Jamie joined The Progressive Farmer staff two days after college graduation in 1995, and has been with the magazine ever since. After a brief stint with the design team he designed and built a web site for the magazine and became editor of ProgressiveFarmer.com. He is now Managing Editor of the magazine.
Jamie has won awards from National Agrimarketers Association and the Association of Business Press Editors for ProgressiveFarmer.com. The site was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal in and the Dow Jones Business Report as one of the best places on the web for farmers.
In 2003 and 2004, he won first place awards from the American Agricultural Editors' Association (AAEA) for single- and double-page design, typography, and the web site. He also won first place awards for the web site and magazine design from AAEA in 2005 and 2006.
In 2005, he developed and launched the award-winning Best Places To Live in Rural America web site and designed, edited and helped write and photograph a special section in the magazine for the Best Places program. The program is in its fourth year and has been featured on The Today Show, CNN and many local broadcast outlets. This year, The Weather Channel will document each of the top ten counties on the list as part of its "Off The Beaten Path" program.
Jamie has won several writing awards and took the 1995 National Mark of Excellence award from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Associated Press Reporter of the Year for his print and radio coverage of a devastating tornado that destroyed a church near Piedmont, Alabama, in 1994. In 1999, he won awards from the Association of Business Press Editors for both his web site and magazine work. AAEA awarded Jamie in 2006 for his writing for the Best Places program. He has won or placed in categories in all three divisions of AAEA's awards program: writing, photography and design.
In 2007, Jamie was awarded the inaugural Andy Markwart Horizon Award, presented by the American Agricultural Editors' Association's Professional Improvement Foundation and John Deere. The annual award will be given to an AAEA member who embodies the youthful vigor, energy, passion, dedication and creativity shown by Andy in his volunteer work for AAEA for many years. Andy died in 2006 from heart problems; John Deere was Andy's employer for many years prior to his death.
Jamie served as a speaker and panelist for the American Agricultural Editors' Association and the Society of Professional Journalists, both on the local and national levels, and serves on the AAEA Board of Directors. He has also conducted freelance workshops for aspiring writers and designers. In the summer of 2006, he attended the prestigious Stanford University Professional Publishing Course, where his team's magazine project was awarded first place at the end of the school. He will attend the Stanford school again in Fall 2008.
He lives in Maylene, Alabama, on the rural outskirts of Birmingham. He and his wife Charissa—an elementary school principal— sing with a rock band and are very active at Mountaintop Community Church. Their first child, Sullivan Thomas, was born in 2007.
