The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 31st of December 2025, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran its printing presses for the last time. The paper had been publishing in some form since 1868, more than 150 years without stopping. Two rival papers spent decades competing fiercely before uniting under one name. Across that span, their journalists won Pulitzer Prizes for exposing corruption and challenging injustice. They launched radio and television stations. They employed novelists and columnists who helped define the region's culture. How did these two newspapers begin? What journalism made them matter? And what does it take for a 157-year institution to survive in the digital age?

• 2. The Constitution's Roots

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  The Atlanta Constitution first appeared on the 16th of June 1868. Carey Wentworth Styles, James Anderson, and William Hemphill had purchased a small paper called the Atlanta Daily Opinion and renamed it. Hemphill served as business manager until 1901. When Styles could not settle his debts, he surrendered his share, leaving Anderson and Hemphill as equal owners.

  Anderson sold his half to Col. E. Y. Clarke in 1870. By 1871, under Hemphill's direction, the paper had overwhelmed the Daily Intelligencer. That newspaper had been the only Atlanta daily to survive the Civil War. Hemphill had hired special trains, one engine and one car each, to deliver editions to Macon and stay ahead of rivals. Captain Evan Howell purchased Clarke's interest in 1876 and became editor-in-chief. Joel Chandler Harris joined the paper that same year. Harris created Uncle Remus, a Black storyteller, to recount tales drawn from African-American oral tradition.

  Henry W. Grady edited the paper during the 1880s and championed what he called the 'New South.' He pressed for industrial development and supported the founding of Georgia Tech in Atlanta. On the 17th of March 1922, the Constitution launched a radio station called WGM. It opened just two days after the Journal had started its own competing station. WGM closed after a little more than a year. Its equipment was donated to Georgia School of Technology, which used it to help launch a new station in January 1924. The Howell family owned the paper outright from 1902 and held it for nearly half a century, until Cox Enterprises arrived in June 1950.

• 3. The Atlanta Journal's Rise

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  E. F. Hoge founded The Atlanta Journal in 1883. Four years later, in 1887, he sold the paper to Atlanta lawyer Hoke Smith. After the Journal backed Grover Cleveland in the 1892 presidential election, the victorious Cleveland named Smith his Secretary of the Interior. The paper carried the motto 'Covers Dixie like the Dew.'

  Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Margaret Mitchell worked at the Journal from 1922 to 1926. During those years she wrote profiles of prominent Georgia Civil War generals for the paper's Sunday magazine. Scholars believe that research contributed to her 1936 novel Gone with the Wind. That same year, 1922, the Journal founded WSB, one of the first radio broadcasting stations in the South. In 1939, The Atlanta Journal and its WSB radio station passed to James Middleton Cox, founder of Cox Enterprises. That sale would eventually reshape the fate of The Atlanta Constitution as well.

• 4. Coming Together

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  Cox Enterprises acquired The Atlanta Constitution in June 1950, creating for the first time a single owner for both of Atlanta's major daily newspapers. Sales and administrative offices were merged right away. But the two newsrooms stayed separate for another 32 years. Not until 1982 did the staffs finally combine. Even then, both newspapers continued to publish independently, sharing much of the same material with different editions tailored for morning and afternoon readers.

  The Journal, an afternoon paper, had led in circulation for years. Afternoon papers began losing subscribers in the 1970s, and the Journal's advantage faded. In November 2001, the two papers formally became one daily morning paper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Combined weekend and holiday editions had already been running for years before the formal merger.

  Late in 1947, the Constitution established WCON on AM 550, with plans for an FM station and a television channel. Federal Communications Commission rules of the era barred any owner from holding more than one AM, FM, or TV station in the same market. The Journal already held WSB AM 750, WSB-FM 104.5, and WSB-TV. The merged company had to comply. WCON and the original WSB-FM shut down. WCON-TV's construction permit was canceled. WSB-TV moved from channel 8 to channel 2 in 1951, taking WCON's allotment, to avoid interference from a nearby station on channel 9. WSB-TV had been the first television station in the Deep South, going on the air in 1948. The newspaper has remained part of Cox Enterprises, while the broadcast stations eventually became part of an independent Cox Media Group.

• 5. Voices and Characters

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  Celestine Sibley worked for The Atlanta Constitution from 1941 to 1999, a span of 58 years. She was a reporter, an editor, and a columnist who wrote 25 books about Southern life. After her death, the Georgia House of Representatives named its press gallery in her honor.

  Lewis Grizzard wrote a humor column for the Constitution from the 1970s until his death in 1994. His columns on Southern 'redneck' culture blended ridicule and respect in equal measure. Ralph McGill edited the Constitution in the 1940s. He was one of the few southern newspaper editors to openly support the American Civil Rights Movement.

  J. Reginald Murphy, known as Reg, served as a noteworthy editor of the Constitution. In 1974, he was kidnapped, an event that brought him considerable notoriety. Murphy later moved to the West Coast and served as editor of the San Francisco Examiner.

• 6. A Pulitzer Legacy

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  In 1931, The Atlanta Constitution won its first Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, for exposing corruption in Atlanta city government. George Goodwin won the 1948 Pulitzer for Local Reporting after uncovering vote fraud in Telfair County during the 1946 gubernatorial campaign. Jack Nelson received the 1960 Pulitzer for revealing abuses at Milledgeville State Hospital for the mentally ill. Ralph McGill won the 1959 Pulitzer for Editorial Writing. His winning editorial, titled 'A Church, A School...,' responded to the 1958 bombing of the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple. Eugene Patterson received the 1967 Pulitzer for Editorial Writing. Patterson later left the paper after a dispute over an op-ed piece.

  Bill Dedman received the 1989 Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting for 'The Color of Money.' The series documented racial discrimination in mortgage lending by Atlanta banks. Editor Bill Kovach resigned in November 1988, before the prize was awarded. The investigation had drawn complaints from local business figures and corporate leadership, some of whom described the paper's approach as 'take-no-prisoners.' It was a rare case of a major prize recognizing journalism that had already cost the editor who commissioned it his job. Mike Toner won the 1993 Pulitzer for Explanatory Journalism for 'When Bugs Fight Back.' The series covered how organisms develop resistance to antibiotics and pesticides.

  Doug Marlette shared the 1988 Pulitzer for Editorial Cartooning with The Charlotte Observer. Mike Luckovich received the same prize twice. He first won in 1995, for cartoons on subjects including Newt Gingrich and the 1996 Summer Olympics mascot. He won again in 2006, for cartoons about U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq. Cynthia Tucker won the 2007 Pulitzer for Commentary. Managing editor Hank Klibanoff won the 2007 Pulitzer for History. He and Gene Roberts co-wrote it under the title 'The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation.' Julia Wallace became the first woman to lead the paper as editor in 2002. Editor & Publisher magazine named her Editor of the Year in 2004.

• 7. Controversy and Reckoning

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  In 1996, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution became the first newspaper to report that Richard Jewell was being investigated in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. Jewell had been celebrated as a hero for helping evacuate the area before the bomb went off. The story cited leaked information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. When the FBI cleared Jewell, the AJC refused to issue an apology. It remains the only newspaper to have not retracted the story, written by reporters Kathy Scruggs and Ron Martz. A court case arising from the reporting was eventually dropped after both Jewell and Scruggs died. Jewell died in 2007 at age 44.

  In 2023, the paper fired reporter Alan Judd after his reporting on violence involving the University of Georgia's football program was challenged. Judd had worked for the AJC for 25 years and had twice been a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The AJC initially defended him, then issued a correction after an internal investigation. The paper stated it found no fabrications in the article. Judd had previously resigned from the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1988, after a series he co-reported required at least 10 printed corrections.

• 8. The Digital Reckoning

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  In August 2025, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced it would stop printing a physical newspaper at the end of the year. At the time, the paper had roughly 40,000 print subscribers. That number had fallen from 94,000 in 2020 and from a high of 630,000 in 2004. Daily circulation had already dropped more than 44 percent between the first quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2010.

  AJC president Andrew Morse set a goal of 500,000 paid digital subscribers by the end of 2026 to make the business sustainable. As of August 2025, the paper counted only 75,000 digital-only subscribers, up from 55,000 in 2023. Morse stated that traffic from Google had dropped 40 percent in the preceding year.

  Thirty-four days after the last print edition, on the 3rd of February 2026, the paper announced layoffs of 50 staffers. About half came from the newsroom. The AJC had returned its headquarters to Midtown Atlanta in 2024. It signed a lease on 21,000 square feet in the Promenade Central building on Peachtree Street, motivated by a desire 'to be at the beating heart of the city' it is named for. The paper must grow its digital subscriber count more than sixfold by the end of 2026 to meet Morse's sustainability target.