Scaling down, newspapers look to Web

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will cut regional distribution and staff to retool itself for the digital age.

from the February 23, 2007 edition

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Behind the move are advertisers who are demanding more results and better bargains and who see little value in paying to reach rural subscribers who are unlikely to shop in Atlanta.

Retrenchment shows that "the end of paper as a profitable medium is in sight," says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley. "The wise publisher will do what [16th-century Spanish explorer] Hernando Cortez did with his troops when he landed on the beach: Set the boats on fire and tell them, 'The only way out is in'."

What's notable about the AJC's decision to cut its delivery areas is its push to, at the same time, realign the newsroom toward the Web. Part of the shift, says public editor Angela Tuck, is to focus on sections of ajc.com that offer neighborhood-centered news on everything from high school football games to county zoning board meetings, with readers offering commentary directly on the website.

Retrenchment is ultimately about innovation in how news is gathered and delivered beyond the boundaries of print, says Jay Smith, who runs the newspaper division of AJC's parent Cox Enterprises.

"It's not 'big J' Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism, but it's doing what papers are supposed to do, which is serve the community and build an audience," Mr. Smith says.

Editors at the paper acknowledge there's a lot at stake. After all, the AJC's often unpopular editorial crusade to end white supremacism in the rural South laid the groundwork for the huge migration of capital and people into "The New South." In 1960, the paper won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of corruption at the state hospital in Milledgeville, where the paper will no longer circulate.

It's a mission that editors at the paper say will not be impacted by the changes. "Our dominance and tradition and authority in [the South] will be maintained," says Ms. Tuck.

But circulation does affect coverage and clout, critics of the move say.

"Newspapers in the past have been community leaders, not just influencing opinion but helping to create changes in attitudes among readers – civil rights [in the South] being a good example of that," says Roy Moore, a journalism professor at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville. "But that's much more difficult to do online, because you still have that obligation to the community that doesn't translate as well to having a website, which is more like a news source than a newspaper."

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