"Gauging the Gaps Between Atlanna and Notlanna"

Nov 05, 2024 11:45 AM

Charles Hayslett, Scholar in Residence, MGSU

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Charlie Hayslett is a retired journalist and public relations executive who has spent the past several years researching and writing about the costs and consequences of Georgia’s widening rural-urban divide. He was recently named Scholar in Residence at the new Center for Middle Georgia Studies at Middle Georgia State University in Macon. The Center was established in 2023 with a $1.2 million grant from the Peyton Anderson Foundation to address such regional concerns as poverty, workforce demands and healthcare, among other issues.

Hayslett began his career as a newspaper reporter covering government and politics in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., for The Atlanta Journal in the 1970s. He moved into public relations in 1980 and did tours of duty with, among others, Cohn & Wolfe, Inc., and BellSouth Corporation before establishing his own firm in 1994. He led Hayslett Group LLC for more than 20 years and served clients locally, nationally, and internationally until he retired at the end of 2017.

In 2010, he became convinced by research his firm conducted for a Georgia client that the state’s rural-urban divide was bigger and more problematic than the state’s government and business leaders generally understood. He began gathering material for a book on the subject, and, as part of that work, set up a blog called Trouble in God’s Country as a “parking place” for working draft material.

Over time, the blog itself attracted a following, and it has since been credited by the original co-chairs of the Georgia House Rural Development Council with triggering the creation of that body in 2017. Hayslett presented to that group at its opening session in 2017 and again in 2021.

Hayslett’s work has been published or cited in publications from coast to coast – from The Washington Post to the Sacramento Bee. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s daily “Politically Georgia” column regularly references his research and has referred to his blog as an “unrelenting avalanche of facts and figures” and to him as “one of the smartest thinkers around on the growing divide between Metro Atlanta and the rest of the state.” Over the years, he has made approximately 75 presentations about his work to various groups around the state.

He is a native of Columbus, Mississippi, and holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. In 2008, he was named to the inaugural class of the college’s Grady Fellowship and served for several years on the college’s Board of Trust. He is also a former member of the Board of Directors of Georgians for a Healthy Future.

INTRODUCTION: Michael McPherson

INVOCATION: Kathy Kite