Global Watchdog
Media And Commentary
Do We Have A Fourth Estate Left To Save?
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Last updated
Last updated October 7, 2026: full rewrite on the decline of local journalism. This replaces my 2014, 2023, and 2025 versions with one account, every statistic checked against the latest State of Local News report and the 2025 and 2026 record.
I started this site because I got tired of watching powerful people operate without anyone asking questions. In Macon, during the Dallemand school years, the local paper had largely stopped asking. So I started asking myself, in public, with public records. That is the whole origin story of Global Watchdog.
The question I asked in 2014 still stands: do we have a Fourth Estate left to save? The honest 2026 answer is yes, but barely, and the rescue will not come from the companies that broke it. It will come from nonprofit newsrooms, public money with strings attached, and citizens who decided to be the press themselves. My own town just ran that experiment.
The Short Version
- Close to 3,500 American newspapers have closed since 2005. 212 counties have no local news source, 1,525 have exactly one, and about 50 million Americans have limited or no access to local news. (Medill, State of Local News 2025)
- When the local paper dies, towns pay more to borrow money, corruption gets cheaper, and nobody watches the courthouse.
- AI answer engines now summarize reporting and keep the reader, and the licensing money platforms pay goes to national brands, not to the local paper that did the work.
- Macon ran the counterexperiment: in July 2026 the Georgia Trust for Local News bought the Macon Telegraph from McClatchy and put it under local nonprofit ownership. Whether it works is a test case for the whole country.
Table of Contents
- The Standard
- How the News Got Loud, Fast, and Thin
- Two Decades of Loss, Counted
- Ghost Papers
- What It Costs When Nobody Is Watching
- The New Gatekeepers Get Paid First
- The Backstop Just Broke
- Macon: The Experiment in My Backyard
- The Fifth Estate Grew Up
- What Is Working
- What You Can Still Do
- One Book Worth Your Time
- The Question
- Sources
Table of Contents
The Standard: Murrow, Cronkite, and What the Job Is
Edmund Burke is traditionally credited with naming the Fourth Estate. The story goes that three estates sat in Parliament, the king, the lords, and the commons, while a fourth force watched them all: the press, up in the Reporters’ Gallery. The phrase reaches us through Thomas Carlyle, writing in 1841, and the exact coinage is debated, as most good stories are. The idea is not debated. The press watches the other three.
Thomas Jefferson, writing to Edward Carrington in 1787, put it plainly: were it left to him to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, he would not hesitate to prefer the latter. I wonder what he would make of an hour of today’s shouting heads performing outrage for ratings.
Edward R. Murrow is one of the reasons this country turned against Senator McCarthy. When Walter Cronkite soured on the Vietnam War, the nation’s sentiment shifted with him; President Lyndon Johnson reportedly said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” No offense to the anchors since, Brian Williams and Diane Sawyer included, but none of them moves public opinion the way Murrow and Cronkite did. That is the standard: verify, tell the truth plainly, stand behind it. The reasons almost nobody on television meets it now are structural, not personal.
How the News Got Loud, Fast, and Thin
Before the internet, you had two main sources for news, television and the newspaper, and magazines for depth when you could wait. You could argue CNN started the slide: once a channel had 24 hours to fill, banality crowded out commentary. Gone was the steak and baked potato. In came the applesauce.
The 24 hour fill problem
Social media then made the news instant. You can be alerted to an oil rig explosion minutes after it happens, and that speed is genuinely welcome. The problem is that early reports are often wrong, and misinformation travels faster than the correction. The false early reports around the Boston bombing, the missing Malaysian airliner, and the coverage of Ferguson proved how unreliable the media becomes when the prize goes to whoever says it first. The names change. The incentive has only gotten stronger. There is still a great need for journalists who verify before they publish. Verification is the scarce skill. Speed is free.
The feed took the front page
In 2026, the screen between readers and reporting is no longer even television. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026 found social media and video platforms became the main source of news for the first time, at 54 percent globally, ahead of television at 52 percent and news sites and apps at 51 percent, with print at 16 percent. About 27 percent of people get news from news focused creators, rising to 46 percent for creators of any type. The shouting heads did not disappear. An algorithm shouts faster and never sleeps.
Now the answer engine answers
The newest screen is the search page itself. A Pew Research Center study published July 22, 2025, followed 900 American adults through 68,879 searches and found that when Google showed an AI summary, users clicked through to a traditional result in only 8 percent of visits, compared with 15 percent when no summary appeared. They clicked a link inside the summary itself just 1 percent of the time, and they ended the browsing session outright on 26 percent of pages with a summary, against 16 percent without one. About two thirds of all searches in the study ended with no click at all.
The answer engine uses the reporting, keeps the reader, and sends almost nothing back. Accountability journalism runs on traffic and subscriptions. When the summary layer absorbs both, the watchdog loses its funding pipe at the moment its work is used most.
Two Decades of Loss, Counted
In 2014 I worked from outrage and anecdotes. The researchers have since counted the wreckage, and it is worse than my anecdotes. The figures below come from Northwestern’s Medill State of Local News Report 2025, the standard count in the field, unless another source is named.
Closures and news deserts
Close to 3,500 newspapers have closed since 2005, almost 40 percent of the 2005 total. More than 5,400 remain, but 136 closed in the past year, a pace above two a week.
The map is the alarming part. 212 counties now have no local news source at all, up from 206 the year before and just over 150 in 2005. Another 1,525 counties have only one source, typically a weekly hanging on by its fingernails. Roughly 50 million Americans have limited or no access to local news, and about 80 percent of news desert counties are predominantly rural. Medill tracks some 8,000 local outlets in all, and still the desert grows.
The jobs
The jobs went with the papers. Since 2005, more than 270,000 newspaper jobs have vanished, a loss above 75 percent. Newspaper industry employment stood at 91,550 people in 2024, down 7 percent in a single year, and newspapers shed more than 1,200 journalist jobs from 2023 to 2024 alone. Less than a third of the nearly 42,000 journalists left in the country work in newspapers. In 39 states, fewer than 1,000 journalists remain to cover the legislature, the courts, the school boards, and the county commissions.
A narrower federal series agrees. The Federal Reserve’s FRED count of newspaper publisher employment fell from 98.5 thousand jobs in 2023 to 89.8 thousand in 2024 to 82.2 thousand in 2025. Different ruler, same direction.
Print, traffic, and trust
Print itself is becoming ceremonial. Less than a fifth of American dailies still print seven days a week, and roughly a quarter print less than four days. Print circulation is down an estimated 70 percent from 2005 levels, and monthly web traffic at the 100 largest papers fell more than 40 percent in four years. In Pew’s 2025 survey, 56 percent of American adults often got news on digital devices; 7 percent often read a printed newspaper.
Trust followed the audience down. Gallup measured trust in mass media at 28 percent in September 2025, the lowest in its trend, ticking up only to 33 percent in September 2026. Reuters puts trust at 37 percent across 48 countries in 2026, the lowest it has recorded since 2015, with the United States at 25 percent. And residents of news desert counties trust the media less than other Americans do, 46 percent against 59 percent, while leaning harder on social media and influencers. The places with the least reporting have the least faith in it. That is what abandonment looks like measured.
| Measure | 2005, the baseline | 2025 to 2026, the latest counts |
|---|---|---|
| Counties with no local news source | Just over 150 | 212, with 1,525 more counties down to a single source (Medill 2025) |
| Newspapers closed since 2005 | The count was just beginning | Close to 3,500 closed; more than 5,400 remain; 136 closed in the past year |
| Newspaper jobs | Peak employment era | More than 270,000 gone since 2005, a loss above 75 percent |
| Who owns the survivors | Chains consolidating | Gannett largest at 297 papers; Alden and MediaNews Group 165; the ten largest owners hold nearly a quarter of all papers and 60 percent of dailies |
| Main source of news | Television and the paper | Social and video platforms first at 54 percent globally (Reuters 2026); 7 percent of American adults often read print (Pew 2025) |
| Macon Telegraph owner | McClatchy, a distant chain | Georgia Trust for Local News, local nonprofit ownership since July 2026 |
Ghost Papers: The Desert You Cannot See
Here is the part that fools people, because it does not show up in the closure counts. A town can keep its masthead and lose its newsroom.
For the 2024 State of Local News Report, Medill researchers reviewed 500 newspapers owned by the five largest chains and found that, on average, more than a third of front page content originated from a nonlocal source. The name on the building stays. The reporters are gone. Industry watchers call these ghost newspapers, and Massachusetts showed the full life cycle: Gannett weeklies hollowed out under a regional umbrella, then local journalists and readers forming nonprofit startups like the Plymouth Independent and The New Bedford Light to do the work the chain stopped doing.
Closure makes the maps turn red. Ghost status is what most surviving communities live in. Your paper still arrives. It just no longer knows your town.
What It Costs When Nobody Is Watching
It would be easy to file this under nostalgia, one less section in the Sunday paper. The research says otherwise.
Back in 2011, the Federal Communications Commission’s Information Needs of Communities report warned that a shortage of local accountability reporting leads to more government waste, more local corruption, and less effective schools. A hollowed out news ecosystem, as that era’s reporting put it, “can cover the scoreboard and the scandal, but not the scrimmage.” The games and the indictments still get covered. The zoning vote and the contract amendment, where the money actually moves: nobody is in the room.
Researchers Gao, Lee, and Murphy put a price on it in their study “Financing Dies in Darkness.” After a local newspaper closes, municipal borrowing costs rise 5 to 11 basis points, roughly $650,000 in extra cost on an average bond issue, alongside higher government wages and bigger deficits. That is the bond market pricing in the absence of a watchdog. When nobody sits in the council meeting, the council notices, the bond buyers notice, and the taxpayers pay for both.
A county with no news source is a county where the sheriff, the school board, and the county commission conduct the public’s business in a room nobody reports on. Corruption does not arrive with a drumroll. It arrives as a no-bid contract nobody questions, a superintendent nobody vets, a budget nobody reads. I have watched that movie, and it is set in my hometown.
The New Gatekeepers Get Paid First
If the answer engines are taking the readers, are they at least paying for the journalism they summarize? Sometimes. Not to your local paper.
On December 5, 2025, Meta signed AI content licensing deals with CNN, Fox News, Fox Sports, Le Monde Group, People Inc, The Daily Caller, The Washington Examiner, and USA Today with its network. Google licensed Associated Press content in January 2025. Microsoft is building a Publisher Content Marketplace that pays publishers per use, with the Associated Press, Reuters, and Bloomberg among early participants. Read the names again: every one is a national brand with a rights department. No local newspaper is in the room, because each outlet is too small to negotiate its way onto the invoice. Local journalism is structurally locked out of the AI licensing economy that is supposed to replace the search traffic it is losing.
Canada already ran this experiment to both endings. Google paid CAN$100 million into a collective fund under the Online News Act and bought a five year exemption. Meta blocked news on Facebook and Instagram in Canada, starting in August 2023, rather than pay at all. A state brokered payment that bypasses individual towns, or total refusal. Georgia has no equivalent law, and Bibb County has no seat at either table.
The Backstop Just Broke
When the newspaper died in a rural county, one newsroom often remained: the public radio station. Medill counts 342 public media stations reaching more than 90 percent of American counties, including 82 percent of news desert counties. In nine counties, public radio is the only local news source there is.
That floor is now moving. In July 2025, Congress rescinded about $1.1 billion in Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding. CPB announced an orderly wind down on August 1, 2025, eliminated most staff by September 30, and its board voted to dissolve. More than 1,500 local stations were affected; CPB had distributed more than $500 million a year, over 70 percent of it to local stations. New Jersey PBS is ceasing operations in 2026, Penn State’s WPSU winds down by June 30, 2026, and major stations from Boston to Houston have cut staff.
Whatever your politics, the arithmetic is the arithmetic: the safety net was cut in the same news cycle that closed another 136 newspapers, while it was load bearing.
Macon: The Experiment in My Backyard
The death of the Fourth Estate is usually told as a national story. The equally troubling decline happened locally, and Macon, Georgia is my evidence. What follows is partly the record as I reported it at the time. Where the years have moved the facts, I say so.
The era record
In 2014 I wrote that the once proud Macon Telegraph had degenerated into something close to a stenography service, reporting the news as it was spoon fed by the police, the mayor’s office, and other local agencies, while local politicians got softball questions. This in a state that the 2012 State Integrity Investigation had ranked dead last in the nation. That study measured corruption risk and the strength of integrity laws, not proven corruption, and the distinction matters. The point was that Georgia’s guardrails were the weakest in the country.
The opinion pages were the sore spot, and I documented that era at length in the Charles Richardson archive on this site, where the whole file still stands. During the Dallemand years, when a salesman superintendent was selling Macon a “Macon Miracle,” the opinion page acted as his biggest cheerleader while voices that questioned authority were shown the door. I had been reading The Economist since I was about 16 and knew more about Cambodian politics than about my own backyard. Then I heard what was happening at the school district, got intrigued, then outraged, and started digging myself.
Two facts grade that era from a distance. McClatchy, the chain that owned the Telegraph then, went through Chapter 11, and in 2020 the court approved the sale of substantially all of its assets, all 30 of its news organizations, to Chatham Asset Management for about $263 million in credit bid plus about $49 million in cash, with the pension plan handed to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Everything I complained about ran its course. And Charles Richardson is a former Telegraph opinion page editor now, working part time as a Community Liaison at Middle Georgia State. My 2014 and 2015 Macon reporting stands as a record of that era, which is where it belongs.
Macon in 2015: the last time anyone measured
In 2015, Pew studied local news habits in three cities, and Macon was one of them. Nobody has rerun it, so this is the only measured baseline the town has:
| Macon, 2015 (Pew Research Center) | Finding |
|---|---|
| Reached by local TV | 66 percent |
| Reached by the daily paper | About 36 percent |
| Followed weather very closely | 69 percent |
| Followed crime very closely | 51 percent |
| Followed schools very closely | 33 percent |
| Said local media did an excellent job | 21 percent |
| Reliant on friends and neighbors for news | 37 percent |
| Called Macon an excellent place to live | 9 percent |
| Called Macon fair or poor | 43 percent |
Those are 2015 findings, a baseline, not a description of today. The watchers stopped watching the watchers.
July 2026: the town bought its paper back
Then Macon did something almost nobody else in America has done. In July 2026, the Georgia Trust for Local News, a subsidiary of the National Trust for Local News, purchased the Macon Telegraph and the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer from McClatchy and put both under local nonprofit ownership, with the Peyton Anderson Foundation funding the Telegraph acquisition. The Georgia Trust now operates 21 local newspapers and digital platforms across Middle, West, and South Georgia, covering more than a million people. The Macon Melody, the nonprofit newsroom the Georgia Trust launched in 2024 with a $5 million Knight Foundation grant that created 12 new jobs and a newsroom of seven journalists, will merge into the Telegraph as a section within it, and the combined newsroom will be housed in Mercer University’s Reg Murphy Center for Collaborative Journalism. Cynthia DuBose became the Georgia Trust’s executive director on June 1, 2026.
Context matters. The Telegraph had already cut its print schedule to two editions a week in June 2024, and Georgia has lost 28 percent of its newspapers since 2005. Macon was drifting toward ghost status on schedule. Instead, the paper of record in my town is now owned locally, as a nonprofit, for the first time in the chain era.
I do not know yet whether nonprofit ownership fixes what ailed the Telegraph. I know it removes the excuse. There is no distant chain to blame now. If the watchdog still sleeps, it will be a local choice, and local people can do something about it.
What we do not know yet
Honesty requires a short list of what I cannot tell you. I do not yet have a confirmed print schedule or newsroom headcount for the Telegraph under its new owners, and I will not guess at either. Georgia law makes the print question more than a business detail: under Georgia Code section 9-13-142, a county legal organ must be a printed product published within the county at least weekly for two years, with at least 75 percent paid circulation on an independent audit, because foreclosure notices, probate citations, and sheriff’s sales are required to run in it. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran its final print edition on December 31, 2025, making Atlanta the largest American metro area without a printed daily. In counties that lose a qualifying paper, nothing equivalent replaces that legal function.
The Fifth Estate Grew Up
In that 2015 Pew piece, I wrote about the fifth estate of blogs, citizen journalists, and social media groups filling the gaps the professionals left, and I ended with a flourish: “The new fifth estate is here and already taking their place because they didn’t want to give us a seat at the table.”
Eleven years later, that is not a flourish. It is the operating environment, and I will grade my own prediction honestly: the fifth estate arrived, and it brought no standards with it. No copy desk, no libel lawyer, no corrections column, and some of it is every bit as slanted as the lamestream it replaced. But it shows up to the school board meeting, and on the evidence of the last decade, showing up is most of the job.
My own town is the exhibit, not because this site is grand, it is one retiree with a laptop and a long memory, but because it is typical. When this site published its Bibb County schools budget investigation, sourced line by line from public records, the reporting the daily paper once would have done happened anyway, because a citizen decided to do it. Multiply that by thousands of towns and you have the 2026 media map.
The gap has an equity dimension too. Pew’s 2015 Macon and Denver data showed people of color following local news more closely than white residents, even as mainstream outlets served them worst; Macon then had, to my knowledge, one weekly for Hispanic readers and one, The Informer, for Black readers. The audiences hungriest for local news were the ones the Fourth Estate bothered with least. The fifth estate’s chaos at least has a door open.
What Is Working
The obituary is not the whole story. A repair industry has grown up around local news, and some of it works.
Nonprofit and trust ownership
The sturdiest piece is nonprofit and trust ownership, with Macon as the exhibit. The American Journalism Project has been pivotal in backing nonprofit local newsrooms nationally, and philanthropy has real money in the fight: MacArthur announced $48 million in initial grants in 2023 to seed Press Forward, a coalition aiming to invest more than $500 million over five years, and Press Forward’s pooled grants have since reached more than 200 news organizations, all with budgets under $1 million.
State programs, graded
Government help is a mixed record, and the honest scoreboard matters more than the press releases. California allocated $25 million in 2023 for its Local News Fellowship at UC Berkeley Journalism. The verified outcome: more than 70 full time reporters producing about 100 stories a week in 35 counties covering over 90 percent of the state’s population, with another $15 million to fund fellowships from 2026 through 2028. Illinois is distributing retention tax credits to 120 outlets, more than half outside the Chicago area, with no money to Gannett or Alden papers. New York’s payroll tax credit has stalled and distributed nothing in the past year, joining failed measures in New Mexico, Maryland, and Massachusetts. A program is not a result. The states that pay for reporters get reporters.
Philanthropy, with the map caveat
One caution belongs beside every warm paragraph in this section. Metropolitan areas received 95 percent of journalism grants and 98 percent of the grant money over the past five years, on Candid data reported by Medill, while about 80 percent of news deserts are rural. The rescue economy follows donor zip codes, not need. That is why Macon matters nationally: it tests whether trust ownership works in a mid size Southern city, and the next two years of the merged Telegraph will grade the model.
What You Can Still Do
If it bleeds it leads is nothing new; even Ben Franklin salted his Pennsylvania Gazette with the occasional salacious story. There is no app for human nature. But citizens have more levers than they think.
Subscribe to something local, and treat it like the utility it is. If you cancel, cancel with a letter that says why. A cancellation with a reason attached is data a publisher must read; a silent cancellation is a rounding error. Write the publisher by name when coverage fails. Aim your letters to the editor at local issues instead of national shouting. Nobody in Washington will read your letter in the Macon Telegraph. The people who run your schools, your roads, and your jail just might.
And participate. Comment on the article. Share it with your own note attached, saying plainly what you wanted covered. Newsrooms read their comments the way politicians read polls. Better yet, write. Buscamos escritores. We are looking for writers, neighbors who will cover the meeting nobody else attends. Retired teachers welcome. We grade on showing up.
One Book Worth Your Time
Alexander Cockburn’s End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate remains the sharpest autopsy of the American press I know: smart, urgent, and at times wickedly funny. If this article made you angry in the right way, it will entertain and enlighten you. (As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.)
The Question
A closing scene, because it started this line of writing for me. The muse for the 2014 piece was Aaron Sorkin’s HBO series The Newsroom, where anchor Will McAvoy stops playing it safe and says out loud that television news had become ratings driven infotainment, and that it used to be better. In 2014 my answer to my own title leaned no. In 2026 it is more specific: the national Fourth Estate is a shadow of the Murrow standard, the local one nearly died on the chain store model, and what is saving it, where it is being saved, is nonprofit ownership, public money with strings attached, and citizens who decided to be the press themselves.
Reader poll
Do you still trust your local news to hold the powerful accountable?
- Yes
- Not really
- Only the national outlets
- Nobody is watching anymore
Answer in the comments, and tell me plainly: who holds the powerful accountable in your town now that the local paper has thinned out, or is anybody watching at all?
One easy question before you go: who holds the powerful accountable in your town now that the local paper has thinned out, or is anybody watching at all? Tell me in the comments. Name the outlet, the newsletter, the stubborn neighbor with a records request habit, or say plainly that the seat is empty.
Sources and Further Reading
Every figure above traces to one of these.
- Northwestern Medill, State of Local News Report 2025.
- Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears (July 22, 2025), and the News Platform Fact Sheet 2025.
- Gallup, trust in mass media trend (September 2025 and September 2026); Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2026.
- Federal Reserve FRED series IPUJN51111W200000000, newspaper publisher employment, 2023 to 2025.
- Federal Communications Commission, Information Needs of Communities report (June 2011); Gao, Lee, and Murphy, “Financing Dies in Darkness,” on municipal borrowing costs after a closure.
- Editor and Publisher, Georgia Trust for Local News to acquire the Macon Telegraph and Columbus Ledger-Enquirer (July 2026); National Trust for Local News, Macon Melody launch.
- Associated Press (August 29, 2025) on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ending print; Georgia Code section 9-13-142; America’s Newspapers, McClatchy sale to Chatham approved (2020).
- UC Berkeley Journalism, California Local News Fellowship and $15 million continuation; MacArthur Foundation, Press Forward initial grants (2023).
- Pew Research Center, Local News in a Digital Age (2015): the Macon baseline table above.
On this site: Bibb County Watchdog, a five part investigation of the school budget built from public records, is the fifth estate argument with a Macon address on it. The Charles Richardson archive holds my Dallemand era Telegraph criticism in full. Read the primary sources first. Then argue with me in the comments.
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I am so happy you started this blog. And also agree with all your articles. Thank you for shedding some light on Dallemand and all the other corruption in Macon. I have always wondered how Charles Richardson kept his job. He actually sucked long before Dallemand came to town but then that conflict of interest with his wide should have given them a good excuse to fire that loser.
From what I hear Sherrie marshall is just as incompetent as Charles. What are your thoughts about her? I also heard she and Charles are as thick as thieves which is why he is allowed to get away with such poor writing week after week. Keep up the good fight brother man. Up here in Atlanta we are pulling for you. If the Macon Telegraph had any sense they would fire Charles and hire you.
Thanks for article. I’ve been bitching to Adam Ragusea and other “reporters” about the lack of investigative reporting for over a year now. I’m still trying to get Richardson to tell why he fired the best columnist the Telegraph had. I hope everyone here will help spread the word about Georgia Watch Macon and this article.
Thank you. I read your back and forth in the comments with Adam Ragusea a while back and he seems to think local media are simply too small to do investigative reporting. Although this may be partly true to a degree, that does not mean reporters should’t at least follow up on stories with witness reports. That does not requite a lot of investigation or resources. It also does not mean that in extremely important matters like Dallemand and the Cotton Avenue mafia they should simply ignore this blatant corruption. Certain reporters at the Telegraph proved they are capable of in-depth reporting as proven by a few pieces on Dallemand. We just need that type of reporting far more often. Too often it reads like stenography and not journalism.
I will do my best to try and provide an alternative voice but at the same time I am also hopeful others will join the effort by contributing their thoughts as well. Article submissions are always welcome.
As to David Oedel. I have spoken with him and I am not at liberty to go into more detail but I can say that Charles was a central factor in his leaving. It is already public knowledge that the last article he wrote was edited beyond recognition which must have been infuriating. I think that pathetic series Charles had begun writing where he attempted to portray Dallemand and all of the BOE with equal culpability was also a major factor.
I just got back from Athens and there was a “Go to hell, Jim” FB message waiting for me from Ragusea. Obviously, investigative reporting is hampered by limited funding and by the revolution newspapers are going through right now, but good reporters manage to get to the bottom of important stories instead of whining about lack of funds and resources. To keep this short I won’t go into my experience writing for the Boulder Daily Camera (just an occasional book review, interview, etc.) and hanging out and being in a writers group with a reporter from the Denver Post and Daily Camera because I posted that several times elsewhere, but the jist of it is that nothing stopped those guys (a man from the Post and a woman from the Camera) from going after a good local story and they knew you never trust the cops. My dispute with Ragusea was over the second shooting incident involving Sutton. I don’t watch TV so I don’t know what the coverage there was but all we got from the Telegraph was a regurgitating of the Sheriff’s report which made Sutton look like he should have been wearing tights and a cape (despite the fact that the Sheriff didn’t want Sutton as a deputy). Then the next day a small article that made Sutton look like he should be in a straight-jacket. The problem was that that was it! Nothing more. Did Sutton shoot a dog or a dog and a man or a dog and two men? How fucking hard is it to find out if the two perps were shot or not? How hard would it be to find out about the dog? Or to knock on the door of the two or so houses where the shooting happened to find out what people saw happen? Ragusea and his sidekick Grant Blankenship said they were waiting for a GBI investigation (or some kind of state investigation). Then Ragusea said he didn’t have the staff to “canvas” the neighborhood and that the condition of the two men who may or may not have been shot could not be reported because of medical confidentiality. That’s obvious bullshit because you don’t need a staff to knock on two or three doors and you don’t need hospital records to find out if someone was shot or not. Nobody had the funding to investigate something as important to the community as the possibility of maniac cop on the loose, but they had time to cover the pink poodles and beauty contests for 3-year-olds at the Cherry Blossom Festival which was going on at about the same time. BTW, Dave Oedel, as a columnist, did more investigative reporting that Ragusea. To investigate for a column he did about gangs, he went to one of the worst corners in Macon and talked to the gang members there! Same thing with the dog that the city let starve to death in a sewer and other stories–no investigative reporting. The Fourth Estate protects us from the other three. It is important, especially here in the Heart of Darkness.
Looks like I forgot to keep that short and to use paragraphs. Sorry. It has been a bitch of a day and I still have miles to go before I sleep.
Charles Richardson is not the senior editor of the Telegraph. He’s the editorial page editor, meaning he edits all of the opinion pieces. The senior editor for local news is Oby Brown. They both report to Sherrie Marshall, the executive editor.
Thanks for the clarification. I knew that Sherrie Marshall was the executive editor and that Charles was only responsible for opinion editorials, but I did not know that Oby Brown was a senior editor for local news. Sherrie Marshall is a bit of a mystery as she is certainly very quiet. She rarely writes any articles, has no social media presence to speak of, and in my opinion at least seems to be very hands off when it comes to Charles. When you Google her name there is almost nothing to see which is odd for an executive editor that should have a long list of awards, attributions, or at least some presence.
At the very least she needs to do a far better job with poor grammar, typos, and fact checks for his pieces. How in the world did she allow the school to be listed as Rutland and not Skyview today for example. Charles even said Lester represented Rutland when that is Sue Sipe’s district.
I am certainly guilty of spelling errors, typos, and odd grammar here on this blog, but in my defense I have no one to help with edits and am dyslexic. I usually catch most errors but some inevitably slip past me. Charles has a team of people able to proofread for him and that should be one of Sherrie Marshall’s duties.
I don’t think any of these people are as mysterious as they may seem to you, they’re just folks doing their jobs as best they can. If you want a tour, get in touch, ragusea_ac at mercer dot edu.
I have mentioned several writers such as Mink, Brown, Andrea, and Stucka for some great work in the past. They are all talented and I have no issue with any of them besides wanting them to do fewer fluff pieces and more in-depth stories as they have done in the past. In-depth are few and far in between. Let the Mercer students cover a new restaurant opening and let the reporters actually be journalists again.
https://gwmac.com/no-accounting-for-stupidity/
I don’t think Sherrie Marshall is an enigma. My use of mysterious was meant more towards her being largely MIA. If the Telegraph is shorthanded then she could certainly write some hard hitting pieces once in a while. Charles receives a full-time salary and yet turns out a few paragraphs a week. They certainly aren’t well researched. RE: Rutland instead of Skyview today. I could turn out what he writes in a single afternoon. His articles mostly look like they were written last minute and Macon deserves better. Compare the quality of the editorials from the Augusta, Savannah, Athens, and Columbus papers for reference.
I am sure they are all very nice people including Charles Richardson. However, the blatant agenda with his five part Update series, the conflict of ethics with his wife, pushing David Oedel out which was the only voice of dissent, the inability to write convincing persuasive or analytical editorials, the refusal to examine the rampant corruption and simply ask questions, the grammar and factual errors, and so many other issue simply became rather intolerable and I felt I needed to speak out. Instead of writing about the defense budget, where are the articles that deal with the rampant crime, corruption, human interests, volunteer organizations, homeless, inspirational articles..local stories that actually matter.
If I want to read about defense budgets I will read it from a source I trust and not from a small town editorial writer who doesn’t have a clue or expertise to make any claims. He has abrogated his responsibilities as an editor and has lost the trust of the public. Truth be told I don’t think anyone ever thought he was an especially good writer but he was jovial and occasionally wrote some good pieces when he stuck to his areas of expertise. But his fawning support of Dallemand suddenly changed him in a very real and noticeable way. Instead of admitting his mistakes he dug in deeper and deeper.
Adam, I just had this conversation with someone in a management position at the paper. Apparently, Oby answers to Sherrie, but Charles answers to the publisher.
If Don Bailey says it then it’s so, my apologies.