AJC ending weekday print editions

Senior editors were told of the decision during a zoom meeting Thursday

https://saportareport.com/ajc-plans...end-newspaper/sections/reports/maria_saporta/

 

Once a great paper. Ralph McGill has to be spinning like a top right now.

 

Google says the Atlanta metro area is 6M people, 8th largest in the country. Not a great sign if you have to end the weekday print edition there.

 

The first of what surely will be more to end daily print.

A lot of MeeMaws and PapPaws in Georgia are going to be huffin' and puffin' about not having their paper.

 

It wasn’t quite Rock City, but you could find an AJC box in at least five different states that I know of once upon a time (and I wouldn’t doubt if N.C. made it six.) And now, there is nothing left worthy of the name. This grieves more more than it probably should.

 

Not many MeeMaws and PapPaws will be huffin' and puffin". They have stopped subscribing.

I have linked this before but the AJC did not make the list of the 25 papers in the United States in 2021 with the highest circulation despite being in the eighth largest metro area. It took a circulation of 47,832 to make the list. That means that at most only about two per cent of homes in the metro area are subscribing to the print edition.

Visualized: The Top 25 U.S. Newspapers by Daily Circulation (visualcapitalist.com)

 

I should be surprised, but I'm not.

When we moved to the suburbs of Atlanta in 2001, one daily paper alone was big enough to line all the rabbit cages weekly. Now we have just one bunny, and our county's weekly may have more pages than the AJC's Thursday edition. The last time I even saw a daily AJC, it was dollhouse-sized, both in number of pages and dimension.

Atlanta has an amazingly small number of 65+ for its size: just 7.6% of the 4 million in the metro are Boomers or older. The place is definitely trending established Gen Xers, young families and singles, even more than the Dallas Metroplex and Houston. Similar-sized northern metros like Boston and Detroit have 12.6% and 11.7% elderly, respectively.

Here's the census data:

Census Data: Metropolitan Area Age & Sex (census-charts.com)

We lost daily delivery in the mountains (90 miles from downtown) at least 10 years ago, and the only place to buy the Sunday edition is the Ingles supermarket.

 

My brother has lived north of Atlanta for about 23 years and was a subscriber for probably 15 years, I think. He finally quit when he said it got "too thin, little was new that I didn't know about already and I didn't have time to enjoy it anymore." Marriage, kid, work, all that jazz.

 

The sooner legacy newspapers rip the band aid off and stop printing altogether the better off they’ll be

 

You’ll be seeing a lot of this over the next few years. Sounds like the AJC has been planning this for a while — sold off the printing press, moved up deadlines so no breaking news makes it into print.

We’ll see how long they keep doing an e-Edition after they go Sunday only in print. It’s a good transition for print readers, but from the ones I’ve seen, advertisers avoid e-Editions like the plague.

 

I love the "too thin . . . didn't have time" juxtaposition.

"Give me a thick, robust paper, and I'll make time to read it!"

 

Not really controversial.

I’m way more likely to make time for something of high quality vs. something slapped together as an afterthought early the previous afternoon.