Since you used to work at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I'm curious what your reaction was to the news that they would discontinue their daily print paper. How do you think this will impact the city?

I was not surprised by the news, because I understand, from a business perspective, what the publisher's vision and goals were. He came from CNN so I think it aligned with the strategy he had for the AJC to be more than a newspaper and for it to be a digital media hub, not just in Atlanta but in the Southeast.

What we lose, though: there are a number of people in marginalized communities who relied on the newspaper for various reasons. My concern is that there are all these information gaps that have remained. It was true even when we had a print newspaper, to be honest. There are a number of marginalized communities that aren't receiving their news. It may be because of broadband issues. It might be because they don't feel the AJC publishes content for them. 

AJC was not known as a super friendly place for Black people. They had a history of being racist, it's a Southern newspaper. So I think there are a lot of folks whose families have been here a long time who still have that deep-seated distrust for the newspaper. So I worry about the lack of print, but I worry in general about the media landscape — that there are a number of folks where that chasm is widening and where distrust of media and the tendency for people to turn elsewhere, into places where misinformation and disinformation are rampant, is only amplifying. Because frankly, I don't know that traditional news is doing a great job of bringing those people in.

And when you do your own reporting, particularly reporting based in Atlanta, what do you take into consideration knowing that gap exists — that there's a subset of people who might be mistrusting of the news?

I think it really depends, because I've experienced it on both sides, and it's something I've had to contend with. I do a lot of reporting for national publications, which is frustrating because — while I love the larger audience, and it's great for me career-wise — I'm often working with editors who I have to explain or prove parts of Southern Black culture to, to validate those things and the space to write about them in certain ways. 

Locally, sometimes I'll go into communities and say, "Hey, I'm covering this story, I'd love to talk to you," and they're like, "Y'all weren't here before." I just try to be frank: listen, fair enough, I get the frustration. I'm here now. I would love to cover this, because I don't want this story to go untold and slip through the cracks. But I also have to respect it if you have that distrust. A lot of times folks will talk to me because they trust me, and I take that trust very, very seriously.

And I will say — I do a lot of reporting on culture, and a lot of digging into newspaper and media archives, and I'm often shocked and frustrated by the lack of coverage, specifically within Atlanta's Black community, which is so important and driving not just local culture but national culture. So many things weren't covered in real time — or if they were covered, it was from a negative aspect and not from a cultural lens. I would like to create some sort of digital record that these places, these people, these cultures existed, and that they matter, because a lot of people aren't able to access those historical documents.

That makes sense. And it goes back to what we were saying about print and why it's so important — it's all the archives we lose when we don't have something tangible to keep. On that subject, and touching on your book, ‘Take it to Trial,’ one of the biggest culture stories to come out of Atlanta was the Young Thug trial. I'm so curious to hear about your experience covering that.

I am fortunate — and it is unfortunate — that there are not a lot of us culture and entertainment reporters writing from a national perspective. Especially for the past 10–15 years, the national publications would only come to a handful of us. This is one of several times where I thought, oh, I'm probably going to get a call to cover that, just because I'd already been in that orbit.

I wrote for Billboard a lot early in my freelance journey, and when 21 Savage got detained by ICE, my mom was laughing at me because I said, "Oh, I'm about to have to work — my week is gone." And she was like, "Girl, ain't nobody thinking about you." I'd already written about him for Billboard several times — they were thinking, who can we call to jump on this?

It happened with the Young Thug case. I had just written about Gunna for GQ — his album had just gone to number one, and I spent the day with him and Young Thug. There was a photo shoot, an after-party to celebrate the album going to number one. So because I had, within two months before the trial, done a national profile of one of the prominent men who'd been arrested, Billboard reached out to me. And of course I'd already covered the 21 Savage detainment, I'd covered Cardi B suing the blogger — I'd done some legal reporting for them. So they called and said, hey, can you hop on some pretrial hearing reporting? And I did. I realized really early on that I thought this was a crazy story, and it was something I strangely liked covering — I found it fascinating — and I knew I wanted to see it through. And I stuck with it.

I remember some of the testimonies were going viral. What was the moment where you thought, "this is a very different kind of case than an average court hearing"?

I thought that all the time. It was a RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] trial, so it was always going to be unique in that aspect. But they were using another really popular RICO trial — one of the longest trials in Georgia history before the YSL trial — as a baseline. They kept saying, well, it's going to take us X amount of weeks to find a jury, because that's how long it took in that trial. It took nine months to find a jury for YSL. They kept blowing past — not in small ways, but in very significant ways — all the baselines they had set based on the previous trial, which had been the craziest trial. So I knew very early on that this was different. Not normal.

There was an attorney who got arrested pretty early on. Somebody passed a pill to Young Thug. There was always some level of chaos that just didn't make a lot of sense to me.

And I will say — once we actually got into the prosecution's case, which is what took years (the trial lasted two years, and we never got to the defendants) — they seemed woefully unprepared for a case they had spent 10 years investigating. That was really shocking to me, because I think when people think of RICO, they think of federal RICO — and if you're charged with a federal RICO case, hang it up. They're not going to bring a case they can't prove; they're going to throw the book at you. So for all of the hoopla, for all the time they spent investigating and trying the case, it was really bewildering to see some of the flustered moments the prosecutors had.

What was the most surprising thing you saw behind the scenes that maybe didn't get captured on the news, or was less well known to the public seeing things from the outside?

The thing I was always thinking about — and I'm not saying none of this had been made public, but I don't think anybody had really thought about it in a real way — the Fulton County DA's office was arguing that Young Thug and YSL were responsible for something like 70% of crime in the city at that time. That's a big number. So my question, as the trial went on — and then as they accepted plea deals and it ended very unceremoniously — was: well, Young Thug has been exiled, but everybody else is just taking these plea deals. Is Atlanta safer now? Was justice achieved in the way we think of “criminal justice,” after this very long, very expensive trial? And was it worth the amount of resources?

Because I don't think people understood the way this trial slowed down the rest of the court system in Atlanta. There were so many attorneys in that trial, and they could not represent other defendants during that time, because they had to be in that trial every day for two years. So not only were these attorneys losing money — because they're spending two years on this one trial, and everybody does not have Young Thug's money — they also had to postpone or give away their other cases. That was impacting the rest of the criminal justice system. It was backing up the courts. It was making defendants delay what their outcomes would be. 

Wow, I didn't even put two and two together on that. So I want to ask you the question you posed — was it worth it? Having this backlog of other cases not able to go to trial, the money spent on something like this. Do you think it was worth that years-long ordeal?

I do think the city has made the argument that crime is better. I don't know if that's fully true or not — that's something I'm reporting out currently, so I don't know that I can fully speak to it right now. But on the whole, I would probably say no.

I sat there, I watched the trial, I saw the evidence, and I found a lot of it to be really confusing. I found a lot of it to be missing context. I don't feel they really proved the points they were setting out to prove. And I know it was a hard case — I'm not even saying everybody was 100% innocent — but I don't know that they proved the things they set out to prove. So to me, I don't know that it was worth it that we all sat here for two years. The jurors — two years, paid $25 a day to do this. I can't say I think it was.

It's like there's nothing you can point to and say, yeah, it was worth it because of this.

Right — does the family whose son was murdered feel they got a sense of justice? Or this community that you say was really ruined by this group — was there an actual reckoning, were actual resources poured into this community to make it right? I don't know that that's true. And to me, for the amount of resources and time that went into this case — because it was such a large RICO case — I just don't know.

Well, I'm looking forward to reading your book. When does it come out? Tell me the details.

We don't have a set date — probably late 2027, early 2028 right now. I'm still in the writing and reporting phase, but I'm very excited about it. I think it's a really fascinating book. It's such an interesting, weird trial. I think everybody is a little culpable — I don't know that anybody on any side is 100% angelic and great in this case. It's really sticky and nuanced in a way that's really interesting to me.

To bring us back to the spirit of Maxed Out, I'd love to hear your media go-tos.

That's such a good question — and the worst time to be asking me, because everything I'm reading right now is Young Thug–related. I'm deep into archives and songs from that world. But trying to think of my usual, typical news: I love The Cut. If anything comes out from them, I am deeply enamored. I love Vulture — so, New York Magazine. Locally, I like Capital B — I was their founding editor-at-large, and I think they write for an audience in a way that's really important and really interesting. So I love to read Capital B Atlanta's reporting.

Other than that, recently — because I've been reading a lot of books and newspaper articles specifically about this case — I've mostly been engaging with articles and things my friends have been texting me.

Understandable! Figured you're probably immersed in your book right now.

Literally — I'm looking at my desk right now and it's all books, either Atlanta-related or rap-related. There's a book called 'The Price of Exclusion' — my friend's book, coming out within two weeks — so I read that one for her. And I'm reading a lot of narrative nonfiction, just because I enjoy it, but also as inspiration. There's one called 'There Is No Place for Us,' about homelessness in America — they look specifically at five families in Atlanta. It just won the Pulitzer, and it's really great. That's one I'd recommend to you.

I was going to ask if you knew of any Atlanta media or storytelling that people who don't live in the city might not be tuned into, but that could help them learn.

I'd say Capital B Atlanta. I write for UATL, which is the AJC's Black culture vertical — I think they're a good one to follow on Instagram if you want to keep in touch with what stories are going on.

Personally — and maybe this is because I'm a freelancer — I follow writers more than I follow publications, if that makes sense. There are certain writers where I'm like, I will read anything you write. For instance, I have this friend, her name is Gray Chapman, and she now focuses a lot on stories about motherhood and inequality for mothers. But before, she would write the most random Atlanta stories — Atlanta has a rodent problem, or here's why there's so much poop on the mountains. Stories where I'm like, I'm never going to click on this — but because she wrote them, I would read them and learn something new, and be enthralled by a topic that would never have occurred to me.

Finally, the moment of truth: how much time do you spend on your phone?

Should I look, or no?

Yeah, feel free to look!

Let's see what it is... ooh, it's high this week. Last week it was nine hours and 11 minutes.

I was going to ask if you thought that was high for your average.

Usually it's between five to seven hours, I would say. It depends. This week I also had to do a lot of Instagram-based research and reaching out to people, so that might be why. But I've really been trying — and it's probably because I'm writing this book, which requires a level of focus. I've been freelance for a long time, but this is different from what I did before. So I bought a Brick to literally lock myself out of my phone recently. So I've been really intentional about not being on my phone a lot.

You know what, I've heard that from a lot of folks I speak to for this — they say the same thing: I bought the Brick and it's helped me unplug and focus on my one thing.

It sucks, though, because I find a lot of my articles on TikTok or Instagram. [A story I wrote about [unlicensed “veneer techs”] was just me on TikTok seeing a lot of people talk about veneer cases going wrong, realizing one of the main guys was based in Atlanta, and being like, somebody should write about this — and then realizing, that's quite literally your job, you should write about it. Sometimes I'm like, oh man, if I'm not on my phone scrolling all the time... but it's not that I don't scroll anymore, it's that I don't do it all throughout the day.

In other Seen and Heard news…

There were some layoffs at Marie Claire this week. I’ve noticed a lot of media companies paring down their commerce teams lately, even when they’re claiming to be focusing more on other revenue streams (looking at you also, Condé). Make it make sense…

Bumble doubles down on editorial content. Another trend I’ve noticed is dating apps morphing into content studios. Grindr has made some pretty big investments in its original content lately (that Madonna partnership they had to promote her new album was everywhere last week) and now Bumble is scaling up its content arm with a new social series called Bee Line. The show will feature a rotating list of celebs answering dating questions from people who call into Bumble’s dedicated hotline, 844-HI-BEE-LINE, or submit questions on social media. The first episode with Jake Shane drops on Tuesday, June 16, on YouTube and will appear monthly on Bumble’s channel. I think the concept is a nice change from the usual advice columns you see out there, especially the call-in element. I’m curious how the execution will look. What made Grindr’s Madonna collab successful was that it didn’t feel branded and they got genuine scoops that traveled on social (like the JFK Jr. revelation).

Have a tip for me? Send it to [email protected] or my Signal if you want to keep things confidential (itsstephwill.94).

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