Featured Young Alum Bio

A resident of Marietta, Georgia, Jon Gillooly is a member of the Maryville College Class of 2001, where he earned a degree in history and political science. At Maryville College, Gillooly enjoyed editing and contributing to the campus literary magazine, Impressions.

A native of Orlando, Florida, Gillooly intended on becoming a teacher, but after writing for the campus newspaper, The Highland Echo, he decided to give journalism a stab.

After graduating from Maryville, Gillooly accepted a job with a daily newspaper in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, before moving to his current job in 2004 with the Marietta Daily Journal and Neighbor Newspapers, a media company located just north of Atlanta that publishes several daily and weekly newspapers and magazines.

Gillooly currently focuses on the Georgia General Assembly and Marietta City Hall in his reporting, although he has had the pleasure of covering such personalities as the Dalai Lama, George Bush, John Ashcroft, Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and Bob Barr, among others.

Described as “a bulldog” for his refusal to back down to pompous elected officials and government bureaucrats, Gillooly has been recognized with a number of media awards, most recently this June, when the Georgia Press Association honored him with The Freedom of Information Award. The GPA awards only one FOI prize per year among its 196 member newspapers.

The award honored Gillooly’s coverage of the City of Marietta’s Tax Allocation District controversies, including the city council’s secretive attempts to bail out financially troubled developers who had been the recipients of TAD subsidies.

Gillooly is also credited with exposing the secretive technology plans of former Air Force General Joe Redden, who served as superintendent of the 107,000 student Cobb School District. Redden’s $100 million plan to give students their own laptop computer led to the first special grand jury in the history of Cobb County and resulted in a negative ruling from the Georgia Supreme Court, Redden’s resignation in 2005, the resignation or termination of most of his cabinet and the defeat of several elected school board members.

Gillooly is the son of Edward and Patricia Gillooly of Tallassee, Tn, and brother of Samuel, Bethany and Anna Gillooly.