Bragg finds a soft landing after bailing from NYT

For eight years, Rick Bragg had what many consider to be the best job in journalism: roving correspondent for The New York Times, filing stories from the backwaters of his beloved South — places with names like Elba and Jasper and Arkadelphia.

But when word surfaced that at least one of those stories was crafted using the reporting of an uncredited freelancer, Bragg found that he himself had become the news. For Bragg, the timing couldn’t have been worse: The revelations came at the height of the Times’ controversy over Jayson Blair, the fabricator and plagiarist who very well could go down in history as the profession’s biggest jackass. On May 28, Bragg resigned. Eight days later, his bosses at the Times — Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd — followed suit, setting off a firestorm of coverage across the nation.

Bragg already seemed weary of the topic when he addressed reporters June 6, a day after the Raines/Boyd resignations, as part of Gwinnett Reads, a program to encourage county residents to all read the same book. In this case, the book was Bragg’s memoir, All Over but the Shoutin’.

“It’s not part of my life anymore,” he said of the Times. “I wish the very best for everybody there and that is not hard to say.”

Bragg reiterated what he’s told other interviewers, that no matter what had happened, he was hoping to leave the Times’ employ sometime this summer. “It’s no secret that I’ve been leaving for a long time, and I tried to leave more than once in the last two years. But apparently I’m weak-willed and got talked out of it.”

The downhome Bragg said that, for the better part of a decade, his work at the Times had kept him from doing the things he loved, such as “goin’ fishin’.” His equanimity is no doubt enhanced by a $1 million, two-book deal he inked with Alfred A. Knopf publishing house. While one book will be a novel, the other will require reportage — it’s about the closing of a cotton mill in his northeastern Alabama hometown. He’ll relocate to Alabama from New Orleans temporarily, spend time with his mother and report for the book.

“I don’t want to write about anybody else anytime soon,” he said.

The two books — and the reporting, writing, editing and publicity they’ll require — will eat up the next eight years of his life, Bragg said. “After that, I don’t know what I’ll do. I suspect rest.”

Bragg, who’s 43, also signed copies of his book, including one for 14-year-old Tyler Ledon. “You spell that T-Y-L-E-R?” the author asked.

Who said Rick Bragg doesn’t do his own reporting?