No More Ink-Smudged Fingers

I was raised on newspapers.

I was a news geek at a young age. My mother says I traced newspaper headlines as a 4-year-old.

Growing up, the Chicago Sun-Times landed in our driveway every morning. (The Chicago Tribune, the other morning paper, was less popular in the Jewish community, as its publisher, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, was viewed, with good reason, as antisemitic.)

My father brought the New York Times home from work. At our local public library, I read the Chicago Daily News, an afternoon paper, along with newspapers from elsewhere in the country.

I wrote for my mimeographed junior high school newspaper and for my high school and college papers. During a graduate school semester, I reported from Washington, D.C., for newspapers in Iowa and Montana.

There was little question what I wanted to be when I grew up.

My professional career began at a newspaper that covered cities, towns, and rural areas of Iowa and Illinois along the Mississippi River.

I started as the nightside police reporter, working a shift that began at 5 p.m. and ended at 1 a.m., or later. Those hours meant that I could go down to the press room, usually standing on the stairs, and watch as the first editions of the morning paper — perhaps with my byline on the front page — rolled off those high-speed, deafening machines, and were bundled for delivery.

(An older generation of those presses starred in the last scene of the 1952 black-and-white film, “Deadline — U.S.A.,” in which Humphrey Bogart, as the crusading editor of a newspaper about to be sold at auction, delivers one of my favorite closing lines. You can find it online.)

After being caught in a layoff, I succumbed to entreaties to “cross the street” to television news, where I remained for more than 30 years.

Six months after we married, Audrey and I left television news jobs in Kansas City for a study program in Israel. I quit to work freelance as CNN’s Jerusalem bureau producer. Audrey came on board after completing the program. When we moved to Atlanta 38 years ago, to work for the network, one of the first things we did was to subscribe to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Reading the AJC has been a daily course in Southern history, politics, and culture. Its reporters and columnists have expanded my understanding of a region that — to a Jewish boy raised in the Chicago area — was, in some regards, a foreign country.

Now the paper in that newspaper is going away. As of Jan. 1, 2026 — 157 years after the Atlanta Constitution was founded in 1868 — the AJC will be digital only.

We are among the dinosaurs on our block, where the number of houses with a newspaper in the driveway, daily or Sunday, can be counted on one hand. The AJC has about 115,000 total subscribers, of whom 75,000 are online only. As the latter figure has increased steadily, the number of print subscribers has plummeted, to less than half what it was five years ago.

The economics of the newspaper business, to put it mildly, suck. According to the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, more than 3,400 print newspapers have closed in the past 20 years. Of the remaining 4,800-plus newspapers, 80 percent are weeklies. Only one-third of the 1,033 daily newspapers remaining in 2024 still printed seven days a week.

The Medill Local News Initiative also counted 650 digital-only news sites. In the past decade, Atlanta has seen a proliferation of digital outlets focusing on local and state news.

The AJC will be the largest metropolitan daily to go digital only, at least for now.

The paper is thrown from a car onto our driveway around daybreak. At breakfast, I read the sports section first, with my plate on the paper. I thumb through the other sections, looking for items of interest, stories I may have overlooked in my online perusal of various news sources.

I have been reading newspapers online for nearly 30 years, but I will miss the tactile sensation of holding the AJC broadsheet. There will be no more fingers smudged with traces of printer’s ink.

The AJC offered long-term subscribers an iPad and a commemorative book as thank you gifts.

In a letter published in the AJC, one such reader said: “I’ll accept the iPad with much appreciation, but I am not sure how easy it will be to share the reading at the breakfast table. Although coffee spills may have made a morning mess, the newspaper always did dry; I am not so sure the iPad will be as forgiving.”

As I contemplate the cessation of the AJC’s print edition, I close with a nod to the AJC’s legendary sportswriter, Furman Bisher, who habitually ended his columns with a word found in the Book of Psalms, a Hebrew word whose various translations include “stop and think about that.”

“Selah.”