AJC plans to cut staff by 30 percent
March 25, 2009 at 9:59 am by Thomas Wheatley in NewsAfter weeks of rumors, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this morning announced that it plans to cut 30 percent of its full-time newsroom staff. It will be the third and largest round of job cuts since 2007 to hit metro Atlanta’s largest daily newspaper. Effective April 26, the AJC will also stop distribution to seven outlying counties, reducing its total distribution area to 20 counties in the metro region.
From a staff report:
The AJC’s news staff will drop to about 230 full-time positions, down from about 323 currently. Staff members with five or more years with the company will be offered voluntary buyouts, with layoffs to follow if fewer than about 90 apply, the company said.
Most of the news staff cuts “will be in production and management, allowing us to keep as many news reporters as possible,” AJC and ajc.com editor Julia Wallace said.
The cuts are expected to be completed in May.
The company laid off 48 part-time news staffers Tuesday and announced the full-time cuts Wednesday morning.
In 2006, full-time newsroom staff numbered about 500.
(UPDATE): Rumored counties dropped from distribution: Barrow, Bibb, Clarke, Houston, Monroe, Oconee, Putnam.
More to come.
(Photo by Joeff Davis)
March 25th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Julia Wallace, you have single-handedly killed the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It’s not the economy, it’s not that newspapers are dinosaurs. It’s about your horrendous leadership and ridiculous decisions.
This is from her letter to staff: “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.”
Quickly and efficiently? Just because you worked for the USA Today doesn’t mean the AJC should be USA Today-lite. I want freaking local stories with some meat to them!
Everytime I go to a big city like Boston, Philly or D.C., heck, even St. Pete, I pick up their daily paper and cringe how superior they are to the AJC.
Every once in a while there’s a decent in-depth piece in the Sunday edition. But the weekday paper’s Metro section is a f-ing embarassment. As are you, Julia Wallace.
Waking up and reading the paper with a cup of coffee was my ritual for decades, as it was for my father. You’ve absolutely failed every newspaper reader in the metro area, Julia Wallace. No one else is responsible for this, just you.
March 25th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
To YS,J:
While I appreciate your chagrin over the woes facing your hometown paper, I have to take issue with your position the AJC’s editor is to blame. All the papers you cite (Boston, Philadelphia, heck, even St. Pete) are in the same straits as the AJC. Heck, even the great gray lady, The New York Times, is on the ropes. It’s a sad fact of the industry.
So, I reiterate: I appreciate your despair over the AJC. But blaming Wallace alone is not only unrealistic, but unfair.
March 25th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
The comments made by YSJ remind me of an old pysch study about how people act under the cloak of anonymity. In the experiment, participants were instructed to zap a test subject with electric shocks when she behaved a certain way. The buttons were phony and the woman was an actress only pretending to be shocked. One group of button pushers wore masks, the other did not. Guess which group “zapped” her most often?
March 25th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
I think all papers in and of themselves suffer of their own demise.
1. As Winston Churchill so perfectly put it “If your 20 and not a liberal you have no heart, if your 40 and a liberal you have no brain”. Media got stuck beyond justice and tried to be social pillars of the poor, outcasts and criminals of different ilk. That get’s old. Julia Wallace is brought in to do what has to be done. Be the scapegoat and bleed for the Cox family. I think the print paper lost it’s relevance years ago. and has gotten so fluffy online, it looks like a competitor to TMZ. See what happens when the AJC building gets on the selling block..
March 25th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
In 2008 Cox newspapers represented less than 9 percent of the CEI’s revenue. There are no public shareholders. In the effort to protect the wealth of the dozen or so members of the Cox Family thousands have been put out of work. Yet Anne Cox Chambers and James Cox Kennedy make the top of the Forbes list. And Jimmy’s sister is the “richest American in Australia.”
With so little of CEI’s revenue coming from the newspaper division it makes you wonder what is going on with the rest of the company that the Cox family finds it so necessary to cut even deeper than some of the publicly held companies.
March 25th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Apparently the “liberal/heart/conservative/brain” quote is falsely attributed to Churchill:
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=112
March 25th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Curt, thank for you finding that. And let’s not even bother addressing the grammar in edge’s post.
March 25th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
Ben Smith is a class act!
YSJ is just pissed, but there is a point to be made. The truth is that the leadership of newspapers (not just Julia Wallace) have known this day was coming and failed to plan for it. If the number of editors and managers is being reduced because the AJC is “editor-heavy”, it’s because the leadership MADE IT THAT WAY! And who’s paying for it? The editors that were put there!
The problem now is that the leadership of newspapers is so obsessed with minimizing the damage, they aren’t focused on fixing the problem. Journalism 2.0 isn’t going to happen when everyone is hyper-focused on the bottom line.
Just one sellout’s opinion, but Julia Wallace isn’t to blame, at least not alone. It’s the people in her positions that have failed to act and failed to lead that have led us to this moment. It’s just heartbreaking.
March 26th, 2009 at 12:27 am
ben smith – link to psych study, please…
March 26th, 2009 at 9:28 am
I’m not sure this is the same study, but it is, at least, similar. Read pages 6 and 7.
http://www.prisonexp.org/pdf/powerevil.pdf
March 26th, 2009 at 11:39 am
I don’t think that Julia Wallace (James Mallory, Bert Roughton) are to blame for the AJC’s problems. But they have certainly done nothing to improve the paper’s situation. I don’t understand how the current day-to-day leadership has stayed in place for so long while they let rank-and-file journalists out the door. Reporting, no matter the quality or bias, is ultimately what matters. These boneheads collect high salaries for what, exactly? Having worked there for eight years, I know how demoralized the staff is which is partly a function of working in a doomed industry but also a function of their worthless leadership. Roughton, particularly, surrounds himself with a coterie of ass-kissers because he is not a skilled business leader. You could probably have a dozen more “boots on the ground” collecting and pay someone a third Julia-et.al.’s salary to continue to drive this business into the ground. The only good top level manager was Hank Klibanoff, who inspired journalists. And I suspect he was driven out because he didn’t fit in with the ass-kissing corporate culture. Ben Smith, if formerly of the ajc, was also a fine reporter. Hope he’s doing well.
March 26th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
A few years ago, Business Week listed Anne Cox Chambers No. 2 for U.S. billionaires who do not give to charity.
Warren Buffet was No. 1, but he’s giving away all his wealth when he passes.
Julia Wallace wants the AJC to be USA Today-lite. She’s obsessed with articles, online and in print, on home renovations in Virginia-Highland, Inman park, etc., most likely because some focus group
info that said it would attract more female readers.
Ben Smith is a fine reporter. A few years back, he had a three page article on Vernon Jones shadily spending DeKalb Co. park & greensapce money. It was very, very well down. And you rarely see articles like that anymore in the Julia Wallace AJC.
With all do repsect to Ben, JULIA WALLACE SUCKS!
http://www.atlantamagazine.com/article.aspx?id=19002
March 26th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
I vowed never to buy that paper again after Cynthia Tucker wrote before the election that all white conservatives were racists, just like their leader Sadie Fields. Cynthia Tucker and Jay Bookman are dumbasses. I cannot wait to find out what happens to them once the building is shuttered and they’re forced to turn their moronic pontifications into another source of income. They couldn’t sell burritos at Taco Bell. But other than that, yes, I’d have to agree that Julia took premeditated steps that made the AJC a much worse paper than when she arrived. And all these sycophants wrote all these Atlanta Mag and E&P type stories praising her for innovative leadership. What a damned joke!
March 26th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
There was a day so many years ago when I dreamed of one day “making it” to the grand AJC. And even though I got out of the business way back when, I never dreamed I’d see the day when the AJC and other heretofore top-flight papers in this much trouble. I have a few old friends at the AJC and other papers, and it pains me to know they’re going through this turmoil. In many ways, this has been more distressing to me than all the other bad economic news combined. Not that I have that much of a skin in this game, it’s just that it’s hard to believe that the business of my youth may soon be no more.
March 28th, 2009 at 11:25 am
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-atlanta-journal-constitution
April 1st, 2009 at 7:20 pm
BLAME THE COX FAMILY AND JULIA WALLACE! She was brought in in 2002 with orders to TRIM THE FAT! Anybody who was there at the time can tell you about the surprise “announcement” when she arrived from the Arizona Republic as M.E., and immediately set about to “restructure” the newsroom (i.e. “trim the fat” by redlining salaries!) She started at the top with the A.M.E.’s making 6-figures and went down the line. Before it was over, Ron Martin had suddenly decided to “retire,” John Walter was told to clean out his desk and leave; and Miss Julia was Queen! In 7 years, she’s slashed that newsroom from nearly 600 to 230. And what kinda BONUSES do you think she got for it?
April 2nd, 2009 at 1:20 am
Thank you, newsboy, for keeping this informative thread rolling. Let me bolster your point by bringing up a bit of additional AJC history. Shortly after Julia arrived Metro Editor Cindy Gorley was her first target, quickly transferred from a management level position to some stupid recreational coverage job out in the suburbs. A very embarrassing and public demotion. Granted, I hold no brief for Gorley, but after her departure the AJC was supposed to put out an APB for the most qualified journalist/manager to bring its local news coverage to national prominence and renown. And the winner was… Bert Roughton, who wrote mostly thumb-sucker pot-boilers from the irrelevant Cox international bureaus, a job that practically by definition required no management experience. I cannot describe how disappointed the rank-and-file were with this selection. To crystallize the metro staff’s greatest fears, within a month Roughton issued inane critiques that included a directive that the “perfect lede” was something like 27 words, as if Platonic journalistic revelation was divinely provided as result of occupying the top perch of the AJC’s metro section. Absurd. A heroic Pulitzer-prize winning member of the staff copied-all on the response and basically told Bert what an asshat he was. From then on two things happened, one, we stopped getting those very amusing critiques and, two, Roughton surrounded himself with an impenetrable wall of supplicants to tell him his shit smelled like sasparilla. Alas, that was many moons ago and left undisturbed Roughton’s meteoric rise at the AJC (pun intended; meteors fall rapidly and are destroyed). But the point here being, a la newsboy, that whatever Julia’s instructions were with respect to upper management, she never sought to fill positions with dynamic leaders. Well except for Hank Klibanoff. I think Klibanoff was good but ultimately things didn’t work out between him and the AJC and I suspect that was because he was a skilled journalist and a good manager, therefore a bad fit for the AJC. It is extremely difficult for me to muster much sympathy for that organization as it crumbles to utter ruin, save for the unfortunate situation faced by the rank and file. But as for the higher level folks, they have ruined a valuable organization as badly as anyone at AIG or GM did, perhaps worse. The real heros now are folks like Jim Walls who are experimenting with new forms of journalism, and hopefully they pan out.