450k
City population, 1978
The city was smaller than its myth even then — fewer than half a million people inside the city limits, with a metro area pushing two million. It was also the largest Southern city by every measure that mattered.
The Spoon Legacy · Pulse Chronicles, est. Atlanta 1978
A paper, a city,
and a man who refused to leave either.
Richard E. Spoon founded this masthead on August 14, 1978, in a 12-person office at 145 Edgewood Avenue SE. The paper has changed many times since. The philosophy it was started on has not.
The man
Born in Macon, made in Atlanta.
Richard Eugene Spoon was born November 9, 1941, in Macon, Georgia, the second of three children. His father drove a delivery route for the Macon Telegraph. His mother taught fourth grade. He spent his summers in Albany at his grandmother's house, which had no air conditioning and no fewer than four newspapers delivered every morning.
He took his first newspaper job at sixteen, setting hot type in the composing room of the Telegraph. He was a reporter by twenty, working the city desk by twenty-two, and on a Greyhound to Atlanta with a job at the Constitution by twenty-three. He covered Atlanta city hall through the late 1960s, the 1970 school-board reorganization, and the early years of the Maynard Jackson administration. He filed his last byline for the Constitution on a Thursday in August 1978. He started Pulse Chronicles the following Monday.
He was tall and thin and, by every account from people who worked with him, quietly stubborn. He kept the same desk for forty-one years. He answered his own phone. He read every issue cover to cover the night before it went to press, in red pen, on the page.
In his own words
The editorial philosophy.
Spoon was not a writer of manifestos. He preferred the editor's note. What follows is drawn from forty-one years of them.
We are not in the business of being first. We are in the business of being right, and second is fine if right takes a little longer.
A nomination is a polite suggestion that someone, somewhere, read the thing all the way through. That is the entire prize.
We owe the reader two things: the reporting we promised, and the reporting we didn't realize we needed to do until we started. The second one is what makes the first one worth reading.
The story took eighteen months. The check that ran with it was for $312. If you measure the work that way, you should not be doing the work.
We buy what we test. We keep nothing. If a manufacturer doesn't like that, they are free not to send us anything. We will buy it anyway.
The advertising will come and go, and it is going at the moment. The reader is the constant. The reader has always been the constant. Write for the reader.
Whatever comes next for this title, it will not be the same. I hope it will be good.
The city
Atlanta, 1978.
What Atlanta was when Spoon opened the office on Edgewood Avenue — and why he insisted, against every advisor he had, on starting a paper there instead of moving north.
1980
CNN, two blocks away
When Ted Turner switched on the Cable News Network in June 1980, the broadcast originated from a converted country club on Techwood Drive. The Pulse newsroom watched the test pattern from Edgewood Avenue on a borrowed television.
1996
The Olympics
The Centennial Olympic Games were the city's audition for the world stage. The magazine's coverage — from the bid in 1990 through the Centennial Park bombing in 1996 — ran across thirty-one issues.
Photo · Pulse Chronicles archive
145 Edgewood Ave SE
Atlanta · 1981
The original office
A 12-person newsroom, three blocks from city hall.
The lease at 145 Edgewood Avenue SE ran from August 1978 through May 2019 — forty years and ten months, the longest continuous newspaper tenancy in the city's history. The building, a 1923 brick two-story originally built for a cotton broker, still stands. A plaque on the side door reads simply: The Pulse, 1978–.
On the day Spoon opened the office he hired twelve people: four reporters, two copy editors, a photographer, an ad salesperson, a part-time accountant, a typesetter, a receptionist, and his wife Adele, who ran circulation out of a second-hand filing cabinet. By 1993 the masthead had grown to thirty-one. By 2019 it was back to nine. The receptionist's desk — a battered oak rolltop Spoon had bought at a Macon estate sale — is now in our current Peachtree Street lobby.
The masthead lineage
Eight Editors-in-Chief, 1978–today.
- 1978–2004Richard E. SpoonFounder · Editor & Publisher
- 2004–2009Helen MarchettiPromoted from Executive Editor
- 2009–2013Richard E. SpoonReturned during the contraction
- 2013–2016Tomás ReynaFrom the Washington bureau
- 2016–2019Richard E. SpoonFinal tenure · stepped back to Editor Emeritus
- 2019–2021Helen MarchettiSecond tenure · oversaw the quarterly period
- 2021–2024Daniel HwangInterim during the digitization project
- 2024–Margaret WhitfieldEighth Editor-in-Chief · the digital relaunch
Spoon held the editor's chair for twenty-eight of the paper's first forty-one years, across three separate tenures. He once said, when asked why he kept coming back: "Nobody else wants to do it for the money I'm willing to pay."
Posted on the wall, every newsroom we've ever had
Spoon's Five Rules.
- I.
Reporting first.
Opinion is cheap. Reporting is expensive. We publish the second only if it is informed by the first.
- II.
The reader is the constant.
The platforms will change. The advertising will change. The reader has always been the constant. Write for the reader.
- III.
Right beats first.
We are not in the business of being first. We are in the business of being right, and second is fine if right takes a little longer.
- IV.
Buy what you test.
We pay retail for the things we review. We keep nothing. If you cannot afford to do this, you cannot afford to review it.
- V.
Correct in public.
Errors of fact are corrected promptly, visibly, and by name. The reader saw the mistake. The reader will see the correction.
Endowed 2025
The Richard E. Spoon Reporting Grant
Established in 2025 from a bequest in Richard Spoon's estate and matched by the paper's new ownership group, the grant funds one early-career reporter for a year of long-form work on a Southern beat of their choosing. The first cohort will be named in 2026.
Applications open every September. Recipients are announced the second week of January.
In memoriam
Richard Eugene Spoon
"He was, by every account from those who worked with him, a difficult editor and an unfailingly generous one. He believed reporters should be paid more than they were, that interns should be paid period, and that a good piece of journalism was worth holding the issue for. We owe him everything."
After Richard's death in April 2025, the Spoon family — together with Peachtree Editorial Holdings — sold the masthead, the operating company, and the print archive to a new ownership group whose mandate was to take this paper fully digital. The family retained the founding editorial seat on the board and the naming rights to the Richard E. Spoon Reporting Grant. The digital paper you are reading exists because of that decision.