Ga. papers form alliance for political reporting

With the shrinkage in coverage and circulation of metropolitan newspapers, and the cutbacks in state-capital reporters, it's up to smaller newspapers to fill the vacuum, and a group of Georgia newspapers will be doing that with a historic partnership. Georgia’s largest dailies and Tennessee's Chattanooga Times Free Press have formed the Georgia Newspaper Partnership to "provide deep reporting found nowhere else in the Southeast," the group says.

“This partnership helps put an end to the idea that there are two Georgias,” said Bert Roughton Jr., managing editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which has drastically reduced its circulation area in the last three years, leaving many rural areas without a metro daily. “The work that these partner newspapers do will go a long way toward providing the state’s voters a more unified voice.”

In addition to reporting projects, the parrtnership will support three statewide polls by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research. So far, this is "the only large-scale, non-partisan political polling in Georgia for 2010," the group says, announcing that the first statewide polling will appear exclusively in the partner newspapers starting on July 11. (We wouldn't have indicated when we were polling, but that's just us.)

Besides Atlanta and Chattanooga, the papers in the group include the Athens Banner-Herald, The Augusta Chronicle, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, The Times of Gainesville, the Georgia Times-Union (an edition of The Florida Times-Union, Jacksonville), The Telegraph of Macon, the Rome News-Tribune, the Savannah Morning News, the Statesboro Herald and the Valdosta Daily Times. Sunday readership of the group alone exceeds 2.2 million.

“As a small newspaper in southeast Georgia with very limited resources, the Georgia Newspaper Partnership will allow us to give our readers much more in-depth coverage of the governor’s race and every statewide race than we could possibly have produced on our own,” said Jim Healy, executive editor of the Statesboro Herald. “Also, it will hold candidates much more accountable than in the past.”