Poynter on the Record

If you're reading this sentence off a sheet of newsprint instead of a computer or cell-phone screen, then you're just the type of graying, liver-spotted, brittle-hipped audience that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution plans to target with its reinvented newspaper.

For several years now, Editor Julia Wallace and her fellow newsroom bigwigs have been declaring that the AJC was no longer in the newspaper business, but in the information business.

Last week, they put their money where their mantra was by formally announcing the start of an overhaul effort that's expected to funnel breaking news and youth-oriented content to the Internet, while reserving the print version for investigative news and long-form feature stories for older, more educated readers.

The announcement comes on the heels of significant circulation decline. Last year, the AJC's paid weekday circulation fell to 365,000, representing a 6.7-percent drop, the third-worst decline among major newspapers. In 2005, the paper had an 8.73-percent plunge in readership, a decline second only to the San Francisco Chronicle among major U.S. newspapers. ...

... The AJC is only the latest big-city newspaper to try to find the magic balance between print and online, notes Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst for the Poynter Institute who says he's spoken with both Wallace and Smith about their vision for the company.

"This kind of transition to do more breaking news online is pretty consistent with other metropolitan papers," says Edmonds, who explains that the idea is to give up the fight to lure easily distracted Generation Xboxers to the newsstand.
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