What We Lose When the Presses Stop

There won’t be any commemorative front pages from the AJC after December 31.

Before my mother died, she gave me a box crammed with Ralph Ellis keepsakes she’d collected over the years. Report cards. The hospital bill for my birth ($51.50). Vacation Bible School graduation certificates. My childhood is well documented. 

My favorite things are yellowed clippings from The Mountaineer, my hometown paper in Waynesville, NC, such as the three-paragraph story with a headline that says, “Ralph Ellis Is Honored At Birthday Party.” 

Mom (a.k.a. Hazel Bowen Ellis) wrote the story about my third birthday party, sent the information to the paper, clipped it out, and saved it for decades. It documented that she did her duty as a mother in our little Southern town in 1955. She could have told her friends, but having it appear in the paper made it real in a way that conversation doesn’t. (You can read more about these birthday stories on this page under the headline “The Newsmaker.”)

This is not a small-town phenomenon. Atlantans buy whole editions of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution when something important happens, such as Elvis dying, 9/11, or Sid Bream sliding into home when the Braves won the 1992 National League pennant. I’ll never forget the day after Obama was elected president, when people lined up outside the AJC building to buy the paper with the historic headline.

An actual, physical newspaper prove that something important happened in a way that digital news can’t touch—because you can’t touch digital news. It’s on a screen. You can print it, but it’s just not the same.

There won’t be any commemorative front pages from the AJC after December 31. That’s when the AJC ends the print product and goes digital all the way. If Mom was alive and living in Atlanta, she wouldn’t be happy.