Flyover country’s just fine, thanks

largest state east of the Mississippi is a plateful every day. As a newsroom leader, I have all I can handle without engaging in the titanic struggles inside the Beltway.

Even so, we have an indispensable role in the national story — we explain what all the sound and fury from Washington and the world mean to you. When Washington reverses course with every change of administration on health care, trade, environment and the myriad other issues that pass for sport in the capital, we apply a Georgia lens to divine the impact in the hinterland.

And then there’s the under-appreciated reality that the people who have the greatest effect on your life are the people who aren’t in Washington. The real power rests in the hands of people we can’t even name who sit on city councils, county commissions and statehouse committees. They pay your teachers and cops and make big decisions that shape our communities in big and permanent ways.

I traveled a long way to come to simple truth. I was a foreign correspondent for a few years and wrote some pretty interesting stuff about wars, economic change and sundry big issues across Europe and Africa.

Despite the thrill, the work left me empty. The things I was writing about were removed from the lives of the people who were reading what I wrote. I wrote amazing stuff, if I do say so myself, about the implications of the AIDS epidemic on babies in Zimbabwe, but not one person who read what I wrote shared the experience I was describing.

It was far more fulfilling to bust state officials who were ginning up traffic counts to support plans to build a destructive and unnecessary freeway through the historic Inman Park neighborhood. (The freeway plan began evolving into tamer Freedom Parkway not long after I reported the state had cooked its books.)

Because my sense of the importance of our work is so freighted by experience, I was taken aback by comments made the other day by Dean Baquet, the top editor of the not-failing New York Times. He was speaking to Carneros pinot-sipping techies at what was, I’m sure, a sunny and idyllic California resort. In the account that appeared on the Poynter Institute’s site for journalism junkies, Baquet waxed on the usual defenses of his newsroom’s ongoing torment of the White House. He then turned to what he saw as the real threat to American journalism: The decline of local news coverage.

“I don’t think it’s quite understood and accepted,” he said. Don’t worry about the Times, Post and The Wall Street Journal. “We have to figure out the Buffalos, the New Orleans, the Atlantas ... so if a school board does something important in a suburb of New Orleans or Atlanta, it’s covered.” The Atlantas? Is it just me, or did he just lump our great city among the clusters of flickering lights he observes from first class over the flyover space between Manhattan and Santa Monica?

Despite what was, I guess, a well-meaning pat on the head, he cast newspapers like ours as charity cases.

“I would say to philanthropists and local leaders, you should think of a way to sustain local journalism,” Baquet said. “I don’t know what that model is.”

Obviously. Dean, the “model” in Atlanta is much the same as it is with the big boys on Eighth Avenue. We believe the best way to support an independent press is by sustaining a successful and independent business. We think advertisers want to be associated with a trusted brand and that our readers will pay to support great journalism.

I like our philanthropists and local leaders just fine, but I can tell you that they weren’t a lot The Atlanta JournalConstitution wants to explain openly to readers what we do and why. Discuss this column and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s coverage of other areas at editor Kevin Riley’s Facebook page, www.facebook.com/ ajceditor. of help when we were writing about the test-cheating scandals in Atlanta Public Schools. Quite a few paraded through to complain that our reporting was hurting their efforts to lure business to the city.

We cover the school boards, cities, counties and statehouse committees. Occasionally, we even play on a national stage. I suppose, Dean, that you were too busy comparing your Pulitzer count with the Washington Post to notice that we were Pulitzer finalists with our nationwide exposé on doctors who sexually abuse their patients and get away with it.

This is one of those times when I’m reminded of my favorite scene from my favorite movie about newspapering, “The Paper.” It starred Michael Keaton, Glenn Close and Robert Duvall. Keaton plays Henry, the city editor for a local newspaper in New York. The character has just lost a job with the insufferable Times-like paper after he literally stole a scoop from them for his paper. I will provide the PG version. Paul Bladden, New York Sentinel: “Well, I hope you’re satisfied, (bad word)! You just blew your chance to cover the world!”

Henry: “Really? Well guess (bad word) what? I don’t really (bad word) care. You wanna know (bad word) why? Because I don’t (bad word) live in the (bad word) world! I live in (bad word) New York City! So go (bad word) yourself!”

And I live in (bad word) Atlanta!

The “business model” for local journalism in Atlanta is much the same as it is with the big boys at The New York Times on Eighth Avenue.