Shirley James, the publisher of one of America’s oldest African-American owned newspapers, will receive an honorary degree this week from Spelman College, her alma mater, in recognition for her lifetime of achievement both as an educator and community leader in Savannah.
Author Archives: Margaret Coker
Margaret Coker is editor-in-chief of The Current GA, based in Coastal Georgia. She started her two-decade career in journalism at Cox Newspapers before going to work at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Contact her at margaret.coker@thecurrentga.org.
Over time she has covered stories from 32 countries on four continents. She came home to Savannah in 2019 to launch The Current.
Margaret has won numerous national journalism prizes for investigative, business and diplomatic reporting as well as feature writing. She led a team of Wall Street Journal reporters named as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting in 2017. She is the author of “The Spymaster of Baghdad,” a nonfiction book of Iraqi patriotism in the battle against Isis.
Margaret’s journalism has led to criminal trials and regulatory investigations of global banks and financiers, the dismissal of 14 corrupt police officers, and freedom for three people wrongly convicted and incarcerated.
