money didn’t change me

Figures that the one time I pick up a copy of Atlanta magazine, they’d run a lengthy, fairly interesting history of the last 20 years at the AJC. It’s labeled a profile of the AJC’s editor-in-chief, but Fennessy’s article delves into the events surrounding the paper’s late-80s pinnacle and subsequent decline. He rightly calls out the AJC’s transparent, cash-grabbing attempts at pseudo-hip posturing (the AccessAtlanta section, the cheesy front-page weather reports), showing them to be demonstrative of a tendency toward continual reinvention at the paper.

Also bearing in mind this item, an obvious problem with a wire-centric newspaper emerges. I can read all the AP/Reuters/Cox articles I want nearly anywhere. The media scene is saturated with wire copy. Why would I want to buy a newspaper that prints the same stuff I could read in hundreds of agglomerator Web sites, not to mention every small chain newspaper in the region? Charity? Nostalgia?