Stop the presses!

Presses are expensive to operate these days, and consumers of tomorrow get nearly all of their information from the phones in their hands. So, the words on the paper that you have in your hands mark the AJC’s, and Atlanta’s, final print edition.

The AJC has played a significant role in pushing Atlanta forward in ways that only a printed newspaper could. The image of Constitution editor Ralph McGill on the front page, above the fold, nearly every day of the Civil Rights Era told Atlanta’s leaders their actions were being watched by citizens and would have consequences.

McGill wrote often about the Ku Klux Klan, which was operating openly in Georgia in the day. He described his disgust for its members, who “made jackasses of themselves, their city and their state,” and listed their actions with every egregious detail.

On the day after Atlanta’s the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, McGill declared King was “a free man killed by white slaves.”

“At the moment the triggerman fired, Martin Luther King was the free man. The white killer (or killers) was a slave to his own sense of inferiority, a slave to hatred, a slave to all the bloody instincts that surge in a brain when a human being decides to become a beast,” he wrote.

McGill’s columns not only won him the Pulitzer Prize, they prodded the entire country’s politics toward progress.

Other columnists followed McGill and made their own forward impact on the city and its leaders.

Eugene Patterson succeeded McGill as the Constitution’s editor and won a Pulitzer in 1967 for his own front-page editorials, including a series ripping the majority-white Democratic Georgia Legislature for refusing to seat state Rep.-elect Julian Bond, who was Black.

Patterson was also a primary reason then-Gov. Lester Maddox said the newspaper was “no more useful than a fishwrapper,” since Patterson once wrote that the segregationist governor was “a mere gadfly buzzing around the ears of horses pulling the carts of progress.”

Cynthia Tucker won yet another Pulitzer for the paper by writing as powerfully against Georgia’s restrictive voter ID laws as she did about the “cheap theatrics” of then-U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat from DeKalb. Compared to U.S. Rep. John Lewis, “It’s the difference between infamy and influence.”

My predecessor, Jim Galloway, refused to tolerate race-baiting and dog whistles from Georgia politicians, too, and often called out the increasingly fashionable style of politics “that rewards the intensity of one’s beliefs, even in the face of actual facts on the ground.”

But just as important as what he wrote, Jim also created the paper’s first-ever politics blog, a moment-by-moment news ticker of Georgia politics to feed the newly online audience the AJC needed to win over and serve. The blog drove conversations in the Capitol and decisions on the campaign trail. And there wasn’t an inch of newsprint to be found.

The blog has grown into morning and afternoon newsletters and a Georgia politics podcast.

It’s hard to believe we’re the ones turning out the lights on the print edition, after the McGills and Pattersons and Tuckers and Galloways that came before us. It’s even hard to decide if the job title “newspaper columnist” still fits if there’s not a newspaper anymore.

Unlike Atlanta, I actually am prone to nostalgia. I like to look back, even if it’s just to see how far we’ve come. I also have an admitted preference for reading a printed newspaper over the latest blast on my phone.

But the news is still the news. The truth is still the truth. Pushing leaders to do the right thing for Georgia still matters. And I hope you’ll remain our loyal readers in the digital world as we continue to do it all there, too.

Time marches on and so does Atlanta, always. The time has come to stop the presses.