He is the namesake of the most prestigious prize in journalism. George Foster Peabody was born in Columbus in 1852. His parents were New Englanders. They moved to New York after the Civil War, when George was 14. Peabody had a natural aptitude for business and finance, and managed railroad accounts for a New York […]
Missouri has Mark Twain. Georgia has Bill Arp, the pen name for Charles Henry Smith. Born in Lawrenceville in 1826, Smith moved to Rome in 1851 to practice law. After the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Smith wrote a letter under the pen name “Bill Arp” to President Lincoln in the humorous dialect favored by […]
Detractors called it the Chicken Noodle Network, but it revolutionized the way the world gets its news. Ted Turner launched the Cable News Network—CNN—in Atlanta as the world’s first 24-hour all news network. Turner had already revolutionized cable television by beaming Superstation TBS around the globe by satellite. Convinced there was a market for an […]
Peyton Anderson was born in 1907 in Macon with newspaper ink in his veins. His uncle edited and published the Macon Telegraph and later the Macon News; his father was vice president of the company; another uncle was a columnist. Anderson began working at the paper at age 9 sweeping floors. After earning a Bronze […]
Joel Chandler Harris was a New South journalist, a folklorist, and one of Georgia’s most famous authors. He was born in Eatonton in 1845. Like Ben Franklin, Harris learned to write by hand-setting newspaper type, working at Turnwold Plantation for Joseph Addison Turner. After working in Macon and Savannah, Harris went to work for Henry […]