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.
Read the full Legacy Georgians 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 40 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.
The year in which Georgia Trend was founded, 1985, marked the beginning of perhaps the most explosive economic growth in the history of Georgia. By every measure – job creation, businesses attracted, businesses created, infrastructure built, urban and suburban expansion, population growth, and an expanding housing market—the Peach State grew faster in the past forty years than at any period since its founding in 1733.
Although the Great Recession of the late 2000s slowed the pace of growth and persistent poverty and crime continue to detract from it, there is no denying the miraculous transformation of Georgia from an agricultural, segregationist, one party state of the 1960s into a vibrant, diversified, and dynamic economic engine of the New South.
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. Georgia Trend was here to record it all. But it did more than just report. It encouraged, it guided, it analyzed. It shaped opinions—and with them the direction our leaders marched forth on the long and bumpy road toward change. It reflected the new-found emphasis on growth and the excitement of those who were leading the state into a new era now that the century-long stranglehold of Jim Crow and white supremacy on the state’s potential had finally been broken.
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, high-lighted exemplary leaders, offered encouragement to investors, and pointed out opportunities. It gave voice and a sense of unity to the state’s business and political leadership as it forged a new Georgia for a new century. 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. But in general, the Georgia we live in today is a testament to high caliber political and business leadership characterized by wise decisions, proper priorities, visionary planning, and openness to change.
It is also a tribute to the leadership and influence of Georgia Trend and its editors, especially the long-serving Neely Young. Neely’s in-depth coverage of important issues and key policy decisions enhanced the power and profile of the magazine. Under Neely’s guidance, Georgia Trend became a key element in the state’s unprecedented success.
The challenge to solve our current problems and remain competitive in a global economy is great. But so was overcoming segregation in the 1960s, forging the first-ever biracial alliance for progress in the 1970s and 1980s, securing and hosting the Olympic Games in the 1990s, rebranding the state by changing its flag in the early 2000s, and recruiting the film and EV industry more recently.
Yes, Georgia is changing, as it always has. But Georgia Trend is still here to lead the way.
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 before him, deployed the magazine to help shape Georgia’s greatest years ever.
So happy birthday, Georgia Trend! Thanks for being the voice of progress and prosperity over the past four decades. Here’s to you and another forty years of great journalism!
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.
