Here are the stories that The Current’s reporters found the most compelling for a variety of reasons. Settle in and see if you agree. Send your faves to staff@thecurrentga.org.
Glynn County reporter Jabari Gibbs
To me, Glynn County is the most fascinating region of Coastal Georgia, home to the best seafront in Georgia, while simultaneously growing at a rapid pace. It also has one of the most apparent and demoralizing dichotomies that perfectly represents the state of the union at the time: that incongruity being St. Simons Island and its affluence, and the inner city of Brunswick and its poverty.
Back in November, I reported on the polarizing elementary school rezoning plan that is set to be voted on in January. This plan is likely going to discontinue the longstanding arrangement of busing students who stay south of Gloucester Street to the schools on the island. These students, who are living below the poverty line, assist the schools on the island in maintaining a Title I status, which provides them with additional federal funds.
Another story that I was particularly fond of was Jake Shore and Justin Taylor’s piece that exposed the conditions in the Camden County Jail. It does not even seem to be habitable for animals, and without The Current, this type of information would not be shown to the public.
Data reporter Maggie Lee
The giant statues of serious-looking men outside Georgia’s government buildings guard some nonsensical activity. I don’t even mean the stunts meant to capture headlines, I mean nonsense that is legal. The Current’s Craig Nelson covered two cases this year.
Take the Savannah lawmaker who spent tens of thousands of dollars of campaign money on personal use. After years, he got in trouble – but was allowed to pay a state ethics fine with dollars donated to his political campaigns. Or take the 16 current and former state judicial leaders who complained publicly about a “partisan” judiciary — without noting their or their firms’ political campaign spending.
Environment reporter Mary Landers
The climate is warming, plastic pollution is growing, species are disappearing. All that negativity makes it hard to stay hopeful covering environmental issues. That’s why my favorite stories focus on solutions.
In February I reported on a solar panel installation project, Georgia Bright, that’s making clean energy affordable and accessible to lower income families, many of them people of color who have been largely left behind in solar adoption. The project received a federal grant in April to fund its expansion.
Closer to home, in my Savannah backyard in fact, I reported on how I found a monarch butterfly chrysalis on the ground and managed to coax it to adulthood with the help of a dab of super glue. A small triumph, but one that came with a sense of awe at seeing the monarch emerge and joy in sharing the experience in a time-lapse video.
Liberty County reporter Robin Kemp
When the average citizen is trying to navigate the government bureaucracy, journalists can help make a difference by letting the public know what’s happening and, hopefully, holding elected officials responsible to the people they represent.
Whether you live in a mobile home park that’s being relocated, or on pricey waterfront property, at the crossroads or at the end of a dirt road, the people who call Liberty County and Coastal Georgia home deserve to be heard by those whose dollars-and-cents decisions can devastate—or uplift—real lives.
Public safety reporter Jake Shore
As a reporter who writes about public safety, I’ll be the first to say that the subject is hard on the soul. Cycles of violence, complex legal systems, and competing desires for safety and fairness often make change feel far afield. You see a lot of pain and anger.
But I feel most uplifted on this beat, when citizens stand up and demand more of their leaders and each other in response to a problem. That’s what I saw in July when residents of Cann Park and Jackson Park in Savannah convened at a neighborhood meeting after a 16-year-old’s shooting death days before.
Residents of multiple ages and backgrounds congregated in the evening, after work, on a hot Georgia day. They complained and some pointed fingers but, more importantly, they listened to each other. The Savannah Police chief and his top brass were there, but the conversations centered on residents, not leaders telling them what to think. It created a space for nuanced conversations, which are necessary for communities to work through their issues. I hope to see more of that across Coastal Georgia in 2025.
Craig Nelson, politics reporter
2024 will be remembered a year when we were flooded with misinformation and disinformation. It was also a year that expertise was, in the minds of many news consumers, grounds for suspicion, not trust. The new year promises no change to either trend.
There were rays of light in the gloom, however, notably from my colleagues at The Current, who I’m shamelessly going to praise for their efforts in 2024 to shed light on often overlooked or ignored corners of our Coastal Georgia community.
The stories of Jake Shore, The Current’s public safety reporter, are a testament to great beat reporting. He never averted his eye from the criminal case involving Jackie Johnson, the former Brunswick district attorney accused of shielding the killers of Ahmaud Arbery. By diligently poring through official records and cultivating sources, Jake showed how enforcement agencies and courthouses operate — or don’t — to ensure our well-being.
Also on the public safety front, Caitlin Philippo’s extraordinary four-part series into how dozens of Coastal Georgians have been denied due process by the actions of Glynn County’s now disbanded, corrupt counter-narcotics squad and the court system that deferred to it was a feat of rare perseverance, culminating 15 months of combing through court records and tracking interviewees to detail a miscarriage of justice that still reverberates today.
Whether it was her stories about Georgia’s election system, affordable housing, a primer on how the General Assembly works or the digging she did to aid her colleagues, the work by Maggie Lee, The Current’s data reporter, showed her dogged determination, intelligence and hard-earned experience in prying loose information from reluctant local and state government bureaucracies. Her efforts made the journalism of all of her colleagues better.
Other news outlets reported this year on the water issues brought on by the construction of the Hyundai Metaplant in Bryan County, the Kemp administration’s showcase economic development in Bryan County. But no one did it before The Current’s Mary Landers. And no one has done it better since. No environment reporter working in Georgia or the broader southeastern U.S. understands the nuances of the beat — and the scope of the stakes involved — better than Mary.
The Current views the training of young journalists as crucial to its mission of providing independent investigative journalism. Its 2024 class of interns produced such journalism, not least Amira McKee’s exposé of injuries to workers at the Hyundai plant and Gillian Goodman’s election coverage.
The importance of local accountability journalism is nowhere more evident than when it’s addressing matters of life and death. Nothing better exemplified that this year, perhaps, than the stories by Liberty County reporter Robin Kemp about the county’s dangerously porous fire protection system.
Then there was Jabari Gibbs, The Current’s Glynn County reporter, who joined with photographer Justin Taylor to explore the harrowing life of Melissa Bullard, a single mother in Brunswick who was forced to live apart from her 10-year-old daughter so both of them could have a roof to sleep under.
Jabari not only explored the dilemmas faced by impoverished single mothers and their children; he masterfully dissected the institutional forces producing those dilemmas. Justin’s moving, troubling photograph of Bullard, her child Heaven, and their dog Ivory in a cluttered hotel room off I-95 wasn’t just an example of great photojournalism. It was great journalism. Period.
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