Putting the Paper to Bed

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced on Thursday that it would be ending its print edition — which has been published in some form since 1868 — at the end of the year.

I grew up outside Atlanta, at a time when it was nominally still a two-newspaper town: The Constitution was delivered in the morning, and The Journal arrived in the afternoons. My parents subscribed to The Journal, whose opinion page leaned more conservative and had one of the great newspaper slogans: Covers Dixie Like the Dew.

My grandfather was also a longtime advertising executive at the AJC. Although I started my own career in newspapers long after he retired, the business was a bond between us until he died. (He routinely mailed me clippings from the AJC that had caught his attention over breakfast, often from the left-leaning columnists he vehemently disagreed with.)

Despite that background, I didn’t immediately gravitate toward journalism in college. But I got there eventually and have — happily, and very, very luckily — been there ever since. I started in my first “professional” newsroom 30 years ago this summer, and my favorite gallows-humor description of that time comes from a 2017 piece in McSweeney’s:

Michelle Jones remembers graduating journalism school twenty-five years ago and being warned that the industry was declining because advertisers were pulling out, salaries were dropping and the internet would ruin everything. And that’s pretty much what happened.

I’ve been extremely fortunate to hold onto a job in a field that has been radically transformed since the time I graduated from journalism school, much less from when my grandfather started working for the AJC almost 90 years ago. I’ve had literally hundreds of friends and colleagues lose their jobs over the years. The AJC news followed widespread buyouts at one of the other papers near and dear to my heart, The Washington Post, that one media critic called “the most spectacular departure of journalistic talent from a newspaper” in decades.

Despite all this bad news, I was heartened by, and agree with, a quote from the AJC’s publisher about the decision to end its print edition: “Unless news organizations have the courage to disrupt themselves faster than the marketplace is disrupting the industry, really important institutions that have existed for generations will cease to exist.” He added, “I love print, but I love journalism more.

The front page on Sunday, 24 May 2020. The list of 1,000 names — about 1 percent of those who had died of the coronavirus in the U.S. at the time it was published — continued inside.

The online presentation is also striking.

At Least We Had Fun

“If you spend a lifetime in journalism, you may have some stories that matter more, you may do work that is of greater importance, and you may serve some greater societal purpose. But you will never have as much fun as when you and the other sleep-deprived and beerstained wonders around you published your own damn newspaper.”

— David Simon, The Diamondback, March 10, 2020

David Simon feels about his experiences at his college newspaper the way I do about mine.

Saying Goodbye to The Slot

“In the hurly-burly of a newsroom, where even the best reporters have widely varying degrees of grammatical competence, copy editors are the often unheralded guardians of language and common sense. They are the front-line mud soldiers in an endless war against bad spelling, ill-considered sentence construction and factual errors.

“They prevent English teachers everywhere from wincing. They save behinds.”

— From the obituary of Bill Walsh, The Washington Post, March 15, 2017

Bill was one of the finest — and funniest — editors I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. He died last week at the age of 55.

Also see: Linda Holmes’s appreciation over at NPR; and Bill’s own longtime site about copy editing: The Slot.

A full-page ad in Sunday’s print editions.

Daring to Be Dull

“Straight as an arrow, exasperatingly thorough, extremely earnest, smart, plain, pragmatic, wonkish. He was a stickler, a self-described curmudgeon.”

David Butler, an editor for Stars and Stripes, was beaten to death almost 17 years ago in Arlington, Va., on his way home after a night shift.

I was in D.C. at the time, and although I never met him, this remembrance has stuck with me, partly because of the horrific nature of the crime, which appears to remain unsolved. But in him I also saw — perhaps with some self-flattery and a touch of embarrassment — myself.

His work mirrored my own, hanging around “in case you have to tear up the front page for a nuclear explosion or the death of a princess.”

(Like him, I was in the newsroom on my 30th birthday, which was an election night. Like him, I was surrounded by pizza boxes. Unlike him, I was not in the company of a stripper.)

I was also well familiar with “those strange small hours, our 5 p.m., our quitting time, the world’s middle of the night” and could easily envision the circumstances in which he was killed.

I’ve recently been thinking about David because he sounded like most of the journalists I’ve worked with over a 22-year career in newspapers: dedicated, careful but human, and honestly trying to provide a fair and accurate account of the facts in an often messy world.

“He was, in short, everything you want in the guy who edits your newspaper.”

“Nothing in God’s creation is ever as good as it once was, but The Washington Post is coming pretty close.”

— David Carr, The New York Times, Oct. 6, 2014