One man’s opinion: So long, old friend
It will be years next spring that I returned home to Atlanta from days away in college and beginning my career in Macon Georgia I moved into a modest apartment in Midtown within stumbling distance of Manuel s Tavern and as I set up my utilities I began my subscription to the Atlanta Journal That relationship will be years old next spring Growing up in a newspaper and printing family I can easily admit to a bias in favor of tangible printed products Though I have become a fan of a inadequate podcasts and occasionally will read an E-book with my Amazon Fire this comic book nerd VASTLY prefers the in-hand hard copy for newspapers books comic books magazines and particularly for the bane of my existence E-tickets I am not suggesting that I have consistently loved the copy the editorial viewpoints or even the selection of stories in the AJC but the talent combined inside was phenomenal the reporting occasionally award winning and as to the daily chronicling of major happenings about the state and across the southeast there was no clearer voice At a point in the late s while working for Georgia s Secretary of State the state and I were paying for three copies of the paper a day The morning Constitution the afternoon Journal and the late street edition Blue Streak Journal at p m intended as a commuter ride home aide as well as still urgent stories ahead of their broadcast competition in drive-time as well as the evening news Our family competed with as well as admired the much more thriving Cox Enterprises through a series of weekly newspapers based in DeKalb County We even printed the AJC one day when construction operations at the Five Points MARTA station knocked out power and the presses at Marietta Street At the peak of their operations roughly coinciding with the Centennial Olympic Games the paper s editorial reporting staff was roughly and the revenue generated by the AJC alone in those years reportedly reached -billion Though as a private company they did not publicly statement earnings The biggest shock to my system with news of the demise of the print edition was learning that across a -county metro region of more than -million there are just over remaining print subscribers Doing the math on those household percentages makes voter turnout on a Special Voting Primary Day look robust But ready or not we will all be soon turning this big page No daily newspaper marketwide will change the way we share and broadly communicate the news of the day Several tell me this window already passed I just missed the shift change Wishing the AJC com AccessAtlanta a founding subscriber via Prodigy and the AJC E-Paper all well a sparse pointers to maximize your chances of success Fix your search engine You have better luck finding AJC stories on Google Yahoo or any number of specialized media databases Offer NEW and additional tiered content I would not pay more for all of the interviews the Sports Desk did with UGA Dawgs Coach Kirby Smart but there are plenty of folks who would Add live feeds of multiple municipal county and school board meetings across the metro area and an archive of the same Create a one-stop sector place for the residents facing version of local governance Stream the Georgia General Assembly Committee meetings and legislative sessions stepping into a space that Georgia Constituents Broadcasting minus federal funding may not be able to afford in and beyond Go deeper there Simplify and make more intuitive the ability to clip download and share content if well marketed you create an additional revenue stream Expand partnerships and share credit with other news outlets for more in depth coverage the AJC of at present cannot be everywhere at once I plan to remain a subscriber and already opted in during an earlier Online Sale rate as readers are not likely to pay several hundred for the electronic version alone without chosen of that added new content I referenced above The AJC voluntarily retired specific of its best talent last year which was also to be expected as payroll expenses began to exceed revenue I wish Cox Enterprises and the AJC E-paper every success perhaps going forward consider listening a bit more to your readers and longtime subscribers It is inevitably easier to keep a longtime customer than it is to develop and convert new ones The post One man s opinion So long old friend appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta
