Mellott said that he has seen advertising revenue drop over the past 12 to 18 months more than it has in the prior five-year period. As a result AJC formed a place. Mellott said, “What our business will be about going forward is the skillful management of the slow decline of the printed product and the accelerated growth of the Internet.”

The goal is to continue their vital print paper for their dedicated audience, but give up on chasing marginal readers. The newspaper will curtail both circulation to outlying areas and discounts in home delivery. They will than try to lure younger readers by pouring resources into their website.

The goal is not to kill the print newspaper because some readers will in fact still prefer the print version. Mellott says “Each medium works differently,” he says. “You can’t say that one is a pure substitute for the other.”

Changes inside the newsroom have included buyouts, a greater focus on local coverage, and a radical reorganization.

The buyouts were offered to around eighty newsroom staffers 55 and older with at least ten years of service. Many staffers also learned that they would need to reapply and interview for their jobs. Several of these old jobs disappeared in the reorganization. Many staffers were very unhappy with this change. “I will go to my grave believing it should not have been handled in the way it was handled,” says Weaver, forty-seven, who had held her job for eight years and was passionate about it. “It was demeaning and insulting.”

The increased emphasis on local news means that wire stories will replace some reporting by staff. Another result of the localization is that the staff most likely will not assign someone to report on the 2008 presidential elections. “The days of being a globe-trotting correspondent at a paper of this size are done,” says Mark R. Davis, a cultural institutions reporter who once aspired to such a job. “The fact is, people do like to read about their neighbors, and we’re doing more of that.”

Julia Wallace, managing editor said that September 11th really focused the paper by asking "How do we explain the world to our audience?’”

The paper has done extensive research to find out what it is that is valued by the readers.

The result of that thought process was the section Atlanta and the World, which discusses issues such as immigration and AIDS.

The reorganization of the paper meant a collapse of more than twelve departments into just four in order to speed up decision-making.

The News and Information department focuses on beat reporting and breaking news. The Enterprise department focuses on feature and major investigative stories and has a quota of 60 stories a year for narrative/profile writers and 12 a year for investigative reporters.

The Digital department oversees the Web site and the Print department oversees the newspaper.

However, the transition does not come without costs. The costs include the trauma of any change and dealing with inevitable glitches. Another cost was the journalists who decided they were unwilling or unable to adapt to the new system.

However, staffers are working hard to adapt to the reorganization.  Chris Stanfield, a senior editor for photography in News and Information was asked how he felt about the reorganization. He said, “We’re changing the way we do something entirely- and it’s not just a little change.” He says that for some it’s “cumbersome; for some, intimidating; for others, not possible.”

Source: Columbia Journalism Review