Georgia Trend’s 40th Anniversary
Georgia Trend celebrates its 40th Anniversary in September of 2025. We caught up with influential leaders who have grown alongside the magazine and the state.
Georgia Trend celebrates its 40th Anniversary in September of 2025. We caught up with influential leaders who have grown alongside the magazine and the state and asked them to contribute their thoughts on the magazine’s influence. We appreciate their participation and encouraging words. These are excerpts from the Legacy Georgians feature.
Read the full feature in the September 2025 issue of Georgia Trend.
Ann Wilson Cramer
Senior Consultant for Coxe Curry & Associates and retired director for IBM Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs for the Americas
Congratulations to all of our friends at Georgia Trend who celebrate its 40th Anniversary! It has been quite humbling to prepare this reflection. For so many people, organizations and leaders to become involved – Indeed, Georgia Trend embodies a movement because everyone can participate.
As we enter the next forty years, each of us will intentionally find specific and strategic ways to connect people to each other and to opportunities. That is the Spirit of Georgia Trend!
Georgia Trend has successfully moved thru 40 years- and now approaches its next 40 years. It is still – as it always has been – about the power of YOU and the collective us. Bravo and on to your next 40 years!
Read Ann’s remarks in the Legacy Georgians feature.
Todd Groce
President and CEO, Georgia Historical Society
This year marks the founding of a Georgia original, one of the finest and most influential publications in the state. For forty years now, Georgia Trend has served as the magazine of Georgia business, politics, and economic development. No other journal on these topics is as widely read or highly regarded as Georgia Trend.
Today Georgia ranks 9th nationally in the number of Fortune 500 companies (18 in all) and is home to four Fortune 100 companies and thirty-three Fortune 1000 companies, statistics that would have been unheard of forty years ago.
As it chronicled and helped shape this unprecedented era of economic and political change, Georgia Trend served as a first draft of history. It provided in-depth analysis of major business issues, highlighted exemplary leaders, offered encouragement to investors, and pointed out opportunities. When Georgia stood at the crossroads between the past and the future, Georgia Trend helped lead the way forward.
Fortunately for Georgia, our predecessors generally made good choices. They weren’t perfect and there are still enormous, complex, and vexing issues, especially about race and poverty, that we have yet to resolve.
If, like our predecessors, we can continue to take the long view and keep making the right choices, then in 2065—the year Georgia Trend will celebrate its 80th anniversary, Georgia will be even better educated, happier, and more prosperous than the one bequeathed to us by the leaders of the last four decades.
When that day comes, I look forward to writing about how Ben Young, like his father Neely before him, deployed the magazine to help shape Georgia’s greatest years ever.
Read Todd’s remarks in the Legacy Georgians feature.
Thank you to all of the contributors to the Legacy Georgians special anniversary feature, and thank you to our readers for trusting Georgia Trend as your source for Georgia business news since 1985.
