AJC's Andrew Morse steps down 3 years into $150 million reinvention : NPR

Key Points:

• Andrew Morse, who previously led digital transformations at ABC, Bloomberg, and CNN, took over The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) in January 2023 with a $150 million plan to grow digital subscribers from 53,000 to 500,000 by 2026, but has achieved only 101,000 subscribers so far.
• Under Morse's leadership, AJC went fully digital by ending its print edition at the start of 2024, making Atlanta the largest U.S. metro area without a major printed newspaper, while expanding coverage beyond the metro region and investing in newsletters, podcasts, and social media.
• Morse is stepping down after three and a half years due to family reasons, with Paul Curran from Cox Media named as his successor effective June 29; Cox Enterprises remains committed to supporting the paper despite ongoing financial losses.
• The AJC's digital transformation is being closely watched amid widespread financial struggles and consolidation in the newspaper industry, with some experts viewing the paper's all-digital pivot as a high-risk but potentially instructive experiment.
• Challenges to growth include slower-than-expected progress in building leadership and analytics capabilities, reduced news referrals from social media platforms, and the rise of AI-driven information sources limiting traffic to original reporting, a phenomenon known as "Google Zero."