The printing press at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is quiet today.
The regional print juggernaut printed its final edition yesterday and now exists solely in the digital world.
When I worked for a local newspaper, we used to talk hypothetically about “the day the presses stopped printing.” We all knew it was inevitable and sometime in the not-so-distant future. But even with that knowledge, the fact that the AJC — the mighty regional paper that covers Dixie like the dew — was one of the first major papers to pull the trigger on ending its print edition stings a little to this newspaperman.
I grew up with the AJC. I sat at my kitchen table as a child and read the comics. As I grew older, I enjoyed the paper’s well-respected columnists, Lewis Grizzard and Celestine Sibley. I chuckled and sometimes shed tears because of Mike Luckovich’s cartoons. Anyone who grew up in metro Atlanta has some story to tell about how the AJC was part of their lives.
Yes, the AJC still exists, but the physical essence of it — the tangible product that marked the days with us, singing the song of the day’s events from the day we were each born all the way through 2025 — isn’t there anymore. There will be no more front pages to save on significant days. There will be no more framed copies. There will be no more flipping through the pages to get a digest of the day’s events.
Regardless of your opinion of the paper’s editorial stance or choices — and there are many around these parts — you can’t deny the impact the AJC has had on all of us. As someone who worked for a group of newspapers that competed with the AJC for years, I can admit that. The AJC was second to none in impact.
Moving away from print was inevitable. But I don’t think any of us, especially inside the news industry, expected the AJC to be one of the first to ditch the printed page in favor of digital pastures.
When I first started working at a local newspaper in the early 2000s, print was still growing. I worked for Neighbor Newspapers at a time when their footprint was 28 newspapers with 450,000 copies throughout metro Atlanta. For the first five or so years of my time there, we were actively growing and even added at least three new papers to that massive footprint.
Then came The Great Recession of 2008. Up until that point, “the day the presses stopped” seemed much more in the ether than in reality.
Advertisers stopped buying ads. Those coupon inserts everyone loved shifted to direct mail. Craigslist had already depleted the classified ads, and Facebook and Google were chipping away at everyone’s attention span and our ad dollars.
Monster, Indeed, and LinkedIn came in and replaced the need for the want ads. Legacy.com took over obituaries everywhere. These changes, coupled with an industry that was always about 10 years behind the times and frequently victim to bad business decisions, chipped away at every revenue source newspapers had ever known.
From 2008 until I left The Neighbor in 2024, I watched the 28-paper footprint dwindle down until only three newspapers remained.
The AJC lives on despite the death of its print product. But for tons of newspapers, “the day the presses stopped” was all too real and was a death blow.
To stop the bleeding and to save their lives, most newspapers have turned to paywalls, asking their audience to pay for what about five other revenue sources once paid for. Most of them charge more than Netflix for your daily news, and most people deciding where to spend their subscription money would rather have Netflix. Can’t say I blame them. I’d rather watch “Stranger Things” than read about the latest city council zoning dispute, too.
But this isn’t going to be a column where we was poetic about the good old days and demonize the Interwebz for burning down the system.
I don’t blame technology for the end of print. I never have.
That would be like blaming daylight for the extinction of candles. Technology is just a tool, and tools don’t kill industries — people’s choices do. Or more accurately, people’s changing habits do.
If technology alone was the death knell for newspapers, print would have died decades ago. When radio became a household staple in the 1920s, newspaper publishers were convinced it was over. “Who’s going to read the news when they can hear it?” they wailed into their typewriters. Then television showed up in the 1950s, and the panic intensified. “Now they can see the news! We’re doomed!”
Spoiler alert: newspapers survived both. In fact, they thrived alongside radio and TV for decades. Print journalists have been predicting their own demise for over a hundred years. Many print journalists are like the doomsday preppers of the media world, except their bunkers are filled with AP Stylebooks and old copies of “All the President’s Men.”
The real culprit isn’t technology itself — it’s what technology and a fast-paced society has done to us. Or more specifically, what we’ve allowed it to do to our attention spans and our daily rhythms.
Consider the modern American: They spend two hours sitting in traffic or a carpool line. They spend four hours at various ballparks watching their kids play sports they may or may not care about. They spend another three hours doomscrolling through social media, tending to the buzzing, whistling, and hooting alerts from a device that has more control over their dopamine levels than they do.
And then we expect this person — this frazzled, overscheduled, notification-addicted person — to sit down and flip through a newspaper? Whether that newspaper is printed on actual paper or displayed on a tablet doesn’t matter. They just don’t have the time. Or more accurately, they don’t have the mental bandwidth.
The era of the digest is over, replaced by binging, beeping, and notifications. We don’t sit down to consume news anymore. We graze on it throughout the day like cafeteria food — a headline here, a push notification there, maybe a 30-second video if we’re feeling ambitious. We’ve traded depth for speed, context for convenience.
And that’s a problem. A big one.
Because when you consume news in bite-sized, disconnected chunks, you lose the thread. You lose the context. You lose the ability to see how one story connects to another, how today’s headline is the result of last month’s decision, how the thing happening across town affects the thing happening in your neighborhood.
We now have a generation of people who can tell you everything about the latest Taylor Swift album but can’t explain how their votes are counted. They’ll read a headline about a local controversy, get outraged, share it on Facebook, then immediately pivot to reading about Travis Kelce’s latest Instagram post before heading off to argue with strangers in the comments section of a recipe blog about whether you should rinse your pasta. (You shouldn’t, by the way. But I digress.)
This isn’t about being smarter or dumber. It’s about being informed versus being distracted. And right now, distraction is winning by a landslide.
Newspapers — the physical, hold-it-in-your-hands kind — forced you to slow down. You couldn’t just scroll past the boring stuff. You had to at least glance at it. You had to flip through the sections. You had to see the full picture of your community, your state, your world, even if you didn’t read every word.
That’s gone now. And I’m not sure we’ve fully reckoned with what we’ve lost.
I don’t know if I will specifically miss print newspapers. I’ve always been digitally inclined. I haven’t sat down and read through a newspaper outside of doing it for a work-related function in years.
But I will miss the society that newspapers represented.
I’ll miss the idea of people taking time during their day to pause and become informed citizens. Not just informed consumers of content, but actual citizens who understood their role in a functioning democracy required more than a hot take and a retweet.
I’ll miss the ritual of it — the coffee, the kitchen table, the rustling of pages, the ink on your fingers. I’ll miss the idea that we all, more or less, started our day with the same set of facts, the same shared reality, before we went off to argue about what those facts meant.
I’ll miss the world where being informed wasn’t a luxury or a hobby, but a basic part of being a grown-up.
The AJC’s presses are silent now. But the real silence I’m worried about is the one that comes when we stop making time to listen to anything deeper than a notification.
