Courtesy of Errin Haines
In 2006 the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) honored Atlanta native Errin Haines as its Emerging Journalist of the Year for covering the lasting legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. Twenty years later, she’s now president of the NABJ and will be presiding over the organization’s 50th anniversary convention and career fair taking place Aug. 12 – 16 at the Marriott Marquis downtown. Atlanta hasn’t hosted the convention since 2005.
The year also marks the 50th anniversary of the Atlanta Association of Black Journalists (AABJ) where Haines first cut her teeth as a journalist.
She launched her career in Atlanta working at a number of regional papers before her career catapulted to the Los Angeles Times, Orlando Sentinel, Washington Post and Associated Press. For the AP, Haines covered race, politics and culture across the nation.
In 2020, she left the AP to become a founding member of The 19th (named for the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote) a then new, nonprofit newsroom focused on the intersection of women, politics and policy.
She was The 19th’s first editorial hire and sole reporter at the start of the historic 2020 Democratic primary election cycle, which made history for having several candidates of color and six women. Since then, she’s become the publication’s editor-at-large.
She’s also a political contributor to MS Now (formerly MSNBC) and co-hosts the recently launched YouTube series Long Play: Winning the South with former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu and Hillary Clinton’s former presidential campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri.
Surprisingly, the award-winning journalist says she never imagined leading NABJ.
Atlanta Magazine caught up with Haines to discuss her career and her big moment overseeing the 2026 NABJ convention.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
What got you interested in journalism?
When I was growing up, I was not allowed to watch television while we were eating dinner [unless it was the news]. So, because I wanted to watch television, I was like, ‘Yeah, put the news on.’
In our house, we were a WSB TV household, and that meant that at 6 o’clock every night, I was watching Monica Kaufman [now Monica Pearson] do the news. And the thing about that was, she was beautiful. and she wore glasses like me, and she was a dark-skinned Black woman like me. … So I was interested in her even before I was interested in journalism as a profession.
So how did you make the leap to journalism?
Fast forward, I’m in college and I need to figure out what I’m going to do with my life. I didn’t really know, but I was thinking about just kinda who I was and what I was good at. One: I was really nosy. And two: I liked to learn. So you put those two things together, and journalism starts to look like a possible career path.
But I had no idea how I was going to do that. I was at Oglethorpe by then, and my school newspaper wasn’t great. That wasn’t how I was going to get a whole bunch of experience. I knew I needed some experience, and so I just happened to be looking at an issue of Creative Loafing one day back when that was still printed, and there was an ad for a [monthly] meeting of the Atlanta Association of Black Journalists.
What happened there?
From my very first meeting, when I introduced myself with ‘I’m a student and I’m trying to get my foot in the door in journalism,’ they embraced me. They took me in and said, “Yes, you’re going to make it. We’re going to help you.”
From there, I met some other students that were active in the chapter, and one of them, who is still one of my friends to this day, mentioned to me that the Atlanta Daily World hires freelancers. Maybe I could go on over to Auburn Avenue and share my portfolio. Maybe they would have something for me to do, and I could get some stories that way. I think I went over there on a Monday or Tuesday, and introduced myself, showed them my stuff, and by Friday, [I had] [published] my first article.
How did working with the Associated Press change your life?
It was at the Atlanta Bureau. The very first week of this internship, they said, “Hey, we’re sending you to a press conference. President Bush is going to be speaking about this housing project that’s closing.” And I was like, “Okay, you guys are sending me to cover the president coming to Atlanta?” They were like, “Yes, goodbye.”
They put me right in the mix. … I wrote about so much covering HBCUs, Black life in the city, the civil rights community. I was fully a part of the newsroom. A lot of the stories I wrote made the national wire. A bunch of my stories ran in papers in Georgia that would then run across the country because Atlanta influenced everything, even back then. … My news judgment got a lot sharper.
Let’s leapfrog. You left the AP for The 19th. Why?
[The AP] was my dream job: to write about Black people for a national audience for the biggest news organization in the world. I was so happy to be doing that.
But, there was some frustration because by the time we get to 2019, I’m covering the 2020 primary. There’s six women running for President [Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuchar, and Marianne Williamson] There’s a super diverse field … but I felt like every news organization that was covering race and gender was not [doing it] good enough. They were covering it like some kind of side issue.
… I’m sitting in this frustration when I get this DM from my now boss who was editor-in-chief of the Texas Tribune at the time, Emily Ramshaw … I call her and she tells me she has this idea for a newsroom and it’s going to be focused on women and politics. I’m like “This sounds amazing. Can you raise some money so that I can quit my job and do this? Because this sounds exactly like what I want to do.”
A lot of people were like “wasn’t it risky leaving your job at AP to start The 19th?’ and I was like, no. For me, the risk was in not trying to do this because things have not changed in our profession in political journalism.
What happened?
We launched a week before the Iowa Caucus in 2020, and three months later, the pandemic happened. Obviously, we’re a newsroom covering politics. There is no campaign. Joe Biden was in the basement at that point. And I didn’t know what we were going to do. But, honestly, because we knew the pandemic was impacting all the people that we wrote for and about –women and people of color and queer people, we were like we’re going to write about the pandemic. Of course, we were thinking we were going to do it for a couple of months and then the country would be open again. Well, that obviously didn’t happen either.
But it was still good because talking to those people about how the pandemic was affecting their lives was absolutely political. So, by the time the campaign comes back around, we’re writing about that and how that’s impacting the election. … We started with five founders, and I was the first and only reporter for months before we kept growing. And now, we’re an organization of about 60, six years later. And this is my new dream job.
And now you’re NABJ President Errin Haines in a milestone year in your hometown.
To be here now, leading this organization of 4,000, and welcoming them to the place that raised me, that shaped me, that really made me the person and the journalist that I am, it is just such a tremendous honor and a privilege.
What I want for every single person that comes here is that the spirit of what Atlanta is, and what we represent — the excellence, the swagger, the courage and the revolutionary spirit we have here — I want people to take that back with them to wherever they are.
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Ronda Racha Penrice
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