Climbing the Corporate Ladder

publication date: Apr 1, 2008

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author/source: Tim Altork / Senior Editor

Adulthood can certainly sneak up on a man.

Five years ago I was a 20-something newlywed living in a dilapidated old house in rural Alabama taking my first trepid steps in the newspaper industry as an inexperienced sports writer with the county’s weekly paper.

Today I am the senior editor of the largest weekly newspaper in one of the largest suburban areas in metro Atlanta, I am 30 years old, I have two kids and one on the way and I’m about to buy a house. If there is a line of demarcation between youth and adulthood, I’m pretty sure I’ve crossed it – kind of like Moonlight Graham after he gets his one at-bat, then has to step off the Field of Dreams to save Kevin Costner’s daughter from choking on a hot dog.

Getting from there to here has been quite the magical Volkswagen Bus ride.

My qualifications for getting that job in Alabama were:
1. I liked sports (still do),
2. I was literate (mostly), and
3. I was married to the publisher’s niece (still am).

Although sports and literacy aren’t two things that stereotypically go hand in hand, I would say that there are literally millions of people in America who have those first two qualifications.

So you can basically chalk up my career as a journalist to brazen nepotism. And I have absolutely no problem with that.

I spent three years covering high school sports in Randolph County, Alabama, before I realized that the punch line to an old joke I heard once actually rang true. Why do all the trees in Georgia lean to the west? Because Alabama sucks.

Seriously, though, I can’t bash the state too much because it got me and my political science degree out of the food service industry and into a career that I have thoroughly enjoyed thus far.

I stumbled across the Beacon after we moved back to the Atlanta area and my dream of becoming a published author was incrementally deteriorating with every soy latte that I made. (Yes, I worked at Starbucks.)

I found an ad on one of those job-posting websites and sent my resume to a man named John Fredericks. After a couple of months of interviews and negotiations, on Jan. 2, 2007, I found myself in the basement of his home sitting at a table with him and two other people plotting out how we were going to make an impact on our community with a cutting edge new publication that told it like it was.

Of the three people John originally hired, I am the last man standing. It’s like the Beacon’s version of “Survivor,” but instead of winning a million dollars, you get to be senior editor.

But earning this position is really every employee’s dream. What job have you ever been in where the people around you didn’t spend most of their time offering un-solicited advice about how they could take the company straight to the top? In the media industry this is especially true. Everyone thinks they can do a better job than the person who is doing the job.

I’ve had the opportunity to sit on the sidelines and observe some things that I thought could be done better, and now I am in the unique position of having a chance to put my money where my mouth is.

To that end, there will be a few cosmetic changes to the Beacon (nothing major) and a few internal tweaks here and there. We’re also going to put some effort in the coming months toward making Beaconcast.com the go-to site for news and sports in North Fulton County.

But for the most part you should see the same quality product that you’ve grown accustomed to getting in your mailbox each week. If you don’t, let me know, and I’ll crack the whip and get all the slackers around here back in line. Just kidding, of course.

But in all seriousness, our job is to put out a product that is a satisfying, enjoyable, and enlightening read from cover to cover. And your job as a reader is to let us know if we are doing that or not.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Tim can be contacted by email at taltork@beaconcast.com