Dang.  From Mashable…

At a recent conference, The New York Times‘ publisher and chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., stated that he eventually expects the “Gray Lady” will no longer be a physical newspaper.

“We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD,” he said to attendees of the International Newsroom Summit.

I mean, this certainly shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to anyone that’s got an ear to the rails of print ad-revenue, but to hear it stated so flatly and definitively by the biggest name in the business is still sorta shocking.  (Even to the guy who’s continuously trying to grow his ONLINE ad revenue.)

Former Creative Loafing editor – and current blogger – Ken Edelstein is quoted in this morning’s NY Times, in a piece about the future voice of the AJC’s editoral staff. Ken reacts to Cynthia Tucker’s move to DC…

“It’s definitely a move to the right, and it’s a real change for a paper that was the most important progressive voice in the South for a long time.”

In same same article, the AJC editor Julia Wallace says this…

“We have moved to a different kind of editorial that’s much more about community issues and less about, ‘let me opine on national issues,’ ” she said.

Elsewhere on the interweb, GriftDrift is still struggling with another recent quote by Wallace and has submitted this question to the AJC…

Given the reaction of the online community as well as the rise of such local websites as inDecatur and DecaturMetro while the AJC continued to close local bureaus, do you regret stating the following in 2007?

“Online, we will show that we know Atlanta best, providing superlative news and information and becoming the preferred medium for connecting local communities”

A couple quick thoughts:

1. Communities might be willing to settle on having large, all-knowing (better-than-you) corporations become their “preferred” connection to their neighbors IF there’s no other option. But guess what? Its always going to be better when communities do it themselves.

2. I don’t read much editorial in the AJC these days – can’t say I ever did – so I can’t judge any nefarious move to the right. But I do know the paper has a long way to go if they want to be a “community” paper/site. They gotta go well beyond the well-researched article.

As a case in point: the comments section. I’m sorry but nothing says “community” less than a bunch of semi-racist, off-topic snipes attached to each article. Community online is built through respectful discussion. But BREAKING NEWS, it works the other way too. Real world communities can be destroyed by disrespectful online discussion. So step one: stop treating your comments as a throw away and take responsibility for your site.