The Atlanta Journal-Constitution may soon only be “Atlanta” in name only.

The Atlanta Business Chronicle is reporting that the AJC is seriously considering moving out of downtown due to the cost of operating the downtown building and settling OTP (gasp!) .

Where would it go?

One strong possibility is Gwinnett County, where the AJC decided to locate its new printing presses a couple of years ago. The production facility is at 6455 Best Friend Road in Norcross, about 17 miles from downtown Atlanta.

Other possibilities include the headquarters of Cox Enterprises on Peachtree-Dunwoody Road near Perimeter Center as well as a facility along Lake Hearn where Cox Communications, the cable company, is headquartered. Lake Hearn also is in the Perimeter Center area, but inside I-285.

This morning, the AJC announced plans to downsize from 323 full-time employees to 230.  That’s a 28.79% reduction in staff…which they round up to 30%.  The paper also announced another reduction in distribution area, eliminating service in Barrow, Bibb, Clarke, Houston, Monroe, Oconee and Putnam Counties.

As the article points out, the AJC had around 500 staffers in 2006.  By May, they’ll have only 230.  That’s a 54% decline in three years.

So how does the AJC plan to survive?  This paragraph from a letter sent to staff by AJC editor Julia Wallace sums it up…

Our mission and goals remain the same. We need to continue to grow digital. We need to produce a very high-quality Sunday newspaper, filled with unique local content. And we must produce a daily newspaper that quickly and efficiently tells our readers the news of the day of and the news coming up.

The focus on local is reassuring.  The lack of ad dollars online is not.

Will the AJC be able to right the ship?  And how many people will be left if/when it does?  Its become a gripping news story in itself.

h/t:  Fresh Loaf

For someone who will see his little blog pass a half -million page views today, you’d think that a post entitled “The End of Newsprint” would be a ego-stroking report on the death of newspapers and the unstoppable emergence of the much mythologized “citizen journalism”.

But its not.

Reading Michael Hirschorn’s “End Times” article in Jan/Feb’s Atlantic yesterday, which chronicles the building death-knell of the hard-copy edition of The New York Times didn’t send me out into the night, twirling and laughing at my good fortune.  Actually, it just left me feeling very unsettled.

Hirschorn’s article documents the well-known descent of the newspaper industry and talks about how the NYT must make drastic changes over the next 5 months or it could default on $400 million in debt.  His analysis concludes that the death of newsprint is inevitable…and he’s probably right.

But my own foray into “citizen journalism” hasn’t done much to placate my fears that something substantial isn’t lost when print media goes entirely online.  Yes, newspapers have had this coming to them for an awfully long time.  In its own attempts of survive, our own AJC still claims that it covers the entire metro-Atlanta area, lulling people into a false sense of security that if news happens in their suburb, the AJC will be there to cover it.  But as we’ve seen here in Decatur, cutbacks have made it nearly impossible for our hometown paper to tell even half of the relevant stories the community should know about (Was there a peep out of the AJC regarding the Fellini’s robbery?).  The success of THIS site would not be possible without the cut backs at the AJC.  My questionably-humorous anecdotes about Decatur politics wouldn’t be able to compete with a paid staff of dedicated full-timers.

If this is where the future is heading, this site is definitely on the right side of the trend.  However, I still have a couple real concerns. Read the rest of this entry »