By Hannah Osborne
The Georgia Association of Broadcasters is delighted to welcome Mark Winne to its Hall of Fame.
As an army brat, Winne’s childhood was anything but ordinary and he found himself attending no less than ten schools between primary and secondary school.
In fifth grade, while Winne’s father was stationed in Vietnam for a year as an Air Force Officer, the air force base that his family was staying at in Bangor, Maine was deactivating. Some base housing was set aside for families who were waiting for their loved ones to return from Vietnam. In the meantime, something was happening with the local school board causing confusion for the students still living on base.
Winne and a friend had called into the local telephone talkshow and the two were invited to come on the show the following day.
“I told him that I was only 11 years old and he responded that he didn’t care how old I was,” Winne says.
The two came the next morning and the show ended up running overtime. By the time Winne had walked home through the snow, the station manager had called and told Winne’s mother that he wanted them to come back for a Saturday morning version of the show. Winne continued to do the show on Saturdays for a period of time.
Fast forward and Winne is at his third high school when he started to work for the school paper. The advisor of the paper had been covering sports for the local paper and ended up handing the job off to Winne.
“I got paid 35 cents an inch, which did not encourage brevity, and my TV producer has had to cope with that ever since,” says Winne.
After high school, Winne went on to attend Auburn University. To pay his way through school, Winne had a number of jobs and his mentor, Jack Simms, would tell him about any good job that he came across. Eventually Winne became the local stringer for The Birmingham News, which led to an internship with the paper.
The first investigative story that Winne covered happened by chance. On the way to the internship, Winne’s old 1965 Triumph broke down. He ended up spending the night at a farmhouse in Clanton, AL that was owned by a distant relative of a college friend. The relative made a suggestion to Winne to investigate the Jefferson Health Department.
“Early in the internship, they didn’t have anything in particular for me to do, so I went down to the health department,” Winne says. “In the first drawer I opened, I pulled out an inspector’s card at random and noticed he was giving all of these restaurants and supermarkets the same score over and over.”
Come to find out, he had been getting paid as a health inspector, when he was really going to law school. The story earned a spot on page one.
Frustrated, the inspector’s boss told Winne, “If you think we’re bad, you ought to go look at the state health department.” When he looked into it, he found a county in Alabama where the average score was failing, yet there was no record of anything being shut down. Again, Winne had found himself in the midst of a huge story.
“I love writing and telling stories, but the huge lesson I learned was that I love the thrill of the case and to dig up information,” says Winne.
In addition to his internship with The Birmingham News, Winne was the editor of the campus magazine in his junior and senior year, as well as, wrote a column for the school paper.
“I didn’t sleep a lot, but I enjoyed it,” Winne says. “The experience of juggling work and school prepared me for later when I would have to work long hours, sometimes through the night, on a big story.”
In 1979, Winne spent senior year working for The Birmingham News on Saturdays and school holidays.
“On the last Saturday I worked before leaving Auburn, I was proofreading obituaries in the morning and over the police scanner and heard about a hand sticking out of the trunk of a car,” Winne says.
He talked the Saturday City Editor into letting him and a photographer go and look for the car. In a city with a population of 1.2 million, the odds were slim, but lo and behold, the two spotted the car. Winne and the photographer, Jerry Ayres, chased the car across the city while relaying their location across two-way radios to the police.
At one point, Winne, who was in the passenger seat, began steering to allow Ayres to grab a shot of the hand sticking out of the trunk. The police caught up and released the man who had been in the trunk for 14 hours.
The story was picked up all over the world and Winne’s father, who was stationed in Germany at the time, picked up an international tribune to see the photo of the hand hanging out of the trunk with his own kid’s name in the headlines.
“The single best educational experience I had was my internship,” Winne says.
As Winne approached the end of his time at Auburn, he realized that he wouldn’t be able to meet his foreign language credit requirement. With a job already lined up with The Birmingham News, he decided to leave without his diploma.
Winne eventually returned in 2013 to complete the final foreign language credits and receive his degree.
When he came to work for The Birmingham News full-time, Winne was pegged to work the night police beat. He believes it was a result of the “hand in trunk” story.
“I wish everyone could start out on the night police beat,” Winne says. “I had to learn how to develop sources, search through records and scan stacks of police reports every night.”
Winne says the position formed the basis of what he does. He was motivated to be a better reporter because the morning and afternoon papers would have the first shot of whatever appeared in his beat. From law enforcement, Winne learned how to deal with people experiencing the most dramatic and traumatic moments of their lives.
After three and a half years, Winne made the move to Atlanta to work for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC). Shortly after, Winne took his first gig in broadcast journalism with 11Alive.
“When I moved to TV, the way that I was able to do it without experience was the fact that they were hiring me to find the stories that no one else was covering,” Winne says.
Then, in 1985, he came to WSB-TV Channel 2 and has been there ever since.
Mentorship has been one of the most important aspects of his career, both as a recipient and as a mentor to other people. His own mentor had been Jack Simms, the head of the journalism department at Auburn, and the retired Deputy Managing Editor with the Associated Press.
“Jack was a die hard newspaper guy,” Winne says. “I really needed him to bless the move to TV, which he did.”
Having Simms as his mentor was so impactful, that Winne named his son after him.
“I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish the extent of what I’ve accomplished without him,” Winne says.
Winne’s own experience as a mentor has primarily been to trainees and interns assigned to work with him at Channel 2. He would bring them along on a story and at the end of an interview, have the trainee or intern hop in and ask some questions. They would shoot their own stand up, then turn around and put together a package.
“I take a lot of pride in their accomplishments,” Winne says. “Not in a boastful way, but because I feel that my impact can be exponentially greater if I pass on what I believe to be the way to cover news.”
Ashli Lincoln was a trainee assigned to work with Winne in 2012. That summer, Winne had a story come up and needed to reach out to the ABC affiliate in Savannah, WJCL.
“I told the news director, if you want somebody who knows how to pick stuff up better than reporters on the street, I have somebody you should talk to,” Winne says. “Ashli ended up winning the job on her own based on her reel and presence.”
After WJCL, Lincoln went to a Cox Station in Tulsa, OK, then to St. Louis.
“The plan was always to get her back in Atlanta. When I was ready to get out, she could take over,” Winne says. “Ashli came back to WSB about 2 years ago, and she’s not waiting for me to hang it up. She’s doing fantastic in her own right.”
While some measure their success in how many awards they’ve won, Winne measures his success in how many former trainees and interns have gone on to make it in the news business.
“You can only learn so much in class about terms; how to write a story; or the mechanics of journalism, but the soul of journalism is something that we have a responsibility to pass on to succeeding generations,” Winne says.
During media training or speaking engagements about the responsibilities of journalist and TV reporters, Winne shares five core headings: truth, accuracy, fairness, balance and human impact.
Truth and fairness are differentiated because a lot of untruthful pictures can be painted with accurate building blocks through omission or shading. Fairness is the operation the Winne undertakes as a reporter to gather all relevant sides, and balance is a product of how successful he is of that. Human impact gives people a reason to care and pulls them into the story. Its importance is that if people aren’t given a reason to, even the most important information in the world can be of no account.
“Sometimes interns will ask, ‘How do you get contacts?’ or ‘How do you get sources?’” Winne says. “The best advice I can give is, you don’t act like you care about people, you just care about people.”
Winne has discovered in his career that for crime victims, just knowing that what can be done, is being done, is almost as important as getting justice.
A victim, interviewed in silhouette, talked about times when she never felt she would get justice, but she prayed for it and it came. Afterwards, Winne told her that she never knows who out there is watching and facing something terrible, who she is giving faith to.
“Everyday I can wake up and decide to be on the side of the angels,” Winne says.
Winne believes that if you can find a way to use the particular suite of gifts that God has given to you, and use them to serve other people, while making a living, then you have found your calling.
“I have found my calling,” Winne says.
Knowing that he is doing his best to help people helps Winne to stay grounded when he finds himself stressed or exhausted. While he does not find joy in exposing wrongdoing, he does find satisfaction knowing that the light of public scrutiny has been shed on something important.
“At the end of the day, if you want to look in the mirror and feel real gratification and real satisfaction, it’s got to be because you used your gifts, however humble they might be, to serve other people,” Winne says.
One story that has stuck with Winne during his career had taken place while he was on leave from reporting to complete his book, “Priority Mail.” He received a call from a prison inmate, which is not unusual, but there was something different in the guy’s voice when he told Winne that they had the wrong guy.
GBI had gone undercover in a drug bust operation and local police were used to identify individuals from a video taken while undercover. The person that police had arrested had called Winne and shared who he thought was actually in the video.
Since he was technically on leave, Winne worked with a producer at WSB, Carl Ward. The two eventually had a GBI agent and a police chief on camera saying they believed it was the wrong guy. The judge wouldn’t have it.
Winne and Ward went back to the station’s most sophisticated edit suite and did a side by side comparison of the video with a picture of who was arrested and a photo of who they believed to be the right person.
They were ready to go live with the story and 10 minutes to 6, Ward told Winne that he found the guy, he was in jail and he had gotten him on the phone. Winne had a conversation with the individual who shared incriminating information that Winne included in his live show.
Eventually other news organizations began to look into the case, which led the parole board to do an investigation and granted him a rare pardon of innocence.
Winne calls the moment he was released the single most rewarding, shocking and emotional of his career.
Chopper 2 was sent to pick him up, with a reporter at the prison in south Georgia, a reporter in Hart County where he was from, and Winne, doing a background story since he was still on leave.
“He turned to the camera and said, ‘Mark Winne, thank you, I appreciate all he does,’ It was tough to compose myself and go on live TV after that,” Winne says.
Winne also finds fulfillment in public appearances, like galas or giveaways.
In 2016, an officer who Winne had first met in the late 80s reached out to bring attention to the flooding in New Orleans. The officer was the incoming president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE) and said they were hearing from their members that their communities in Baton Rouge, LA were not receiving the same attention as others who had been affected.
Winne went to Jocelyn Dorsey (GAB Hall of Fame ‘16), the Head of Public Affairs at WSB, who jumped into action. The station organized a Convoy of Care, asking viewers to drop off supplies, but had yet to secure a way to transport the goods to Baton Rouge.
At the same time, Winne was working on a GBI piece and attended a meeting that one of the inspectors was not in attendance for. It was revealed that the inspector had been implicated in using their state funds card to make personal purchases and a search warrant had been executed.
Winne, looking to share both sides of the story, went out to the inspector’s home to interview her. When he got there, he found out that the warrant was still taking place.
On the property sat a huge tractor trailer that had been provided by the Georgia Motor Trucking Association (GMTA). A lightbulb went off in Winne’s mind.
The agent in charge of the Cargo Theft and Hijacking Unit put Winne in touch with the President of the GMTA, who put out a call to his members. Five different trucking companies volunteered the trucks, fuel and drivers to bring the supplies collected by the Convoy of Care down to Baton Rouge.
Since then, WSB’s Convoy of Care has been activated for every major disaster in the Southeast.
The Convoy of Care is among Winne’s top three moments of his career, alongside the opportunity to mentor and his role in getting Crime Stoppers off the ground.
When it began, Winne was doing most of the Crime Stoppers stories himself. The new formula he was testing was to talk to someone involved in the crime (victim or witness), or to talk to the detective on the case.
“The reward was to see the victims get the feeling that I had mentioned earlier, knowing that their case was important and receiving the kind of attention it deserved,” Winne says.
In all, Winne’s career has been about helping people through telling important stories.
On March 28, 2025, Winne’s work will be celebrated at the GAB Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony.
“It’s had a lot of impact on me, I immediately told my kids,” says Winne.
Once the news broke, he had received a congratulatory letter from a state senator, which he had been able to read to his 90-year old mother who was recovering in a rehab center.
“She got a lot out of it and told me how proud my grandparents would be.”
Winne looks forward to having his sons, Jack and Matt there to celebrate his achievement. Both are lawyers, Jack being the Chief Assistant District Attorney in the Coweta Circuit and Matt practices law at a firm out of Birmingham.
“My wife gave our kids the capability to get into and through law school.”
Winne’s wife of 33 years, Kate, passed away in 2020 after battling cancer for 14 and a half years.
“She was my sounding board that got me through a lot of the stress and hard times,” Winne says.
In addition to his family, Winne looks forward to celebrating with current and past colleagues.
“It’s a very humbling experience,” Winne says.
The GAB Hall of Fame induction ceremony will be held at The Omni Atlanta at Centennial Park on Friday, March 28, 2025.
