DHS grad is new columnist for AJC

Published 11:26 pm Sunday, May 24, 2009

Starting Thursday, there will be a new face and a new voice on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s editorial page. But the face will be a familiar one to many Dalton residents.

Kyle Wingfield, a 1997 graduate of Dalton High School, was named the newspaper’s new conservative columnist in April, following a worldwide search to replace the retiring Jim Wooten.

Wingfield says he’ll be an advocate for smaller government.

“I’m in favor of limited government and limited government intervention in the marketplace, and I’m in favor of individual liberty,” he said. “Those two things go hand in hand. Those are the principles that guide me no matter what issue I’m looking at.”

Some of the work Wingfield produced during the search has already appeared on the newspaper’s Web site, www.ajc.com.

The search for the new conservative columnist took about two-and-half-months. It started with an application that asked for several mock columns on various topics. After going through about 200 applications, AJC executives called back 20 semifinalists, including Wingfield, who was then working in Europe.

“At that point I did a videophone interview, and I also did two additional columns, which were published anonymously online. I’m not sure if they were published entirely or just excerpted in the newspaper,” he said.

AJC executives then invited a handful of finalists to Atlanta for interviews.

“I came to Atlanta and wrote an additional column, on deadline, which was not published,” he said.

“It was a lot more thorough than any job application process I’ve been through or even heard of,” Wingfield added. “But it generated a lot of interest. A lot of people around town knew that it was going on.”

Wingfield said he became interested in journalism in middle school.

“I wanted to be a sportscaster. But I started paying attention and saw that many of them were former athletes, and I quickly figured out I was never going to be a former athlete,” he recalled. “I enjoyed writing, and I got a lot of encouragement from my teachers. So I decided to look at the print side of journalism.

He attended the University of Georgia and after graduating worked for The Associated Press in Atlanta and Montgomery, Ala.

He was then hired by the Wall Street Journal as an editorial writer for its European edition based in Brussels, Belgium, where he was working when he learned about the AJC opening.

What was it like switching from reporting to opinion writing?

“It was at least as steep a learning curve and as much a culture shock as going from Alabama to Belgium,” he said. “Some of the basic skills are the same. You have to do your reporting thoroughly, maybe even more thoroughly since you are presenting an argument on an event or an issue. You really have to understand every single aspect of it or you’ll get nailed by the opposing argument pretty quickly.”

“But it’s different style of writing,” he added. “It was the better part of a year before I really felt comfortable, but now, it’s something I really enjoy.”

He wrote about topics ranging from international trade and antitrust to British politics. In addition, he was responsible for a weekly column called “Business Europe.”

He and his wife Emily spent four and a half years in Belgium before returning in early May.

The AJC has cut circulation and gone through several rounds of layoffs over the past few years. But he says that doesn’t give him great concern.

“If you look at newspaper industry you’ve got to wonder about what’s going to happen to it. That would be true if I’d stayed at the Wall Street Journal,” he said. “But I believe there’s always going to be a market for well reported and well written news, probably increasingly so in the future, regardless of the medium it’s in.”

He says the very public and extensive search the AJC did for a columnist shows how management is dedicated to the post.

“It’s a position I feel they value very highly,” he said.

Wooten, the newspaper’s lone conservative voice, has been with the AJC some 30 years, and Wingfield says “it’s a little intimidating” to be replacing him.

“He (Wooten) knows the city and the state and the politics and the players as well as anybody around. He has been extremely helpful,” Wingfield said. “It’s enormous shoes to fill. I’m not going to pretend I can fill them at once. It’s a job I’m going to have to grow into.”

Wooten will keep his Sunday column for at least the next few weeks, but Wingfield will eventually pick that space up as well as produce a column on a third day that hasn’t been decided yet. He’ll also be blogging starting some time in June.

Wooten, who helped in the search for his replacement, wrote that Wingfield is “the real deal. This post is in good hands.”

AJC editor Julia Wallace wrote that Wingfield is “provocative but not shrill. He has a carefully informed approach but also an ability to offer fresh perspectives.”