school and, in a stack of documents, found a letter from DuPree to then-university president G. Wayne Clough saying that DuPree had paid $5.7 million of the $19 million and, "it has become unlikely I will complete my pledge by your [predetermined] date of October 2005." Having a failed business leader’s name atop your business school was untenable, and the morning our story came out, Georgia Tech announced it was taking DuPree’s name off the school.

Sometimes, a story was more personal than others. Competing with the Atlanta-Journal Constitution was part of our DNA at the Chronicle, and it was especially interesting to write about the business of the AJC and its owner, Cox Enterprises. Years ago, I had heard that Cox was owned by Anne Cox Chambers, daughter of company founder James Cox and one of the world's richest women, through a trust set up for her by her father. The details of the trust were secret. But in 2014, I read a report that the Cox family had gone to court to dissolve the trust, to settle the then-94-year-old Mrs. Cox Chambers' affairs prior to her death. The judge agreed to dissolve the trust, passing ownership of the company to the next generation, the five children of Cox Chambers and her late sister, Barbara Cox Anthony. I was the first to report that. I got a copy of the case file from the court, which contained the original trust from 1941, and reported that the judge’s order resulted in the transfer of 175 million shares of Cox Enterprises worth some $3.7 billion. I listed who got shares, how many they got, and what they were worth. For example, she gave 32 charities nearly 8 million shares worth more than $170 million. Anne Cox Chambers died in January 2020, a month after turning 100 years old.

Another story I loved to cover was the finances of the Atlanta Braves. The Braves are owned by Colorado-based Liberty Media, and for a number of years Liberty in its quarterly reports revealed bits and pieces of financial information about the Braves. Then, in 2016, Liberty created a tracking stock for the Braves, and effectively made the team one of the few publicly owned sports teams in the world. From that point, I was, along with the AJC’s Tim Tucker, able to report fully on the Braves’ quarterly profits and losses, opening a rare window into the operations of a major sports franchise.

The news business changed remarkably during my time at the Chronicle. When I started in 1997, we were a weekly business newspaper. We sent the paper to the printer Wednesday night, it was printed Thursday morning and mailed to our subscribers, who usually received it on Friday. If news broke on a Thursday, after the paper went to bed, we couldn’t report about it until 8 days later.

Digital changed all of that. When the downtown Rich’s department store closed for good in 1991, after 60 years in operation, it was on a Thursday, and it was the first time I can remember us covering a major story online as it happened, with multiple reporters posting updates throughout the day. 

The Chronicle’s online presence began under the skilled direction of longtime Web editor Jacques Couret and has grown remarkably under Eric Mandel.

Soon after we started writing for the web, we began publishing an afternoon newsletter, with the day’s top headlines. Later we started a morning newsletter, initially done by a freelancer who worked during the night to scrub the web for stories of interest to Atlanta business readers and to write some of her own. It was published at 7:30 a.m., when most of the Chronicle staff had just woken up.

Five years ago, when David Rubinger, who had returned to the paper as publisher, decided to bring the morning newsletter in-house, I knew he was right. We’d have more control of the product, be much more involved in our online publishing, rather than leaving it to the freelancer and our in-house web editor, and the staff would be more involved with it. But no one, including me, relished the idea of waking up at 5 a.m. to produce it. 

Our brilliant and hard-working editor, David Allison, wanted to do the morning email blast himself for a while, so he could figure out what it should be. After three weeks of that, he was exhausted, so I started doing it on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and he did it Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. A month or so later, we expanded the team to five people, and we each took one day a week.

The most exciting of those days for me was a Thursday morning in February 2019, when just before 6 a.m. I saw an announcement that Atlanta banking giant SunTrust Banks Inc. was merging with Charlotte, N.C.-based BB&T. Adrenaline kicked in and whatever I had planned to do from 6 to 7 a.m. was now out the window. The SunTrust merger was a huge story. I wrote a major piece about it and then another when I got to the office, about which SunTrust and which BB&T executives would be part of the new management team.

A year later, I had drawn the assignment of doing Morning Edition on Dec. 26, the day after Christmas, when business news in Atlanta was usually nonexistent. But I got lucky. It turns out the uber-popular rapper Cardi B and her partner Offset had purchased a mansion in Buckhead. I wrote the story, linked to the online listing for the house, and to a video tour Cardi B had posted of her and Offset walking through the house. Later, Chronicle Managing Editor Jessica Saunders, who did a terrific job of covering high-dollar home sales, which our readers loved, added lots of information she had about the house, plus more photos. We got a ton of page views.

Over more than two decades at the Chronicle, I got to work with dozens of terrific reporters. In recent years that included Doug Sams, one of the best real estate reporters in the Chronicle’s history, and Amy Wenk, who often teamed with Doug while covering real estate and hotels. One of Amy’s stories that I remember most involved a top Atlanta real estate broker who allegedly conspired with two Mattress firm executives in a massive fraud scheme. But there were tons of other great pieces.

One of the reporters who broke the biggest scoops was Urvaksh Karkaria, a journalistic killing machine who made quite a mark over a 10-year career at the Chronicle. It’s one of my biggest regrets that we could never keep the peace between the fiercely competitive Karkaria and Sams, who fought each other for scoops and just didn’t like each other. The rivalry split the staff in half.

We liked experienced reporters, but occasionally we took a chance on a young one, like Sarah Rubenstein or Erin Moriarty, who covered health care for us so well for several years. Another was Ellie Hensley, who got the health care beat in 2013. Along the way, Hensley figured out she could break some stories about the growth of Georgia’s emerging film industry, and did a terrific job reporting about the city’s new film studios and the increasing powerful economic impact of the business.

I’m glad to have helped hire the newest generation of reporters at the Chronicle before I left, including Chris Fuhrmeister, Grace Donnelly, Dyana Bagby and Eric Jackson, who I got to teach a few tricks on the sports beat. And to have hired countless reporters over my 22-plus years, some of them spectacular, some of them who couldn't quite figure out our unique way of covering the news.

One of the things I really enjoyed at the Chronicle was supervising the many summer interns we had, and teaching them a little bit about what we did. I’m incredibly proud that a number of them went on to careers in journalism, some of them at sister papers of the Chronicle.

I hope that I helped at least some of those staffers and interns become better writers or reporters.

I started at the Chronicle as a reporter in 1997 and was lucky to be promoted in the span of just two years to Industry Focus Editor, Managing Editor and finally Executive Editor, when the wonderful Margie Freaney left in the summer of 1999. I was in the right place at the right time.

I worked with several great managing editors along the way, including Jim Molis and Julie Bryant, who made massive contributions, and Jessica Saunders, who continues to do so.

And I had the incredible opportunity to work for more than 20 years alongside David Allison, who more than anyone is responsible for the excellence that has been the Chronicle’s hallmark for decades.

But none of it would have happened without Ed Baker, the publisher of the Chronicle from my early days as a freelancer to my first 18 years as a staffer. I learned so much from Ed and am eternally grateful to him.

The news business was a blast. I loved the people and the work and I’m glad I had the chance to be a participant.