The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

File:The Atlanta Journal-Constitution front page.jpg The January 12, 2007 front page of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner(s)	Cox Enterprises
Publisher	John Mellott
Founded	Constitution: 1868 Journal: 1883 Journal-Constitution: 2001
Headquarters	72 Marietta Street NW Atlanta, Georgia 30303 United States
Circulation	357,399 Daily 523,687 Sunday
Website	ajc.com

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ("Atlanta Journal-Communist") is the only major daily newspaper in Atlanta, Georgia, USA and its suburbs. The AJC, as it is called, is the flagship publication of Cox Enterprises. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is the result of the merger between The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution. The staff was combined in 1982. Separate delivery of the morning Constitution and afternoon Journal ended in 2001. The AJC reaches a total print and online audience of more than 2.3 million people each week. Every month, more than 3.5 million unique visitors access the newspaper's Web sites, including ajc.com and accessAtlanta.com. Since 2003, the paper has also published accessAtlanta, a free tabloid-sized entertainment paper.

Subsequent to the staff consolidation of 1982, the afternoon Journal maintained a center-right editorial stance, while the editorials and op-eds in the morning Constitution were reliably liberal. When the editions combined in 2001, the editorial page staffs also merged. The editorials and op-eds have attempted to strike a more "balanced" tone. Most of the paper's editorial stances have been closer to those of the old Constitution. The combined paper endorsed John Kerry for president in 2004; in 2000 the Constitution endorsed Al Gore while the Journal endorsed George W. Bush. The paper condemned Bush's decision to allow the National Security Agency to spy on phone conversations in the United States without a warrant by calling his actions a "clear, present danger".

The Atlanta Constitution

Constitution building 1890

The Atlanta Constitution was first published on June 16, 1868. It was such a force that by 1871 it had killed off the Daily Intelligencer, the only Atlanta paper to survive the American Civil War. In 1876 Captain Evan Howell (a former Intelligencer city editor) purchased a controlling interest and became its editor-in-chief. That same year, Joel Chandler Harris began writing for the paper. He soon invented the character of Uncle Remus, a black storyteller, as a way of recounting stories from African-American culture.

During the 1880s, Constitution editor Henry W. Grady was a spokesman for the "New South," and encouraged industrial development. Ralph McGill, editor for the Constitution in the 1940s, was one of the few southern newspaper editors to support the American Civil Rights Movement.

From the 1970s until his death in 1994, Lewis Grizzard was a popular humor columnist for the Constitution. He portrayed Southern "redneck" culture with a mixture of ridicule and respect. Other noteworthy editors of The Atlanta Constitution include J. Reginald Murphy. "Reg" Murphy gained notoriety with his 1974 kidnapping. Murphy later served as editor of the San Francisco Examiner.

The Constitution won numerous Pulitzer Prizes. In 1931 it won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for exposing corruption at the local level. In 1959 it won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for Ralph McGill's editorial "A Church, A School....". In 1967 it was awarded another for Eugene Patterson's editorials. In 1960 Jack Nelson won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, by exposing abuses at Milledgeville State Hospital for the mentally ill. In 1988 the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning went to the Constitution's Doug Marlette. Mike Luckovich received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 and 2006.

The Atlanta Journal

The Atlanta Journal was established in 1883. Founder E.F. Hoge sold the paper to Atlanta lawyer Hoke Smith in 1887. After the Journal supported Presidential candidate Grover Cleveland in the 1892 election, Smith was named as Secretary of the Interior by the victorious Cleveland. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Margaret Mitchell worked for the Journal from 1922 to 1926. Important for the development of her 1936 Gone With the Wind were the series of profiles of prominent Georgia Civil War generals she wrote for The Atlanta Journal's Sunday Magazine, the research for which, scholars believe, led her to her work on the novel. In 1922, the Journal founded Atlanta's first radio station, WSB. The radio station and the newspaper were sold in 1939 to James Middleton Cox, founder of what would become Cox Enterprises. The Journal carried the motto "Covers Dixie like the Dew".

Merger

Cox Enterprises bought the Constitution in June 1950, bringing both newspapers under one ownership and combining sales and administrative offices. Separate newsrooms were kept until 1982, though both papers continued to be published. The Journal, an afternoon paper, led the morning Constitution until the 1970s, when afternoon papers began to fall out of favor with subscribers. In November 2001, the two papers, which were once fierce competitors, merged to produce one daily morning paper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The two papers had published a combined edition on weekends and holidays for years.

In 1989, Bill Dedman received the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for "The Color of Money," his expose on racial discrimination in mortgage lending, or redlining, by Atlanta banks. The newspapers' editor, Bill Kovach, had resigned in November 1988 after the stories on banks and others had ruffled feathers in Atlanta. (see Anne Cox Chambers).

In 1993, Mike Toner received the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for "When Bugs Fight Back," his series about organisms and their resistance to antibiotics and pesticides.

Julia Wallace was named the first female editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2002. In 2005 she was named Editor of the Year in 2005 by Editor and Publisher Magazine.

In 2003, the AJC launched accessAtlanta to compete with the alternative weekly Creative Loafing. accessAtlanta is available for free in sidewalk newsbins and also appears as an insert in Thursday editions of the AJC.

Mike Luckovich again won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial cartooning in 2006, an award he had previously received in 1995 under The Atlanta Constitution banner.

Notes

References

• Perry, Chuck. 2004. "Atlanta Journal-Constitution". New Georgia Encyclopedia Georgia Humanities Council. [1]

External link

• Official website
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution (in the New Georgia Encyclopedia)