AJC’s not alone
July 21, 2008 at 8:04 am by Ken Edelstein in NewsThe Project for Excellence in Journalism released a report today that may sound familiar to folks who’ve been watching the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s recent travails.
“Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008,” it begins. Then:
It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.
So the game plan laid out last week by AJC Publisher John Mellott and Editor Julia Wallace sounds fairly typical. For example, Wallace told me last week that readers are telling AJC focus groups that they want more information about schools, and she acknowledged that the paper’s cutbacks last year hit national and international reporting particularly hard. The PEJ report — “The Changing Newsroom” — says large newsrooms are cutting international and national reporting and that, if they’re increasing resources anywhere, it’s likely to be in education reporting.
The report surveyed 250 dailies and bills itself as “the most systematic effort yet to examine the changing nature of the resources in American newspaper newsrooms at a critical time.” And despite the dreary conditions under which most newspapers surveyed have gone through newsroom cuts and face uncertainty in competing for revenue on the web, there seems to be a lot of optimism among editors that their organizations figure out how to adapt.
On one hand, financial pressures sap its strength and threaten its very survival. On the other, the rise of the web boosts its competitiveness, opens up innovative new forms of journalism, builds new bridges to readers and offers enormous potential for the future. Many editors believe the industry’s future is effectively a race between these two forces.
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