One Man’s Plan To Rebuild Atlanta’s Hometown Newsroom: The AJC’s President Andrew Morse

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about Truth, Disinformation, and the Media hosted by Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

Media overall is in dire straits financially, as In Reality listeners are well aware. Local journalism has been the hardest hit: We’ve lost a third of the papers we had twenty years ago and continue to lose, on average, two a week. Most of the rest have been hollowed out. 

Which makes today’s guest particularly interesting. Andrew Morse is the president and publisher of the 150-year-old Atlanta Journal-Constitution. While the AJC is not immune to recent turbulence, it is expanding rather than contracting, going regional rather than doubling down on the Atlanta metro area.  What makes Morse even more intriguing to me is that he’s not a local paper guy: He comes to the role as the former head of CNN digital, Bloomberg TV and ABC digital. 

Eric asks why he was attracted by the challenge of revitalizing a legacy institution like the AJC, what it takes to rebuild trust in a brand like that, and whether his digital subscription strategy could offer a blueprint for the future of local news. 

He’s a persuasive guy. You’ll like this one.

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