"Harold Jackson is an accomplished journalist" who knows the Philadelphia region well, Tierney said. "He also brings a wider point of view, growing up in Alabama during the height of the civil rights movement and remembering vividly how his family reacted to the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham."
Jackson, 54, said he planned no major changes in the editorial page, which is run separately from the newsroom. He said he would work to attract younger readers in part by running the work of younger writers. A registered Democrat, he said he has voted for Republicans and calls himself a conservative on many social issues. "I believe in pay as you go as a policy for federal spending," he said.
He keeps on his office wall a framed letter from former President George H.W. Bush, congratulating him on his 1991 Pulitzer.
He has also written columns opposing the Iraq war and called for limits on immigration and better enforcement while keeping the door open for new immigrants. "We've still got plenty of opportunity to share," he wrote in June.
Jackson is known for carefully surveying the evidence and sometimes changing his mind as he reports on an issue. "He is very thorough," said Joey Kennedy, a Birmingham News editorial writer, who shared the Pulitzer with Jackson and another colleague. "I learned a lot from him."
Jackson grew up in the Loveman's Village housing project in southwest Birmingham, where units were routinely inspected for cleanliness, he recalled in a recent column on his mother, Janye. "It was a far cry from what public housing eventually became," he wrote.
