SOUTHERN history books, says our Atlanta bureau chief, Joseph Kane, contain many references to dastardly "Yankee journalists" who went South to feed on the carcass of the vanquished Confederacy. The antipathy has lingered into modern times. But in reporting for this week's cover story on the new South and Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, Kane found as one sign of evolution a moderating attitude toward the press: "Even the courthouse gangs that run local politics are becoming more tolerant of itinerant reporters."

The TIME cover staffers, however, could not have been considered carpetbaggers even in the old days. Rather they lived in Dixie through its years of great change. Kane grew up in Washington, D.C., while it was "still very much a Southern town," he recalls. "When my high school eventually took its first black student, the football team had to travel to Pennsylvania and even West Virginia to play." After working in Detroit, Kane served as our Miami correspondent for a year, then moved to the Atlanta bureau. This week's assignment, which he describes as an "attempt to shed light on the difference between William Faulkner and Willie Morris," was thus a natural for him. About the only thing Kane felt unprepared for was interviewing Governor Carter at 6:30 a.m., the time Carter was least distracted by official business.

Peter Range, who shared the reporting duties with Kane, is a native Georgian. At age nine, he served as a page in the state house of representatives. He left the South--and the U.S.--in 1967, determined to become a foreign correspondent. He did, in TIME's Bonn bureau. Three years later he returned to more familiar territory as a staff correspondent based in Atlanta.

Writing the cover story was another Georgian, Contributing Editor B.J. (for Billie Jo) Phillips. Born in rural Hampton, she grew up in a clapboard house replete with lilac-laced trellis and front porch. Phillips recalls that trucks used to oil the dirt road in front of her house to keep the dust down and that Hampton phone numbers "were particularly easy to remember. They consisted of only two digits." At age eleven, she tried cotton picking: "I can still feel the burlap bag cutting into my shoulder." Twelve years later she dropped out of the University of Georgia to work for the Atlanta Constitution, joined the Washington Post in 1968. She frequently covered civil rights stories while a reporter and has kept up with the field since joining TIME last July.

Although she remained in New York during the story's preparation, Phillips did not feel deprived of identification with the subject matter. "The longer I live in Manhattan," she says, "the more Southern I become."

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