The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will stop printing at the end of 2025, going all-in on digital

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will publish its final print edition on December 31, ending a 157-year print run. The print product remains profitable but has declined to about 40,000 subscribers from a 2004 peak near 630,000. Print readership and advertising have moved largely online, prompting a full cessation of print to speed a digital transition. Digital-only subscriptions total about 75,000, with 115,000 total paid subscribers, falling short of a 500,000-by-2026 goal. The change will eliminate about 30 jobs, roughly half of them part-time. Some local newspaper chains have been aggressive in shifting from print to digital.

Print newspapers, already vestigial in an era when news consumption overwhelmingly occurs online, have been slow to disappear entirely in part because many continue to turn a profit. (Just six years ago, in 2019, The Boston Globe was the first local newspaper whose digital subscribers surpassed print.) The Journal-Constitution's print product remains profitable on its own and has about 40,000 subscribers, publisher and president Andrew Morse told the Times' Katie Robertson. That's down from 94,000 in 2020, and a zenith of around 630,000 in 2004.

Morse told the Times that he saw ceasing print altogether (rather than the half-measure of reducing print days) as the best way to speed up the publication's digital transition. Print is "not going to be where audiences engage with us," he told the Times. "It's not where advertisers want to be a part of." Nieman Lab's Josh Benton recently pointed out that Advance, one local newspaper company that punches above its weight in digital audience,

Read at Nieman Lab