Atlanta

Anyone visiting Atlanta will quickly discover how difficult the city can be to navigate, because almost everything is called Peachtree. In fact, there are more than a dozen locales, avenues and plazas bearing the Peachtree name. But if you can find your way around, there are plenty of treasures to uncover in this bustling media market. Atlanta's many attributes factored into its selection as host of the 1996 Summer Olympics. It also has developed into a major international technology hub, with such companies as Mindspring/Earthlink, iXi and CNN.com headquartered in this very young, ethnically diverse mecca of the Southeast. Just last month, Motorola announced plans to hire about 5,000 people for its operation in Atlanta.

"There are more technology employees in Atlanta than any other market in the Southeast," says Ed Baker, publisher of the Atlanta Business Chronicle, owned by American City Business Journals.

When it comes to local media in Atlanta, the dominant company is Cox Communications, which owns the leading broadcast TV station and the market's only daily newspaper and commands the biggest slice of the radio ad-revenue pie. However, the market remains highly competitive in each of these media.

Atlanta's broadcast television market has been shaken up by the recent overhaul of CBS affiliate WGNX, which Meredith Broadcasting purchased in March 1999 from Tribune Broadcasting.

"When it was under Tribune, they didn't invest in the station," says the station's vp/general manager, Allen Shaklan, who took the reins with a new management team last March. "While the other stations were doing four to five hours of news a day, [WGNX] was doing an hour and a half," says Shaklan.

As part of its makeover, the station, rebranded itself as "Georgia's Clear TV" and introduced new call letters to fit the brand, WGCL. "We've tried to create clear news-news that is relevant and meaningful to our viewers," Shaklan says. "We believe we need to be very aggressive covering breaking news, but we won't do crime for the sake of crime unless it's within a larger context."

WGCL is also building a brand-new, state-of the-art digital facility in midtown Atlanta in March 2001, moving out of its converted antebellum house near Emory University just north of Atlanta. The station has aggressively tamped up its local...