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Who Is Otis White?

Otis White is the founder and president of Civic Strategies Inc., an Atlanta-based public policy consulting company that specializes in cities and regions. Before founding Civic Strategies, he was president of two other consulting companies.

Before becoming a consultant, White was editor and publisher of Georgia Trend, an award-winning magazine that covered the Georgia business community (and which was then owned by the same company that publishes Governing). In 1982, as a business reporter for sister publication Florida Trend, he won an Alicia Patterson fellowship that enabled him to spend a year traveling around the country studying how computers were changing the way people work.

After founding Civic Strategies in 1998, White began looking for a way to keep tabs on important events in cities across the country. He began e-mailing a list of summaries of news articles from around the country to clients. The e-mail list, called the Civic Strategies E-Letter, evolved into Otis White’s Urban Notebook here on Governing.com.

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Travis Foster illustration