Leroy Chapman Jr. named editor in chief at Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The following excerpt was sent out from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has named Leroy Chapman Jr. editor-in-chief to replace Kevin Riley, who announced his retirement Thursday.

Chapman, 52, a managing editor, has been with the AJC since 2011. He shepherded coverage of a number of high-profile stories, including efforts to undermine Georgia’s 2020 election results and the court cases of teachers and administrators charged in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal.

He takes the reins as the AJC is accelerating plans to transform the storied daily newspaper into a 24/7 digital news organization.

Chapman will be the first Black top editor in the newspaper’s 155-year history.

Chapman, a Navy vet, has been a journalist for 28 years. He came to the AJC from The State in South Carolina and lives in Gwinnett County with his wife Dawn. They have three adult children.

“The AJC should stand on the side of what is right,” Chapman said, “and that’s how history is going to judge us.”

Riley, 61, will become editor-at-large until his retirement becomes effective later this year. He has had the title of AJC editor for a dozen years — the longest such tenure for a lead editor among the nation’s large metropolitan papers. The son of a police officer in Cleveland, he started his journalistic career as a part-time copy editor at the Dayton Daily News when he was still in college. After school, he was hired for the paper’s copy desk in 1984.

He rose through the ranks to become editor-in-chief of the Daily News, leaving after four years to become the AJC’s editor in 2011. Riley is the only person in Cox’s history to be the top editor in both Dayton and Atlanta.

At the AJC, he has overseen work that made the paper a finalist for The Pulitzer Prize in 2017, won three Emmy awards and won the 2021 Edward R. Murrow Award, given for the AJC’s reporting on a decades-old murder that helped free a wrongfully convicted man.

Riley, a regular guest on Georgia Public Broadcasting’s “Political Rewind,” was a juror for the 2019 and the 2020 Pulitzer Prizes and has testified before Congress during an investigation into the impact of social media and large tech companies on local journalism.