AJC circ drops 24.7 percent MORE, quality of sports section drops 2,470 percent

I always have purchased multiple papers in airports no matter where I am.

This year I have traveled to California through Texas, Houston, south Florida, Atlanta and a couple of other cities. I haven't purchased a newspaper in a single location. Whenever I have had time to cruise through a bookstore I've flipped through the papers but not purchased, or found one in the terminal.

 

Boston Globe (metro Boston population 3.5 million) is down 23 percent to 232,000.

 

To be fair, that's the metro-area population, not the Atlanta city population. City population is something like 525,000.

Of course, one might also say, well, they're the massive Atlanta paper. Everybody in the metro area should be a subscription target. And that would be fair, actually. However, it should be noted that most of the surrounding counties all have their own daily papers (Marietta Daily Journal in Cobb, Gwinnett Daily News in Gwinnett, Rockdale Citizen in Rockdale, Clayton County News in Clayton, Cherokee Tribune in Cherokee, Douglas County Sentinel in Douglas) that have taken advantage of the AJC's precipitous drop in staff and abandoning of county editions to cover their counties far better than the AJC does now. So the people who live in the 'burbs go with the paper that focuses on their county.

None of that's to excuse the AJC's astounding shrinkage as of late. Perhaps the move to the new office location will start allowing them to begin repopulating the reporting staff sometime soon. One can hope. I doubt anybody in the business really wants to see the AJC go down in flames.

 

Everything you said goes for just about every major metro area though. City population tiny, existence of suburban papers. I thought we all assumed this info when we still said OMG to this decline.

 

When I was in high school, in my backwater hometown more than 200 miles south of Atlanta, we'd go hit Dunkin Donuts, Baskin Robbins and the AJC rack in the afternoon after school.
Now ... try getting an AJC in Macon.
The AJC used to be almost mandatory reading on Saturday and Sunday mornings for high school and college football fans in Georgia. Alas, no more. Not even close.
It's amazing how hard and fast they've tumbled off the cliff with their staff reductions.

 

According to this Oct 2008 article circulation was 326,000 in the spring of 2008.
That is a 40% decline in just two years. If you go back further the collapse is simply stunning.

"The AJC averaged 381,833 paid circulation Monday through Friday for the six-month period ending Sept. 30. That was down from 406,045 for the same period a year ago. Sunday paid circulation dropped 3 percent to 620,782, compared with 640,290 for the same period in 2001, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation."

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-7911791_ITM

 

That's really sad what's happened to that paper. There's still some quality work (like Michael Cunningham with the Hawks), but it's nowhere near as close to the quality which existed five years ago.

 

I think that number's going to be closer to 6 million when the census is finalized. Georgia, by most accounts, is going to gain a House seat, and most of the new people have moved into the metro area. Which is part of the problem the AJC is struggling with. There's competition from the suburban papers, which used to be laughable, because the AJC could just throw people at any area it wanted and negate any competitive threat (ask any Gwinnett Daily News alum how that worked out for them) but since the AJC reduced its newsroom by more than 50 percent, that's really no longer an option. On top of that is the internet issue and the fact that a sizable segment of the metro area population isn't from Atlanta, Georgia or the South. The AJC can cover local news all it wants, but to draw the interest of all segments of the transplant demographic with a hamstrung newsroom is, to say the least, a daunting task. Not sure any paper in the country, faced with all of those factors, would be in a situation any different.

 

It's not the quality of the work.

Some people may be looking at the newspaper and saying, "well, shit. This newspaper sucks now, so I'm not buying it anymore."

I'm guessing the more likely scenario is "well, shit. This stuff is on the Web. I can download it off my iPhone. Why do I want to bother walking outside to pick up a print copy every day?"

I'm convinced the quality, at this point, is irrelevant. Those who do an OK job *might* maintain their circulation (for the record, we're doing just that in Podunk).

We're just in the midst of a transition to something else. I don't know what else. I wish I knew what else. It's damn scary to think about.

But we should stop bashing the Atlanta guys. I'm sure their job is more difficult than it used to be, and they probably don't have the support they need. No newspaper is as good, as large and as informative as it used to be.

 

While vacationing last fall, I picked up a copy at the airport and was pretty well astonished.

I've posted that story before.

Few random points, likely made before:
* The demographic shifts in Atlanta have hurt the AJC and more so there than anywhere else in the country. The old white people in the town have grown to despise the paper because it quit covering the things they wanted to read and that black girl on the editorial page kept calling them a bunch of racists for shit they didn't do. The old black people view it as the paper for white people. People, white and black, in the 'burbs view it as the "city" paper and not covering their communities. The new people to town view it as a poor replacement for the Times/Trib/Globe/Star paper they got at home before they had to move to godforsaken Atlanta.
* The paper's editor, Julia something, recently had something on NPR as to why the paper has dropped the opinion portion of its op/ed page. The editorials, if they still have them, don't champion unpopular causes because they make people "uncomfortable." And columnists who aren't bland vanilla pods are dropped or reassigned.
* The paper's readership is much like the town's sports fans. Fairly shitty. They can't support the teams, outside of UGA, when they are bad and even when they are good, it still isn't easy. The paper is largely perceived as populated with the losers as the better talent moved on to TV, other papers or web ventures. Or simply just laid off.
* The constant redesigns and a lack of editorial focus have hurt as well. Is the AJC the paper for the South? Well, maybe, but circulation to the places they used to go, doesn't make them any money. Is the AJC the paper for Georgia? While most of the state's population lives in the northern third, covering the state is expensive and doesn't make them any money. Is the AJC the paper for Atlanta? The metro region, the city and closer suburbs or the city core?
Well, Atlanta is now ringed by dailies in the burbs, that Cox doesn't own. Unlike, say, St. Louis, and some have a vested interest in kicking the AJC's ass on local coverage. If you go immediate metro area, well, that cuts down on circ. costs and you can shed some newsroom folks, but that doesn't help the quality of the paper and all it really does is piss off the old-school, hardcore readership because trusted bylines vanish and mistakes pile up. If you focus on the city core, well, you lose some valuable territory in the suburbs that are bustling with people, readership and ad dollars.
So what do you do?
And the AJC's leadership hasn't been able to come up with any kind of solution yet and probably won't.
The reality though is, nearly 200k daily and nearly double that on Sunday still means a shit ton of people are buying a fairly flawed product because even a mediocre Sunday AJC is still a thousand times better than what some of the suburbs are doing.
So, if I was some high-priced consultant or some random interwebs hack, I'd tell the AJC to focus on the Sunday edition ditch Saturday and call it the Sunday bulldog. Beef up distribution by getting the paper out to a larger circ area and also have zoned edition inserts for key areas.
Make the Sunday paper an event and a must buy for those who live outside the DMA for Atlanta, sell it to advertisers by cooking up some numbers that show people will drive in for the really good deals.

That being said, the AJC like Dallas, also shed some expensive, vanity circulation that didn't help revenues. You used to be able to buy same-day AJC in places like Memphis, Nashville, Jackson, Miss., Columbia, S.C., Orlando, Mobile, Birmingham, Charlotte.
Much like the Dallas Morning News, you could get it or the AJC, either daily, in six or seven states. That didn't make sense then, and makes even less now.