For some years now, many newspaper analysts, including me, have predicted that most daily newspapers would eventually cut back to one weekend print edition and go all-digital the rest of the week. Print advertising still has some value, and steering all of it into a big Saturday/Sunday paper would seem to be a smart way of maximizing a shrinking revenue stream.
Yet I don’t think any paper has taken that step. Some have cut back to two or three days a week. But large papers whose executives are rethinking print have tended to go whole hog.
Last year Advance Local shut its print papers in New Jersey, including The Star-Ledger of Newark, and steered subscribers toward its statewide digital news outlet, NJ.com. Now The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is taking the same step, even though Katie Robertson reports in The New York Times (gift link) that the AJC’s print edition is still profitable, and even though digital subscriptions have run well behind what management was hoping for.
The AJC, owned by Cox Enterprises, will shutter its print edition at the end of this year, although it will continue to offer an e-paper laid out like print as part of its digital offerings. Cox is in the midst of a $150 million effort to boost the AJC. Andrew Morse, the paper’s president and publisher, told Robertson: “The fact is, printing newspapers and putting them in trucks and driving them around and delivering them on people’s front stoops has not been the most effective way to distribute the news in a very long time.”
The fact-checker rates Morse’s statement as: true. The question, though, is what effect that’s going to have on the paper’s bottom line. Morse is hoping for 500,000 paid digital subscribers by the end of 2026, but the company told Robertson that it’s only reached 115,000 paid subscribers, of whom just 75,000 are digital-only.
“The AJC’s digital audience far surpasses that of print and has for some time,” writes AJC reporter J. Scott Trubey. “Ending print, however, will be the biggest change of Morse’s tenure and one that will likely be controversial, particularly among some of the AJC’s longest-tenured subscribers.”
Texas Tribune CEO Sonal Shah at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin last September
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Sonal Shah, the CEO of The Texas Tribune, a pioneering nonprofit newsroom. Shah, a Houston native and first-generation immigrant, took over as chief executive in January 2023 after co-founder Evan Smith decided to move on.
Shah is part of a major transition at the Tribune and brings broad experience in government, the private sector and philanthropy. She is a trained economist who worked on the Obama presidential transition team, worked in philanthropy for Google, and was national policy director for Pete Buttigieg’s run for president.
I’ve got a Quick Take about Advance Local, a local news chain in New Jersey that is ending its print editions — including the storied Star-Ledger of Newark — and going fully digital.
Ellen’s Quick Take is on The Minnesota Star Tribune’s editorial non-endorsement in the presidential race and an alternative endorsement of Kamala Harris written on a blog by former Strib staffers.
News that Advance Local is closing its print newspapers in New Jersey is sad on one level. On another level, though, it marks the continued evolution of the chain’s digital-first strategy, which I reported on in the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News.”
Ellen and I also talked about Advance’s digital focus on our podcast this past May with Joshua Macht and Ronnie Ramos, the top two executives at MassLive, the chain’s statewide online news organization in Massachusetts.
According to Lola Fadulu and Tracey Tully of The New York Times (gift link), Advance will end the print editions of three daily papers in New Jersey, The Star-Ledger of Newark, The Times of Trenton and the South Jersey Times. A weekly, the Hunterdon County Democrat, will also end its print run. Another daily, the Jersey Journal, which covers Jersey City, will shut down altogether. According to a statement from Advance:
“Today’s announcement represents the next step into the digital future of journalism in New Jersey,” said Steve Alessi, President of NJ Advance Media. “It’s important to emphasize that this is a forward-looking decision that allows us to invest more deeply than ever in our journalism and in serving our communities.”
Alessi said that that ceasing print publication will allow NJ Advance Media to reallocate resources to strengthen its core newsroom. He said that the newsroom has more reporters than it did a year ago and has plans to continue to grow in 2025 as the organization looks to bolster reporting in previously under-covered areas of the state.
That strategy reflects the direction that Advance was moving in back in March 2022, when I interviewed Chris Kelly, who at that time was the interim editor of NJ.com. Advance was already taking a one-newsroom approach, putting NJ.com first and then doling out stories to its print edition. It was a strategy that had allowed NJ.com to build up strong statewide and regional coverage, Kelly said, although he conceded that it meant hyperlocal coverage was lacking. Here’s an excerpt from our book:
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In New Jersey, as elsewhere, the newspaper scene today is much diminished. The Star-Ledger remains the largest paper in the state, with a weekday print and digital circulation that averaged nearly 125,000 and a Sunday circulation of about 140,000. Next up is The Record, which covers northern New Jersey (35,000 on weekdays, 40,000 on Sundays) and the Asbury Park Press (27,000 on weekdays, 39,000 on Sundays), both of which are owned by Gannett. Observers we spoke with gave those papers reasonably high marks for the quality of their reporting, but the breadth of their coverage was regarded as lacking. The Star-Ledger, owned by Advance Publications, is worth a closer look. Advance is a privately held company based in New York and controlled by the Newhouse family. It is best known for its magazine division, Condé Nast, which publishes prestige titles such as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. But the company operates a number of daily newspapers as well, including The Birmingham News of Alabama, The Plain Dealer of Cleveland and The Oregonian of Portland.
Advance runs its newspapers in regional groups, emphasizing paid digital subscriptions over print. In New Jersey, that means The Star-Ledger and two smaller dailies, The Times of Trenton and the South Jersey News, as well as a number of other Advance publications, are all part of NJ.com. A unified newsroom feeds stories to its digital hub and to its print newspapers. Some of those stories are specific to a particular region and might only run in one paper; others, more general in nature, might run statewide. All of them are posted at NJ.com, which, as of early 2022, was attracting about 1.5 million daily visits. What it means is that NJ.com is able to field the largest editorial staff in the state — about 115 journalists — as well as offer robust statehouse, investigative and data reporting. The advantage is that Advance is able to provide its audience with strong statewide and regional coverage. The disadvantage is a shortage of day-to-day accountability journalism at the community level.
As was the case with many media outlets in the spring of 2022, the NJ.com newsroom was closed as a consequence of the COVID pandemic. We met Chris Kelly, NJ.com’s senior director of news, features, topics and innovation, who was serving as interim editor, at a restaurant near his home in Maplewood. [He is now managing producer of entertainment.] He spoke animatedly about Advance’s strategy for covering New Jersey. “My argument in the eight years that I’ve been here is that you’ve got to basically become a statewide news outlet and almost move from man-to-man coverage to zone coverage,” he said. “We just simply cannot sustain a reporter covering Maplewood, covering Millbrook. I’m not unaware that doesn’t come without the downside of, yeah, we cannot cover every council meeting, we are going to miss things. But that’s been the strategy that mostly seems to be working and has allowed us to kind of sustain at the level we’re sustaining.” He also lauded Advance’s commitment to enterprise journalism, telling us: “The one thing that I can say is, if we’ve got a story that we’ve got to get, we’re going to get it, and we’re going to keep doing it. That level of commitment, the financial support, the legal support has been unwavering since I’ve been there.”
