Atlanta paper's tech columnist takes buyout

Bill Husted, who has written the Technobuddy column for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s business section for 15 years, has accepted the paper’s buyout offer and will leave later this month.

Husted is the fifth person from the paper’s business desk to take the buyout offer. In all, the paper had 73 take its offer.

 Husted started writing the Technobuddy column in 1993, and it now appears in newspapers around the country such as the Austin American-Statesman and the Columbus Dispatch. He also writes a second tech column, a Q&A, that also appears in newspapers such as the Miami Herald and the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Husted joined the paper in August 1990. Since then, he has also been a tech reporter, a line editor and editor of the paper’s old Personal Technology section.

“Being a newspaperman has been an honor — it sounds corny but I don’t know another word that is better,” says Husted. “And I am so happy that my time in the job — it ain’t no profession and often isn’t a career, it’s a job – spanned some really good days for the business.”

Husted is a unusual business journalist in that he came to the Atlanta paper after running an in-house advertising agency for Bear Creek Corp. and working at two other ad shops.

Before that, he worked at the Arkansas Democrat, now the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, in Little Rock as city editor and was briefly an assistant managing editor. He was also a general assignment reporter at the paper. He also worked at the Russellville Courier-Democrat in Arkansas for one year.

Disclosure: I worked with Husted on the Atlanta business desk from 1994 to 1997. He was one of the nicest people I have ever worked with, and was a mentor when I needed advice.