Mitch Clarke is a veteran Georgia journalist who has spent more than 40 years in newsrooms as an reporter, bureau chief and editor.

He has written columns for several newspapers and websites, and this blog site, is now the home to that column.

He started in journalism as a teenager at this hometown weekly, The Early County News, in Blakely, Georgia.

For 12 years, he was a reporter and editor at The Macon Telegraph, specializing in coverage of government and politics at both the local and state levels. He was also chief of the newspaper’s Houston-Peach bureau in the mid 1990s.

Clarke was executive editor of The Times and gainesvilletimes.com for more than a decade, supervising the newspaper’s staff of reporters, editors and photographers. Clarke is the winner of several Associated Press and Georgia Press Association writing awards, including the Joe Parham Trophy for humorous column in 2011 and the Otis A. Brumby Trophy for serious column in 2009. He won first-place in deadline writing in 1992 for coverage of a visit to Macon by Bill Clinton during his presidential campaign.

During his tenure at The Times, the newspaper and its website have received numerous honors. The Times has won the Georgia Press Association’s general excellence award for six straight years, making it the best newspaper of its size in Georgia. The website, gainesvilletimes.com, has been honored as best news website in the South for three times in four years.

He joined Jacobs Media as director of content and marketing in April 2014. He oversaw AccessNorthGa.com, the company’s online newspaper, and served as a political anchor and analyst for WDUN programming. He also developed special content initiatives for the company, and was the lead person overseeing a major redesign of AccessNorthGa.com, which debuted in early 2015.

Before coming to Gainesville, Clarke spent six years at Georgia College & State University as director of university communications.

Clarke is a 1986 graduate of Valdosta State College, where he received a degree in English/Journalism. He is a native of Blakely in southwest Georgia.

Contact him at mitch.clarke@gmail.com.