Reporter, Mercer Center for Collaborative Journalism
Media Partner
Laura Corley is Civic Journalism Fellow for Mercer University’s Center for Collaborative Journalism reporting on topics of public health and education in Bibb County. Laura is also a reporter for The Current and received a Doris O’Donnell Fellowship Award in 2021 to execute an enterprise reporting on Superfund sites in Coastal Georgia.
Laura has worked as an investigative reporter in her home state since 2014 and has covered a range of topics including public safety, government, business and education.
At The (Macon) Telegraph, Laura used open records requests to shine light on the shadows of police misconduct, government salaries, suspicious political connections and more. Her bylines also have appeared in The Douglas County Sentinel, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia News Lab and Georgia Public Broadcasting.
The Forsyth native was named the state’s Emerging Journalist by Georgia Press Association in 2016.
At one Macon hotel, more than 375 emergency calls reporting a suspected drug overdose were made between December 2017 and May 2022, according to a lawsuit Bibb County filed against hotel owners in May 2022.
Five people have been hit by cars and killed in the past six years on a 500-feet stretch of Pio Nono between Glendale Avenue and Dewey Streets, just south of the exit and entrance ramps for Interstate 75.
The Pleasant Hill Mitigation Plan was already being touted as a success in a 2013 study, highlighted as an example of how transportation projects nationwide should work to address environmental justice issues through community engagement. But it features some accomplishments that either didn’t happen as planned or remain incomplete a decade later.
The number of hit-and-run pedestrian fatalities increased from three in 2021 to seven in 2022. Bibb County Sheriff’s Traffic Fatality Investigator Shannon Moseley said in January 2023 only one of those had been solved — the sheriff’s office had a sole traffic fatality investigator to work all deadly wrecks here since December 2021.
The Macon-Bibb Community Enhancement Authority is a state authority created a decade ago with the sole mission to reduce poverty in Bibb County. But many longtime neighborhood residents say the success of new and first-time homeownership in Pleasant Hill is a feat that the CEA hasn’t achieved often enough.
