Pressing On, Forward, or in Circles

Last Wednesday, WABE held its quarterly public board meeting, the first since the announcement of its partnership with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Later that day the AJC posted a feature about WABE on its 75th anniversary. The story also appeared in today’s print edition.

At the board meeting the AJC partnership came up in presentations by the heads of audio (as part of its new radio shows), technology (it’ll take a lot of background tech), and marketing (the announcement and plans for a PR push at show launch scheduled for Oct 30th), but the head of news said nothing, instead promoting WABE’s own newsroom.

(It’s now fully staffed at 25.)

The day before, after inquiring if board members or someone from the newsroom might be available to answer questions about the partnership’s impact on its independence, WABE sent this statement from Managing Editor Alex Helmick:

“The AJC’s Politically Georgia running on WABE 90.1 in no way impacts which stories the WABE Newsroom covers or how our team of journalists cover them. We are an independent newsroom and will remain so.”

The meeting ended with an Executive Session.

Fit to Print

I fully expected the AJC feature to appear in the paper’s Sunday edition and be cross-promotional. Instead, it appeared in the lower circulation Monday edition and only mentioned Politically Georgia coming to WABE in the third to last paragraph.

The whole controversy over the cancellation of Political Rewind is reduced to a clause at the end of a sentence listing the show’s hosts.

“It will feature AJC reporters Greg Bluestein, Patricia Murphy and Tia Mitchell along with Bill Nigut, who was recently let go by GPB and is now employed by the AJC.”

The story wasn’t all cheerleading and included accounts of past controversies at WABE from programming changes to tensions over whether it serves the Atlanta Public School’s mission.

But it only hinted at the direct competition with GPB that began with the state network’s controversial takeover of WRAS in 2014 and makes no mention of the AJC’s presence on GPB from then until this year.

It also doesn’t disclose WABE CEO Jennifer Dorian’s family ties to the AJC. She’s the daughter of past AJC publisher and Cox Enterprises Vice Chair David Easterly.

A telling quote from WABE’s longtime lawyer Kevin Ross on her relationship with Atlanta’s philanthropic community hints at it:

“Last year, for the first time in WABE’s history, the station started a special Transformation Fund to upgrade infrastructure, create new programming and seek out new income sources in places like digital video and syndication. The Woodruff Foundation donated $2.5 million, the largest single gift ever given to WABE, and after a year, the fund has so far collected $6.5 million.”

“Ross said Dorian’s deep connections in Atlanta’s philanthropic community helped them build up the fund.”

Those deep connections didn’t come from nowhere and are likely thanks to her Cox ties, something that will continue to haunt the two organizations’ partnership should either become newsworthy themselves.

Big Philanthropy

The Woodruff grant is noteworthy since that Foundation also gave a multimillion-dollar grant to GPB under its previous CEO Teya Ryan.

But it came as the state network faced budget cuts, negative state audits, and layoffs.

The anonymous Twitter account freepublicradio accused Ryan of cronyism in hiring and keeping the network’s financial struggles quiet.

To its credit, the AJC reported on GPB’s layoffs in 2020 but, again, left out the paper’s close partnership with the network, one most centered on the radio show Political Rewind. That show was spared in the 2020 changes and was given an extra airing to replace On Second Thought. Part of a pattern of Ryan prioritizing the show over other efforts at GPB.

Ryan retired only this year after a much larger state budget cut and Political Rewind was cancelled by her successor.

The Woodruff grants are part of a larger effort to use philanthropy to fund local journalism, such as the recently announced Press Forward campaign.

The AJC launched its own campaign titled Press On in 2021 to highlight the importance of local journalism. It began accepting tax deductible donations for news reporting through the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta in 2022.

A basic function of local journalism is to serve as a watchdog on how tax dollars are spent and to hold public officials accountable. But in Atlanta, so many public works are governed by public private partnerships with foundations as the backer that they become the kind of institutions that need journalistic scrutiny themselves.

I certainly viewed the Woodruff grant to GPB as a kind of bailout for Ryan, one that spared larger cuts or any admission GPB’s WRAS takeover was a mistake.

It also kept AJC reporters on the radio.

Will local news outlets eager for grants cover Atlanta’s major foundations and public-private partnerships with the same rigor they do city council or the state legislature?

Morse Code

The Sunday AJC did have a message from new publisher Andrew Morse about new investments in the paper including hiring more reporters based in Georgia cities. It follows a Sept. 14th article by the Wall St. Journal outlining Morse’s plan and a “fireside chat” Morse and AJC editor Leroy Chapman had with WABE’s Dorian at the Rotary Club of Atlanta, as reported by Saporta Report.

Oddly, Morse highlights the expansion of Politically Georgia to five days a week but doesn’t mention it airing on WABE.

A feature of the AJC-GPB partnership were regular GPB ads in the Sunday paper.

We’ll see if WABE gets something similar.