Books and Atlanta

In response to the outcry raised by John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, over the elimination of the book-editor position at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the paper's editor, Julia Wallace, sent this email to Freeman and others:

"Thank you for your thoughtful note about our book coverage. Let me allay your fears: We are not killing our book coverage or book pages. So long as books are important to our readers, we will continue to dedicate space to them. Remember, this is the newspaper of Margaret Mitchell and Hank Klibanoff, a Pulitzer winner this year for his book on how the press covered the civil rights movement. Our own literary roots are deep, and we won’t forget that.

"Perhaps we have created some confusion as a byproduct of our newsroom restructuring. As you may have heard, we are implementing many changes in the way we gather and display our content in the newspaper and on our website. The point of this restructuring is to even better align our coverage with the interests of our readers. In the restructuring, many jobs are changing -– some are being eliminated. Our staffers are currently being asked to apply for the newly defined jobs. All will have jobs when this is completed. While we will no longer have a book editor, we will have an editor responsible for directing our book coverage. We won’t have a metro editor or food editor in the traditional sense either, but we will still cover local news and food with a vengeance. None of these changes means we’re planning to end our coverage of topics readers love -– far from it. We believe our newspaper readers want an engaging and sophisticated report on new books and that they want to read more about the local literary community and the fascinating people who populate it. We will be using freelancers, established news services and our staff to provide stories about books of interest to our readers and the local literary community. All this should shake out over the next few months...."