Fresh Loaf

AJCers, meet the new boss

While we at CL are anxiously waiting to see who’ll own this newspaper by the end of next month, the folks at the AJC are now already on their third publisher this year.

Here’s the part of the release that went out minutes ago:

Cox Media Group announced today Michael Joseph is being promoted to publisher of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), effective immediately. Joseph currently serves as the AJC’s general manager and president. He will continue reporting to Doug Franklin who will continue his role at Cox Media Group as executive vice president.

Actually, none of this should come as a surprise. You may recall that, back in January, AJC employees were told that their longtime publisher, John Mellott, had suddenly “retired” and that Franklin was now their new boss.

Franklin had already earned a reputation as Cox’s designated hatchet man, a downsizing specialist who’d overseen mass staff cuts at the company’s other two flagship papers, the Dayton Daily News and the Palm Beach Post. And he wasn’t coy about why he’d been sent to Atlanta. In his very first staff meeting, he told employees that the AJC was losing $1 million a week and he was there to stem the tide of red ink.

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Welcome to the poorhouse.

This past Monday, AJC staffers were informed about the sudden “retirement” of their boss, publisher John Mellott. Perhaps the first question that popped into everyone’s mind was, Who retires at 51?

On Wednesday, during the newspaper’s quarterly staff meeting, employees got to meet the new publisher, one Doug Franklin, who has years of experience as a veteran newspaper executive. (Mellott, by contrast, had previously run another Cox subsidiary, Dent Wizard.)

They were told that the bottom had fallen out of the embattled paper’s revenues sometime around October, which served to confirm the widely held suspicion that Mellott had been pushed out.

Franklin also told the assembled crowd that the AJC is currently losing about $1 million every week.

From what I understand, that little news flash got everybody’s attention.

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