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

I think you're wrong. When you get something in your driveway or from the box that's about a third the size it used to be, with stories on stuff you couldn't care less about, you stop buying it. That's when a lot of your readers go to the internet.

Not saying circulation isn't declining everywhere, but a plummet like Atlanta's is not just a function of technology. It's because they gutted the product. Period.

 

They didn't staff the Super Bowl. Nuff said.

 

I moved to Atlanta in 1996 from Washington DC. In Washington I read nearly every section of the paper almost every day. I was shocked to discover that the "Living" section seemed to consist of mostly of what was airing on my television.

While the journalism business is undergoing a fundamental shift to the internet, quality does matter to some degree. When I lived in DC and rode the Metro I would often get sucked into reading articles in the Washington Post simply because they were hard to stop reading once I read the first paragraph. I can't say that happened to me much when I picked up an AJC in 1996-7. The difference in quality was stark--and I stopped reading the paper religiously.

 

And the biggest fall of any still-existing major metro daily continues. I was in college when the Braves were in the playoffs in 1991, and I vividly remember running down to the Capitol Newsstand in Columbia, SC, every morning to buy the early, trucked-in edition of the AJC. It always had a gamer from the NLCS or the World Series. Always. I have many of the pages from those years cut out and placed in frames or scrapbooks. Last time I picked up the AJC I was in the Atlanta airport, and they didn't even have a gamer from the Braves game the night before.

This is so sad. Goodness, the breadth of their coverage was once amazing. They were everywhere, they wrote about everything, and they did it exceptionally well. Like most aspiring sports writers in the South, I grew up wanting to work for that paper. It was once so good I had it mail-delivered, and read everything a day late anyway. To think that the daily circ is now below 200k is almost depressing.

 

Hey guys, we have this product, and you can have it for free or pay for it. Oh, and if you pay for it, it comes in a more inconvenient format. Now, who wants to pay for it?

 

Atlanta has just gotten too fucking big, concentrically.

I spent part of my youth 70 miles to the north and we were considered part of the circulation donut at one time. That wasn't meant to last, under any circumstances, good or bad.

I saw the paper lying on a plane seat about a year ago, like a withered fruit. Leafed through it. It was like a county rag.

 

This is what AJC spokesperson Jennifer Morrow said . . . exactly six months ago:

“The bottom line is we are in a much better position today than we were a year ago and are positioned well as we head into 2010."

Reminds me of the "Airplane!" scene where the doctor is trying to calm the worried passengers and is lying his ass off . . . with his nose growing as he speaks.

 

Newspapers have made it easy for people to go online only to read maybe a couple stories a day on their favorite teams. The newspapers have leaders like this one. This whole business has rotted because the product now sucks. I've heard nothing but complains in our area about all the daily newspapers now having shrunk so much they're not worth buying. I even heard some minister's Sunday talk at church trash the local daily for being so small now it's impossible to fathom.

 

Gwinnett Daily Post, but the point stands. (The Daily News was the one the New York Times Co. tried to start nearly 20 years ago now, which the AJC killed in short order.)

The last time I saw a Saturday paper (which was a year ago), the sports section had five pages and ONE photo. And I'm pretty sure it was two columns. Their front pages are awful. Beyond awful. It's one of the worst redesigns I've ever seen, worse even than the Sun-Sentinel replacing its flag with a Safeway logo.

 

The Safeway logo is great, I keed, I keed.

And as someone else pointed out. I have the entire contents of the AJC's sports section e-mailed to me daily. I also have a Braves report that comes during the season.
Both contain links to full wire stories, staff blogs, bonus local coverage (ie, the staff stuff they didn't have space for that day) and all the other online bells and whistles.

So, if I lived in the Atlanta area, why would I subscribe to the paper for its sports coverage if I'm already getting the entirety of it and more, for free?

 

Playthrough made a great point. Growing up with the newspaper, sitting on dad's lap, talking sports and looking at headlines, all of that is gone. Daddy no longer has time to read the paper and Junior is likely feeding off ESPN via the smart phone. My kids get news updates from CNN texts and watch The Daily Show. That's it. We get a major city daily every day and another paper on Sunday as well. Kids have no interest. Their elders (I guess that's us) are also sliding off the wagon, relying less and less on print. When I was in college, a couple of friends and I would buy the newspapers that served our market and trade the sports sections over breakfast, critiquing and arguing and having a great time. Now I would just be spilling maple syrup on my Palm Pre.

 

My kids read the paper every morning before school.