Elaine Hobson Miller adds to extensive list of honors
Ashville’s Elaine Hobson Miller has been named the 2025 Communicator of Achievement of Alabama Media Professionals.
The St. Clair County resident won the award previously in 2017. That year, she went on to be runner-up in the National Federation of Press Women’s COA race when NFPW held its Communications Conference in Birmingham that year.
As the Alabama winner, Hobson Miller again vied for the national award when NFPW held its 2025 conference in Golden, Colorado.
The Alabama honoree has been writing since elementary school, when she penned a piece for her school’s newsletter. Throughout high school, she worked on her school’s newspaper staff and served as news editor during her senior year.
Hobson Miller began her lifelong career as a professional journalist and freelance writer in1968, the summer before her senior year at Samford University. She accepted an internship at the Birmingham Post-Herald, that city’s former morning newspaper.
The following year, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism with a minor in Spanish. Hobson Miller accepted a full-time position at the Post-Herald. Within a year, she became that newspaper’s first woman to cover the Birmingham city government beat.
She left the Post Herald in 1972 when her first child was born and freelanced for several years. She was a full-time features writer for Birmingham Magazine from 1978-1980, returning to the Post-Herald in 1980, working first as a copy editor and then as food editor and features writer.
As a freelancer, she was editor of PrimeLife, a Birmingham-based magazine for people over 55, during the four months of its existence in 1988. She wrote a twice-monthly house column for the Birmingham News, 1992-1997, and was a regular contributor to Southern Lumberman from 1990 to 2001. She also wrote content for various local corporate and government newsletters, brochures and pamphlets, including Jefferson County, Shelby Medical Center (now Baptist Health Shelby Hospital), First National Bank and Vulcan Materials. She edited Birmingham Home & Garden magazine in 2002.
Hobson Miller took a brief sabbatical from journalism in 1996 following the death of her husband, who owned an independent pharmacy. She did enough freelance writing during that time “to keep my fingers nimble and my brain active,” she said. She sold the pharmacy in 2012 and resumed her focus on writing.
Although the honoree considers herself semi-retired, her work has appeared regularly in the magazine, Discover the Essence of St. Clair, since it was launched 15 years ago. She also writes for its sister magazine, LakeLife 24/7, both published by the Pell City-based multimedia marketing firm, Partners by Design.
Active in mission work, Hobson Miller has made four medical mission trips to Peru with Dawson Memorial Baptist Church in Homewood and Texas-based E-3 Partners, plus an independent mission trip to Peru. She did one mission trip to Spain and continues to participate in mission trips to Zacapa, Guatemala, where three Alabama churches have an ongoing relationship with the small village of Conevisa.
