“The paper will be published by the students, for the students and about the students.”
— Ray Brandes, editor-in-chief, in the inaugural issue of Georgia State’s student-run newspaper.
he weekly publication now known as The Signal has existed under several names since its founding in 1926. Until 1932, it was known as The Technite during a period when the university was Georgia Tech’s night school. From 1933 to 1943, it was The Evening Signal before merging with its sister day-school paper and becoming simply The Signal.
Run independently by a mostly volunteer staff of student journalists, The Signal has a long history of breaking important news and producing features and investigations about pressing issues affecting Atlanta, the region and the state.
Along the way, it’s earned numerous accolades, including awards for general excellence from the Georgia College Press Association and the Southeast Journalism Conference, as well as National College Media Pacemaker Awards for overall paper, design and layout, and individual stories.
The Signal has also launched the careers of many notable journalists, including D.W. Pine (B.B.A. ’92), the creative director of TIME Magazine who was editor-in-chief of the paper in the late 1980s, and Rebecca Burns (B.A. ’89, M.A. ’08), the longtime editor-in-chief of Atlanta Magazine and a recent inductee into the Atlanta Press Club Hall of Fame.
Others, like Evan Grant (B.A. ’93), parlayed the experience he got at The Signal into a career covering the big leagues. Since 1997, he’s been the Texas Rangers beat writer for The Dallas Morning News.
And more than one couple met and fell in love while learning the inverted pyramid style of journalism while on staff at The Signal, like Jim (B.A. ’77) and Pam Auchmutey (B.A. ’76). Jim went on to spend almost 30 years as a writer and editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) during an award-winning newspaper career. Pam recently retired as an editor for Emory University.
The Signal is also where I got my start, too, as a sports reporter from 2008 to 2011.
As budgets shrink and mainstream news publications close at a rapid pace, student journalists inhabit an increasingly vital role as truth seekers, and student papers like The Signal continue to provide an important training ground for the next generations of media innovators.
Here, we look back at how The Signal shaped and was shaped by some of those who wrote under its banner.
AS TOLD BY:
Jim Auchmutey (B.A. ’77), former writer and editor, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Pam Auchmutey (B.A. ’76), former editor, Emory University
Rebecca Burns (B.A. ’89, M.A. ’08), publisher, The Red & Black. Former editor-in-chief, Atlanta Magazine
Evan Grant (B.A. ’93), writer, The Dallas Morning News
Bryce McNeil (Ph.D. ’09), director for Student Media, Georgia State University
Clay Neely (B.A. ’01), managing editor and co-publisher, The Newnan Times-Herald
D.W. Pine (B.B.A. ’92), creative director, TIME Magazine
Sheena Roetman (B.A. ’11), education manager, the Native American Journalists Association
Chris Shattuck (B.A. ’14), associate vice president, FINN Partners
Daniel Varitek (B.A. ’20), associate manager of Strategic Programs and Operations, The New York Times
Sabastian Wee (A.S. ’12, B.A. ’14), director of Marketing and Public Relations, Drive Brand Studio
The Signal has also launched the careers of many notable journalists, including D.W. Pine (B.B.A. ’92), the creative director of TIME Magazine who was editor-in-chief of the paper in the late 1980s, and Rebecca Burns (B.A. ’89, M.A. ’08), the longtime editor-in-chief of Atlanta Magazine and a recent inductee into the Atlanta Press Club Hall of Fame.
Others, like Evan Grant (B.A. ’93), parlayed the experience he got at The Signal into a career covering the big leagues. Since 1997, he’s been the Texas Rangers beat writer for The Dallas Morning News.
And more than one couple met and fell in love while learning the inverted pyramid style of journalism while on staff at The Signal, like Jim (B.A. ’77) and Pam Auchmutey (B.A. ’76). Jim went on to spend almost 30 years as a writer and editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) during an award-winning newspaper career. Pam recently retired as an editor for Emory University.
The Signal is also where I got my start, too, as a sports reporter from 2008 to 2011.
As budgets shrink and mainstream news publications close at a rapid pace, student journalists inhabit an increasingly vital role as truth seekers, and student papers like The Signal continue to provide an important training ground for the next generations of media innovators.
Here, we look back at how The Signal shaped and was shaped by some of those who wrote under its banner.
LEARNING AS YOU GO
Sheena Roetman (editor-in-chief, 2010-11): At The Signal, you’re not just a student journalist, you’re a journalist. There are so many things you can report on that might not be directly tied to Georgia State, but they’re still relevant to your readership. You can take national or statewide stories and localize them.
D.W. Pine (sportswriter, sports editor, editor-in-chief, 1987- 89): I remember weeks where we’d finish up classes or even skip classes to get back to The Signal offices on a Friday afternoon and not leave until Monday morning. We would basically just produce for three straight days, trying to put stuff together, writing the stories and laying it out. We almost used it as a dorm because, back then, there weren’t any dorms.
Rebecca Burns (staff writer, assistant editor, features editor, 1986-88): For the staff, The Signal office was the clubhouse and the place on campus to hang. During production, we’d be there overnight. There was always music blaring, and I just didn’t sleep for a 48-hour period during production.
Sabastian Wee (editor-in-chief, 2012-13): Frank LoMonte, the executive director of the Student Press Law Center, said the thing about youth is that we still have the capacity for outrage. We haven’t been beaten down by life yet. I wanted to tap into that. I knew that was key in doing this job; you have a chance to fail and be OK with it. You can really try things. You can push all the limits of your journalism skills. You can’t really do that in the professional world.
Evan Grant (sportswriter, sports editor, editor-in-chief, 1984- 88): I was so nervous about walking in there and applying that I probably walked past the doorway three or four times before I actually went in. When I mustered up the courage to go in, Paul Newberry (B.A. ’85), who is with The Associated Press in Atlanta now, was sports editor. And he was nice enough to give me a Georgia State soccer game as an assignment. I had never covered soccer in my life.
Clay Neely (staff writer, 2000-01): I remember my first experience interviewing subjects for stories, going over notes with an editor, getting copy kicked back to me and getting it ripped up.
Daniel Varitek (digital editor, editor-in-chief, 2017-20): I had to learn quickly. We were a scrappy team. Whenever the editor was writing a breaking news story, she would call and say, “I need someone to take photos of this event going on right now.” And I lived on campus, so I’d say, “I’ll be there in 10 minutes.” And then we would both hop on a Google Doc. She would type her story, and I would help edit it live. That was out of the scope of my responsibilities as a digital editor, at least initially, but that was how I learned what a lede is and how to structure a story.
Bryce McNeil (director for Student Media, 2008-present): Student journalists are in a unique place. Universities don’t operate on commercial interests as much. Because of that, college newspapers can get important information to young readers that the local publications might not be daring enough to.
Burns: We had to review a Poison album – the record was terrible. So we took the LP and melted it in my oven at home and turned it into an ashtray. We took a photo and then, for the story, we wrote a step-by-step craft project of how to turn a bad record into an ashtray. We were just winging things.
Grant: There were opportunities for you to do just about anything you wanted to do, but there was just so much that I could do in sports. I just gobbled that all up.
Chris Shattuck (editor-in-chief, 2013-14): What drove me was the amount of experience I was getting, the people I was meeting and that I really enjoyed the writing. But there were some long days, and it can be difficult when, you know, the pay is minuscule.
Jim Auchmutey (staff writer, entertainment editor, 1975-77): The Signal really changed my life because that’s where I met my wife, Pam. She was the sports editor and I was the entertainment editor, and we started dating during her last semester at Georgia State.
Pam Auchmutey (staff writer, sports editor, 1974-76): Jim got free tickets and backstage passes to shows, and he’d invite people from The Signal to go with him. Who could turn down a free concert? I remember sitting backstage with him while he interviewed Billy Joel and members of Fleetwood Mac. We saw Lynyrd Skynyrd at the Fox and Paul McCartney at the Omni and all sorts of people at Alex Cooley’s Electric Ballroom and the Great Southeast Music Hall. I knew we were hitting it off when he asked me to cut class and go with him for peach daiquiris at the top of the Peachtree Plaza Hotel. We’ve been together ever since and just celebrated our 43rd wedding anniversary.
(Left Photo) Current Editor-in-Chief Matt Siciliano-Salazar (A.A. ’20, B.I.S. ’21) works on a new issue in The Signal office. (Right-Top Photo) D.W. Pine (B.B.A. ’92) is pictured during a campus visit with Christina Maxouris (B.A. ’18), editor-in-chief of The Signal from 2017 to 2018, and then-Perimeter College student media adviser Alice Murray. (Right-Bottom Photo) Bryce McNeil (Ph.D. ’09), director for Student Media (center), is shown with students from a number of Georgia State media outlets. (Left photo by Meg Buscema. Right photos courtesy of Bryce McNeil.)
THE STORIES
Pine: For one issue we put a thousand condoms in the newspaper along with an editorial about the health benefits. I worked with a health clinic in downtown Atlanta and they supplied us with the condoms. You can imagine all the students at the time, they just grabbed a bunch of them, but the message got out there.
Jim Auchmutey: My most memorable interview for The Signal was with Steve Martin. He was performing one miserable winter night, and there were no more than a dozen people in the audience. He had a cold and was feeling awful and confided to me that he was thinking of quitting showbusiness. I sent him a copy of my story and received a hand-written note in return that said, “Thank you for making me sound funnier than I was that night.” A few months later, he was on “Saturday Night Live,” caught fire, and was soon starring in movies. I guess he can thank The Signal for that career turnaround.
Grant: I remember the university was considering dropping the baseball program, which I thought was insane. So, I wrote, “No, no, no, instead of dropping the baseball program, just fire the coach.” That didn’t go over real well with the coach at the time.
Burns: I was in the office one day hanging out, and we got a call about a part-time Georgia State professor who was found murdered in his bathtub. I didn’t have a car, so I rode MARTA — somehow — to his neighborhood, interviewed a bunch of his neighbors and did a crime story. I ended up scooping the AJC and I won an investigative reporting award for it. I was an 18-year-old kid.
McNeil: In 2012, they covered the Student Government Association election to a fairly extensive degree, which they had not done in a long time. They did an exposé about accusations of hazing within a particular fraternity that, to this day, is the most extensive open records request The Signal has ever done. They weren’t doing soft and fluffy things. They were going out there and investigating.
Varitek: We saw some photos of Henry Grady in the university library’s collection and uncovered some unsettling racist and white supremacist beliefs that he would preach about to large audiences in the late 1800s. There’s a statue of him in downtown Atlanta, and we were troubled a man who believed such racist ideologies would still be publicly revered. We wrote an open letter to Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms asking that it be relocated to the Atlanta History Center. There were stories all over about the letter — in the AJC, in Newsweek. Turns out, it was illegal under state law to move the statue, and still is, so we had a secondary request to place a plaque in front of the statue contextualizing his beliefs. A plaque was never placed.
Burns: We’d have to type in the manuscripts of stories that the writers dropped off. What a pain. We’d also type up the playlist from WRAS and run it. The day the paper came out, we’d take the playlist to Turtles, the record store, because people would come in and buy records based on that list. That playlist and [the comic] “Bloom County” were the two most popular things in the paper. I told that story to my students at The Red & Black and there were just these blank looks.
Pam Auchmutey: Jim and I were at Georgia State for a library board meeting in 2019. We wandered around campus and decided to go by The Signal office. We walked in and found a stack of copies of the Sex Issue, with a bare-breasted woman on the cover. You wouldn’t have seen that on the front of The Signal when we were there!
For one issue we put a thousand condoms in the newspaper along with an editorial about the health benefits …You can imagine all the students at the time, they just grabbed a bunch of them, but the message got out there.
— D.W. Pine
COMMUNITY ON CAMPUS
Pine: I have never missed a deadline in my entire life to this day, but one time, I forget the issue, we couldn’t get it done. We had worked three straight days on creating the whole newspaper, and a bunch of us drove it down to the printer in south Georgia in the back of my car to have it printed that night. It was just an amazing time.
Varitek: The Signal played such a formative role, not just in my love for journalism but also my time in college. Part of the reason I applied to The Signal was because I wanted to find a group that I really resonated with, the people I would call my family. The Signal really became my life for the second half of college.
Grant: It wasn’t just a newspaper, it was a family. We may not have been the biggest athletic department in the state, and we may not have been the biggest school in the state — at least back then — but I think we did a great job of covering both the university community and athletics. I’m really proud to say that I worked there.
Burns: I loved it. I honestly feel like I earned my undergraduate degree at The Signal. It was so meaningful for me and it shaped my career as a journalist. It was a life-changing experience working there. We didn’t know what we were doing, and we didn’t have permission to do a lot of things, but we just figured it out. That’s the thing about student media that’s so fantastic — it teaches you leadership, and it teaches you how to be creative and resourceful.
Pine: We would go out to a restaurant or a bar or something and come back and sleep, and by sleep, I mean like three hours and then you’re up working again. It was just really great camaraderie with the group. Really, it was kind of my fraternity.
Shattuck: When you’re in school, you try to find community. Some people do that through sports or Greek life. Others do it through clubs. For me, it was The Signal.
Abby Carney (B.A. ’12) is a freelance writer in New York. A former cross country runner at Georgia State, she’s written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Texas Monthly and many other publications since her days covering sports for The Signal.
