The Press: The Battle of Atlanta

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The wonder is that it was ever the way it was. After all, a Chamber of Commerce publication is not expected to carry stories about racial problems, the rising local suicide rate or an attack on big-time college athletics. Yet that is the kind of provocative material that Atlanta magazine has been publishing, particularly since Jack Lange became its editor in 1966.

Such content, along with imaginative layouts and some fine writing, helped to earn Atlanta (circ. 24,000) a reputation as the best Chamber of Commerce magazine in the nation, as well as one of the best so-called city magazines under any sponsorship. The same content last month cost Lange his job. It also led to the departure—either through dismissal or sympathetic resignation—of Atlanta's managing editor, two staff writers and five contributors.

Their antagonist was Opie L. Shelton, executive vice president of the city's Chamber of Commerce and publisher of Atlanta. Despite pressure from Chamber members to change the monthly magazine's direction, Shelton had resisted intervening. But when he saw the December issue, he exploded over a piece of fiction called "The Swim to the Other Side of Bayou Vermillion."

Written under a pseudonym by a Catholic priest, it is a rambling, disjointed story about two boys in the Louisiana Cajun country that includes homosexual episodes more vague than vivid. But Shelton found the story "pornographic" and unsuitable for Atlanta. "I regard its appearing there," he explained, "the way I would have if one of my daughters had been violated."

Shelton started firing, and others started quitting. Last week Lange was seeking $1,000,000 to launch a new regional magazine. Atlanta had a new editor, Norman Shavin, who agrees with Shelton that the magazine needs more "balance." Which seems to mean that the old, controversial Atlanta is dead. If so, its obituary might borrow a phrase from Publisher Shelton, who feared it had become "an anti-Establishment magazine published in the bosom of the Establishment."