Atlanta Journal-Constitution will stop publishing a print newspaper

ATLANTA — When Andrew Morse joined the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as its president and publisher in January 2023, the company had plans to stop printing the newspaper by that June. He quickly hit the brakes.

The timing was not right, he told his new colleagues. The Journal-Constitution’s digital news product was not yet robust enough to compel enough readers to subscribe and make it profitable on its own.

Now, he said, the right time has come.

The Journal-Constitution will stop publishing a print newspaper at the end of the year, Morse said, and divert all of its resources into the digital news operation. The company has published in print since 1868.

“The fact is, printing newspapers and putting them in trucks and driving them around and delivering them on people’s front stoops has not been the most effective way to distribute the news in a very long time,” he said.

Still, the Journal-Constitution is one of the largest daily newspapers yet to abandon print. Local newspapers have faced precipitous declines in circulation for the past 20 years, and much of the advertising revenue long ago moved to online platforms. But most major American cities continue to have some version of a print newspaper, in part because the print editions often remain profitable, at least for the moment, unlike the online operations of many outlets.

Roughly a third of the country’s more than 1,000 remaining daily newspapers still print seven days a week, according to a 2024 report on the state of local news by Northwestern University. Many others have reduced their print frequency to cut costs: The same study found that about 180 newspapers that had once printed daily put out newspapers fewer than three days a week.

The Journal-Constitution’s editor-in-chief, Leroy Chapman Jr., said the newsroom had been operating for some time as a primarily digital publication, with editorial meetings no longer focused on which article to put on the front page of the print paper.

“We understand that it’s a matter of inevitability for print,” he said, adding: “I’ve been here since 2011. This has been an ongoing conversation about the ‘when.’”

Morse, a digital news executive with stints at CNN, Bloomberg and ABC News, said he knew he was coming into a challenging environment. But, he said, he thought there was a way to make a local news outfit work in a city the size of Atlanta, which has a greater metro area population of 6.3 million and is in a crucial swing state.

The Journal-Constitution’s owner, Cox Enterprises, invested a reported $150 million over five years in the publication’s digital transformation. Morse said he had focused on building out the news outlet’s product, technology, analytics and marketing teams. The newsroom has also grown, adding a digital video team and new Georgia bureaus in Macon, Savannah and Athens.

Morse moved the Journal-Constitution’s headquarters back to the Midtown neighborhood of Atlanta and introduced a new slogan: “The Substance and Soul of the South.” The Journal-Constitution created partnerships with universities and local institutions to offer corporate subscriptions and launched UATL, which comprises a separate website, a newsletter, a podcast and an event series that covers Black culture in the city.

Early on, he set an ambitious goal of reaching 500,000 paid digital subscribers by the end of 2026, a figure that would make the business sustainably profitable.

The paper is not on a pace to hit that goal. It has about 115,000 total paid subscribers, with 75,000 of those digital-only subscribers, a figure that’s up from about 55,000 at the end of 2023, according to a company spokesperson.

Morse said the swift rise of generative artificial intelligence, which has quickly changed how people search and consume information, had been an unexpected challenge.

“The bottom has fallen out of the entire industry,” Morse said. “Our organic traffic from Google has dropped 40% in the last year. Never could have predicted that.”

Still, he said, he sees encouraging signs. The publication is on track to increase digital subscriptions 35% from the end of 2023 to the end of 2025. Digital revenue is on a pace to grow about 22% in that period, he said.

He said it had become clear that letting go of the print newspaper, though currently profitable on its own, was the best route to speeding up the transition to digital. And unlike other publishers, Morse said reducing print frequency would not adequately address the business challenges.

“It’s not going to be where audiences engage with us,” he said. “It’s not where advertisers want to be a part of.”

About 40,000 subscribers receive the print newspaper, down from 94,000 in 2020. At its height, in 2004, the paper’s Sunday edition had a circulation of about 630,000. The paper is printed at a facility in Gainesville, Georgia, that the Journal-Constitution does not own. About 30 staff members, half of them part-time workers, would lose their jobs as a result of the change, a company spokesperson said.

Morse acknowledged that some staff members and readers might be upset by the decision to end print.

“It’s going to be a lot of change,” he said.

Alex Taylor, the CEO of Cox Enterprises, said in a statement: “I’m proud of our team for making these decisions, as much as I will miss the nostalgia of seeing the paper in my driveway every morning.”

Morse — who subscribes to the print versions of the Journal-Constitution, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post — said the last edition of the Journal-Constitution’s print newspaper would be published on Dec. 31.

“Unless news organizations have the courage to disrupt themselves faster than the marketplace is disrupting the industry,” Morse said, “really important institutions that have existed for generations will cease to exist.”