Now, almost two years later, with Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan having been convicted of murder and other charges, the weight of that role is clearer than ever, and at a moment when the future of local news reporters and newspapers is in jeopardy. Hobbs and his many questions produced work that, while he himself admits it wasn’t always perfect, served a critical need.
But this fact remains: Hobbs’ reporting ultimately played a major role in getting larger news outlets-and eventually civil rights groups and state law-enforcement agencies-interested in digging into what had happened. Some locals in Glynn County, Ga., where Arbery was killed, are critical of the way the paper has covered the killing in Satilla Shores, describing it as too credulous of the Glynn County Police and other local officials. This is not, you know, ‘I’m the only, woe is me.’ This is life on a small town newspaper.” “All of my colleagues have done the same thing.
#Auburn journal aubrey tailsback full#
“I’ve had the full front and a story on the jump,” Hobbs, 59, says about having written every story on the front page and one that continued to the inside of the paper. Many weeks, Hobbs writes about 15 stories. He fit that work between other daily news, his column and a crime blotter he writes, sprinkled with storytelling flourishes that make it easy to imagine Mark Twain reading the contents to a crowd. Those were the first of many stories Hobbs would write about the shooting on Satilla Drive in February 2020, an event that would go on to seize national attention. Then he wrote about the close involvement of district attorney’s office investigators in examining what happened, and about official silence on whether the incident was being investigated as a possible homicide or case of self defense. The next day, a Monday, Hobbs managed to get Arbery’s name from the coroner and included it and a few more lines in a followup story. The information within, as is the case with countless other items published each day about a sudden death in the United States, came only from police. The essence: burglary suspect shot and killed in Satilla Shores, a subdivision outside Brunswick, Ga. Larry Hobbs, the crime beat reporter at the Brunswick News, remembers it well after all, he wrote it.
The first of the stories was published on the local newspaper’s website the day Ahmaud Arbery died.
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