Atlanta News Outlet Aims for Half a Million Digital Subscribers in Under Four Years

livemint.com:

The new leader of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wants to increase the publication’s digital subscribers more than eightfold by the end of 2026, an ambitious goal he aims to reach through expanded local-news coverage and new products. “In the last 5-10 years, we’ve just focused on Atlanta," said Andrew Morse, a former CNN digital executive who took over as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s new president and publisher in January.

He said the publication plans to hire about 100 people in the coming years and place editorial staff in cities like Macon, Savannah, Columbus, Augusta and Athens, where it determined that local coverage has eroded. The publication is also planning to add new products dedicated to sports, Black culture, southern cooking and politics, including new video and audio features—most of which would be available exclusively to subscribers.

Morse said the moves are part of an effort to reach 500,000 digital subscribers largely across the Southeast by the end of 2026, up from around 60,000 today. The expansion will be funded in part by the $100 million that Atlanta Journal-Constitution parent Cox Enterprises recently allocated to the publication, a person familiar with the funding said.

Morse noted the publication only launched its paywall in 2020 and is therefore starting from a low digital-subscriber baseline, which helps explain the rapid pace of growth that he expects. The pace of subscriber growth he envisions is nearly twice as rapid as what the New York Times, a national publication with a global reach, experienced about three years after it launched its paywall.

From that point on, it took the Times about seven years to see its digital-subscriber base rise more than eightfold. Morse said that