Last week, Decaturish, the blog parked at decaturish.com, announced a new newsroom hire: Jim Bass, a recent University of Georgia graduate. He joined founder Dan Whisenhunt and assistant editor Zoe Seiler as the 10-year-old blog’s third full-time staff member. Decaturish takes its name from the suburban city where it was founded, Decatur.

Decatur is the seat of DeKalb County, Georgia, one of five counties that form the historic core of Atlanta’s sprawling metropolitan area. Atlanta itself has long been called a Black Mecca for its substantial Black population and African American institutions, from successful Black business empires to the arts and some of the nation’s most prestigious HBCUs. DeKalb County itself has a significant Black history and Black residents comprise 53% of the county’s current population.

Decatur’s city hall is about six miles east of downtown Atlanta’s Georgia state capitol. It’s a city with a tangled racist and exclusionary history that includes a school week designed to keep Jews from living inside the city limits, urban renewal, and aggressive gentrification that decimated a once prominent Black population and all of the city’s affordable housing.

Decatur is also a news desert. Starting around the turn of this century, cutbacks in such local newsrooms as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution combined with community newspapers going out of print to deprive Decatur residents of essential information about newsworthy events in their communities. By the time that gentrification ramped up around 2007, there were few reporters left to write about displacement, police racial profiling, and many other issues adversely affecting Black residents and visitors.

To fill the gap in local news coverage, Decaturish became one of several blogs and podcasts that emerged there between 2000 and 2015. It’s the most enduring of the bunch, which had such names as InDecatur and Decatur Metro.

The decimated news ecosystem in Decatur became part of my research into racism there and Decaturish comprises a large part of my data. I first wrote about the blog in 2014 after it whitewashed the history of a beloved church demolished by a developer. Over the past decade, the blog repeatedly produced coverage that privileged white perspectives on the city’s issues over Black ones.

For example, in 2013 Decaturish published a story about aggressive real estate speculators leaving yellow post-it-style notes on homes. The headline read, “Yellow Cards stir up Decatur, Ga. residents.” The stirred-up residents in the story were white homeowners concerned that the notes were an invitation to burglars. “People were concerned. It’s kind of like having a bright yellow sticker saying, ‘Nobody’s home all day today, nobody’s taken this off,’” Decatur’s mayor told Whisenhunt.

Black homeowners in Decatur had a different take on the yellow notes. The notes were among the many pieces of mail and unsolicited calls and visits by real estate speculators trying to get Black homeowners to sell their family homes. It’s a situation that’s not unique to Decatur, but it’s something that a truly hyperlocal newsroom should have been attuned to in its reporting on the yellow notes.

The yellow notes story is one of many among my research files for the book about Decatur that I one day expect to finish.

The Decaturish newsroom changes would have gone into my research notes for use later on had it not been for something that happened to me last month in Pittsburgh. I had an assignment from one of the news outlets where I’m a regular contributor to write a Black History Month article. I reached out to a University of Virginia history professor as a possible source for the story — he’s an internationally recognized subject area expert who has written widely on the topic covered in my story.

Instead of responding to my request with a simple “yes” or “no,” the UVA professor visited the publication’s website and navigated to the “meet the team” page. He didn’t like what he saw. “I was inclined to say, yes, but then I took a look at [the publication’s] website. Your staff is almost entirely white and serves a city that’s a quarter Black,” he emailed me. “Is there anything that you can tell me about your publication that would address my concern?”

We exchanged several emails. I ultimately gained his trust and he consented to do the interview. My story, with his quotes, will run later this month.

I wonder how Decaturish could answer similar questions about its newsroom and staff? Beyond Decatur, I wonder how many newsrooms could answer those questions. They are questions more sources like the UVA professor should ask to hold news organizations accountable.

©2025 D.S. Rotenstein