Jamie Gumbrecht

On March 30, a Bornean orangutan was born at Zoo Atlanta. I wrote a small brief about the new arrival for an endangered species, then updated it a few days later when zoo officials said he’d been removed from his mother for hand-rearing. When I asked a few weeks later how the little fellow was [...]

For decades, the William Weinman Mineral Museum in Cartersville, Ga., seemed more like a sign on the highway than a place to stop and learn. Field trips were the main clientele at the 9,000-square foot museum. But a private donation and months of construction recreated it as Tellus: Northwest Georgia Science Museum, a 120,000-square foot, [...]

With about an hour to report a Valentine’s story, and maybe another to write it, I was lucky to find a perfect match: 15-minutes weddings at one of Atlanta’s historic homes, known as “The Castle on Peachtree,” Rhodes Hall. This story ran in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Feb. 15, 2009.
Read the story: Castle plays cupid [...]

On a beautiful October night, Atlanta’s Castleberry Hill neighborhood transformed into a living art project. There were installations on sidewalks, choreographed dances in the street, works projected on walls, impromptu parades, performances staged on the beds of trucks. On my blog, Inside Access, I’m not an art critic, but I am a judge of experiences. [...]

In the days before Thanksgiving in 2008, I’d read stories about how to raise a heritage turkey or cook a heritage turkey, but nothing that explained why or who does it. Liz and Tim Young were my answer.

As recent transplants to Atlanta, my then-editor and I commiserated about the oddities of our new city, including the sudden awareness that our ZIP codes meant more than just getting the mail. With that in mind, we worked together with designers to create an unusual format to match a story that explored where ZIP codes [...]

On my first day at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, my editor asked: “How would you feel about diving into a vat of grits?” It’s an annual competition at the National Grits Festival, in Warwick, Ga., the state’s Grits Capital. Maybe he should have asked if I’d dive into a vat of grits, shoot it, write it [...]

It was the type of story handed to me at the last moment, with all kinds of legal restrictions about names, photos and, as always, newspaper-ish restrictions on time. But spending time with Playmaking for Girls participants — teens who’ve been in and out of detention centers and foster care — I was reminded how [...]

I embedded with the Carlisle, Ky.-based National Guard B Battery, 2nd Battalion, 138th Field Artillery in late 2007 to report, photograph and blog about their experiences in Iraq. They were based at Camp Taji, about 20 miles north of Baghdad, but as a convoy unit, they were on the road most of the time. A [...]