A newspaper editor described as fearless and inventive will deliver the 29th McGill Lecture Nov. 7.
Julia Wallace, editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and www.ajc.com, will speak at 4 p.m. in Room 101 of the Student Learning Center. She will address the question, “Who is Killing the First Amendment? The Search for Fingerprints.”
Sponsored by UGA’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, the event is open to the public. A reception follows the lecture.
The McGill Lecture honors the life and memory of Ralph McGill, the outspoken Southern journalist who fought persistently for civil rights during the 1950s and 1960s. Established in 1978, the annual lecture typically addresses major issues impacting the American press.
Wallace is profiled in the current edition of American Journalism Review, which explores how four U.S. newspaper editors are “dramatically revamping the way U.S. newsrooms operate.”
“The newsroom of tomorrow may be arising today in Atlanta,” AJR’s Carl Sessions Stepp wrote, where Wallace “has fearlessly upended the organizational chart and reinvented the news process.”
Wallace directs a team of more than 400 journalists. She joined the AJC in 2000 as managing editor and was named editor in 2002. During her tenure, www.ajc.com has grown into one of the most popular newspaper Web sites in the country, logging almost a billion page views in 2006.
Her focus, she said, is “unique local content, watchdog reporting and great storytelling.”
Wallace was named editor of the year by Editor & Publisher magazine in 2004. The industry trade journal praised Wallace for “bringing the passion, discipline and top newsroom talent that has transformed Dixie’s most storied daily into a newspaper for an utterly changed Southern metropolis.”
The newspaper was awarded Pulitzer Prizes in 2005 and 2006.
