Hat tip to Media Giraffe.

Anniston, for those not from the deep south, is on the border between Alabama and Georgia and was the original home of one of the finest (fifth largest and recipient of a Tony Award) Shakespearean theaters and festivals in the country (Y'all come back, ya hear!). The King Lear I saw there was the very best version I have ever seen. Chilling. So I was not at all surprised to run into this profile of the publisher of the local paper - The Anniston Star, posted at Journalism that Matters project.

"I would ask you to explain to me what is the objective view of lousy health care, poor schools, racial murder and injustice?" H. Brandt Ayres Publisher / The Anniston Star

According to the blurb at Media Giraffe, Ayres has turned his newspaper into a teaching organization, to regain the community advocacy that was the hallmark of the fourth estate before objectivity became the shibboleth for "above the fray" smugness.

Ayers Institute for Community Journalism
Anniston, AL
http://www.comj.ua.edu/
cwaddle@annistonstar.com
4305 McClelland Blvd.
P.O. Box 189
Anniston, AL 36202

Ayres cited among his “crimes of advocacy” helping to form a committee to mediate racial disputes, reforming a poor city-owned hospital to a quality regional medical center, helping form a coalition to provide a poor minority city school system, helping raise funds to help solve a racially-motivated killing, a voter-registration crusade and reporting on financial abuses by an anti-poverty agency.