The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is the only major daily newspaper in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, 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 has its headquarters in Dunwoody, Georgia.

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 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 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 the South's first radio station, WSB AM 740 (now 750). 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".

The Atlanta Constitution

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.

The Constitution started the second radio station, WGM AM 710, having received its Federal Radio Commission broadcast license in March 1922, just two or four days after WSB. It now succeeded by WGST AM 640, though its original facility (after frequency changes to 1110 and 890) is now WGKA AM 920. The station folded after just over a year, and was donated to the Georgia School of Technology (now Georgia Tech).

Ralph McGill, editor for the Constitution in the 1940s, was one of the few southern newspaper editors to support the American Civil Rights Movement. In 1946, reporter David Snell uncovered that Japan had developed its own atomic bomb prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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.

Prior to the merger, both papers had planned to start TV stations: WSB-TV 8 for the Journal, and WCON-TV 2 for the Constitution. Only WSB actually got on the air (making it the first TV station in the South), moving from channel 8 to WCON's allotment on channel 2 in 1951 to avoid TV interference from a nearby channel 9. (WROM-TV since moved, leaving WGTV on 8, after it was also used by WLWA-TV, now WXIA-TV 11.) This was also necessary to satisfy Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules preventing the excessive concentration of media ownership, preventing the combined paper from running two stations.

Circulation

The paper used to cover all 159 counties in Georgia, and the bordering counties of western North Carolina where many Atlantans vacation or have second homes, in addition to some circulation in other bordering communities, such as Tallahassee, Florida, where the Sunday AJC was available. Due to the downturn in the newspaper industry, it contracted dramatically in the late 2000s to only serve the metro area.Since Q1 of 2007 to Q1 of 2010, daily circulation has plunged over 44%.

Headquarters

The AJC has its headquarters in Perimeter Center, an office district of Dunwoody, Georgia.Previously the AJC headquarters were in Downtown Atlanta. In August 2009, the AJC occupied less than 30 percent of its downtown location, which was outdated and costly to maintain. Later that year, the AJC consolidated its printing operations by transferring the downtown production center to the Gwinnett County facility. In 2010 the newspaper relocated its headquarters to leased offices in Dunwoody, a northern suburb of Atlanta. In November 2010, the former Downtown headquarters was donated to the city of Atlanta, which plans to convert the building into a fire and police training academy.

Parts of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The AJC has four major sections daily. On Sundays, it has additional sections. The main section usually consists of Georgia news, Nationwide news, World news, and Business news. Another AJC section is called Metro. This includes major headlines from the Metro-Atlanta area. The Metro section usually reports the weather as well. The next section is Sports. The Sports section reports anything sports related. The Metro and Sports sections often contain "The Vent" where readers vent about things that are currently happening. The final section of the daily AJC is Living. In this section, you will find articles, recipes, reviews, movie times, a sudoku, a crossword puzzle, and a word scramble. Also, it usually contains the comics, however, on Sundays, the comics are a separate section.