Doug Richards

About

Born in Oklahoma and raised near Philadelphia, my early career hopscotched from Missouri to Mississippi to Nebraska to Washington DC. In DC, I covered Capitol Hill for TV stations across the country. In 1986, WAGA-TV hired me as a reporter in Atlanta. I left WAGA to start a video production company, which tanked during the 2008 recession. In 2008, Georgia State University hired me as a part-time journalism instructor. In 2009, I began working at WXIA-TV in Atlanta. In 2003, I was embedded with the US Army’s Third Infantry Division and covered the invasion of Iraq. I extensively covered the 1984 and 1988 Democratic Conventions, the playoffs and World Series of 1991-92. In 1991, I produced a nine-part series on the Georgia State Prison after spending two nights there in a cell. In 1994, I did a series of stories about professional baseball in Japan. A franchise called Closer Look began in late 1995. From then until 2001, I stretched away from daily deadlines and examined a broad range of stories, oddities and characters, developing those stories into longer-format pieces. In 2001, the bossman killed the franchise after audience surveys determined that viewers prefer the grit and immediacy of breaking news. With the exception of my misadventure as a businessman, I have been up to my eyeballs in hard news ever since—covering politics, presidential visits, hurricanes from Andrew to Katrina, trials, fires and all measure of human triumph and suffering. Specialties: writing, reporting, editing and producing broadcast quality video.