Recommended: 'Shake-up: Old Media Meets New Realities at the AJC."

Scott Henry at Atlanta, Georgia, USA-based Creative Loafing.com has produced a fascinating analysis on the painful but necessary transformation taking place at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  Notes Henry in a July 4, 2007, post:

Movie critic Eleanor Ringel Gillespie. Political writer Tom Baxter. Star investigative reporter Jane Hansen. Pulitzer-winning science reporter Mike Toner. These are some of the marquee bylines that vanished from the paper July 1, when a large-scale buyout, combined with attrition, cleared out somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 reporters and editors from what Wallace says had been a news force of close to 500.

Along the way, at least half the remaining staff had to reapply for their jobs or seek new assignments, a directive that created opportunities for some but caused much angst among longtime reporters worried about getting stuck with a crummy gig. In turn, the lack of information surrounding the staff reshuffling sparked concerns among readers, particularly in the Atlanta arts community, that local coverage would suffer.Henry said,"The newsroom population is only part of the picture. With daily newspaper circulation in a slow-motion plunge across the country, the AJC is struggling to transform itself from a lumbering print-media dinosaur into a nimble multiplatform information provider able to reach customers in print, online, by mobile download – however future generations will get their news."

To read Henry's entire report, please se "Shake-up: Old media meets new realities at the AJC." I highly recommend it.

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