More on the Situation at Our Crumbling Local Newspaper

Normally, your editor relies on British weekly The Economist for news about the world, usually over afternoon tea, one hand holding the magazine and the other hooking a Derby Porcelain tea cup and occasionally setting it down on a Derby Porcelain saucer so I can better pet my noble Landseer, Boatswain.

Pictured above: Boatswain

But when I want to know stuff pertaining to my hometown (Thrashers news, the occasional write-up about some art show or Salman Rushdie lecture at Emory, etc.), I peruse the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The AJC isn't what it once was, sadly. The paper that gave the world Cynthia Tucker and Mike Lukovitch (good things, in my opinion, though I realize many of you would disagree) has dumbed down its content over the years, even though it retains those two Pulitzer-winners and a man who surely deserves the Pulitzer, our friend Rawhide.

The AJC's recent moves have confirmed that it intends only to dumb itself down further, which will surely only alienate the people who should be its core demographic. Its core demographic being, as a commentator at Creative Loafing puts it, "people who READ, people with a certain curiosity about the world, people who are willing to read a publication which sometimes tells them things they don’t want to hear." Indeed.

- The entire editorial board, apparently, has been taken over by the paper's executives (the paper's editorials were too liberal, went the age-old complaint) and star writers like Tucker have been kicked out of town.

- Meanwhile, its already-depleting arts coverage is likely to be non-existent from now on: several art and music critics accepted the same buy-out as Mike Knobler. The book reviews were eliminated a long time ago, and all staff-written film reviews have been replaced with wire copy.

- A not-terribly-popular sport like hockey will no longer have its own beat writer; the guy covering the Thrashers now, Chris Vivlamore, is simply the editor of the Pro Sports section taking on an additional responsibility.

The spectacle of various editors taking on broader, if not deeper, writing responsibilities is only one symptom of the AJC's sad decline. It's this bottom-line/lowest-common-denominator thinking, the tactic of making the paper's style, tone, and coverage bland and watered-down and "more acceptable," that has wrecked the AJC. Far more than, as I've seen many people allege (including on the Thrashers message board) a Maoist editorial board or the hideous offense of covering issues that involve black people in a majority-black city.

I guarantee you the majority of the hockey coverage, like the majority of the arts coverage at present, will very soon be replaced with wire copy. The "new" Thrashers beat writer is a side show. I'm sure he's a fine writer and he'll do a professional job, but it's not like the Thrashers REALLY have a beat writer anymore.

Just saying. Let's boogie!

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