Episode description:

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about Truth, Disinformation, and the Media hosted by Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

Media overall is in dire straits financially, as In Reality listeners are well aware. Local journalism has been the hardest hit: We’ve lost a third of the papers we had twenty years ago and continue to lose, on average, two a week. Most of the rest have been hollowed out.

Which makes today’s guest particularly interesting. Andrew Morse is the president and publisher of the 150-year-old Atlanta Journal-Constitution. While the AJC is not immune to recent turbulence, it is expanding rather than contracting, going regional rather than doubling down on the Atlanta metro area.  What makes Morse even more intriguing to me is that he’s not a local paper guy: He comes to the role as the former head of CNN digital, Bloomberg TV and ABC digital.

Eric asks why he was attracted by the challenge of revitalizing a legacy institution like the AJC, what it takes to rebuild trust in a brand like that, and whether his digital subscription strategy could offer a blueprint for the future of local news.

He’s a persuasive guy. You’ll like this one.

 

Transcript

 

Eric Schurenberg (00:01.504)
Andrew Morse, welcome to In Reality.

Andrew Morse (00:04.397)
Thanks, great to be here, Eric.

 

Eric Schurenberg (00:06.168)
It’s nice to have you. Now, you’re the president and publisher of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, one of the premier regional papers in the United States. You had a distinguished run at national TV and digital brands like Bloomberg and CNN and ABC. Now you’re at the AGC. Let’s just kind of ground us in the arc of things at the AGC. Tell us a bit about it and also one of the things that

I think all of us are aware of is that there’s a difference now in how a company like AJC shows up, the size of the newsroom, the size of the workforce, which is kind of a metaphor for how things have been going in legacy media. So tell us about the general constitution and where was it in terms of the newsroom, say 15 years ago versus now?

Andrew Morse (01:02.595)
Well, well, you know, I wouldn’t I’d start in a bit of a different place as opposed to looking at 15 years ago as opposed to now. I’d look at it. Where are we now as opposed to where we were two years ago? And we’re in the midst of doing something that I think is a bit counter to what a lot of the industry is is doing rather than, you know, retrenching and retreating and and cutting back. We’re leaning in and we’re in the midst of a really bold.

a really bold plan where we’ve got a clear mission, which is to be the most essential and engaging news source for people, not just of Atlanta, but of Atlanta, Georgia and the South. And to do that, we’ve got a vision to be able to transform what’s this is a storied 150 year old brand from this great storied institution, daily newspaper into a modern media company. And as a result, we’re investing heavily in growth and digital transformation. So to your point, you know,

The AJC has had a role in life in Atlanta, you know, for over a century, and it’s been really important to the city and to the region, to the country. know, local news, as we know, has been battered a little bit. Local newspapers have been battered a little bit. We’ve read a lot about news deserts and the struggles of a lot of institutions. But again, we believe very strongly it doesn’t have to be the case. And so we, over the last two years, have been investing really heavily in making sure the next hundred years for the AJC are as impactful as the last one.

Eric Schurenberg (02:34.326)
All right, well, good. I like your optimism. For a lot of people, think that a little reality check is also helpful in the sense that this is not the institution that it was before. You’re talking about a digital transformation from an institution. This reputation was built on dead trees and great reporting and being a storied metropolitan paper. Tell us a little bit about what the digital transformation means specifically.

Andrew Morse (03:10.083)
Well, those terms get thrown around a lot and I think it oftentimes gets misused. you know, unfortunately for lot of outlets, it’s still, let’s take what’s going in the, in the newspaper, as you would say, the dead tree edition and put it out on a, on a website and let it stand. And, and, you know, we are so well beyond that. Digital transformation is really fundamentally shifting, A, the way an organization works, B, the culture of an organization.

C, the way an organization measures success. D, the types of talent and skills that you have. And it begins with setting a a clear North Star in terms of the organization’s priorities. So our North Star goal is growing digital subscribers. And the reason we’re focused on that is because we have the ability, thanks to the power of the internet, to inform, empower, and engage people, not just in Atlanta.

Eric Schurenberg (03:54.702)
Okay.

Andrew Morse (04:05.015)
but in Atlanta, Georgia and the South. So it begins with setting a North Star goal. Then when you’re clear on who your market is, who your audience is, and the products and the content that you’re building for them, then you’re able to determine, okay, what’s the right platform that we have to build? What are the right technical capabilities you have to build? What’s the right content? So it’s really shifting the whole organization into a mindset of pursuing the North Star goal building digital subscribers. And then there are a couple key elements. You need world-class product developers, technologists, analytics experts, data scientists, alongside a great newsroom whose job it is to create really compelling original reporting and journalism. If you just invest in the journalism and you don’t have the right platforms and the right technical capabilities, the journalism won’t reach the people it needs to reach.

If you just invest in building a great technology platform without original content, that doesn’t do it either. And so in order, in order to drive forward, you need to align around clear goals and then a real cross-functional product minded growth strategy.

Eric Schurenberg (05:17.312)
Let’s dive into the question of trust. Kind of the common wisdom after the 2024 election was that legacy media is no longer the media, that influencers have much greater pull. Many of them have audiences that are ridiculously large compared to the circulation of some traditional newsrooms. Make the case for a standards-based

legacy newsroom like the AJC versus kind of the perhaps, well, at least perceptually, arguably in the eyes of some users, more authentic influencer news network.

Andrew Morse (06:01.485)
Well, I like to say oftentimes in both business and in life, we like to think there’s a difference between perception and reality. Perception often becomes reality. And I think we in the industry, rightfully, understandably, have had a hard time wrapping our heads around the notion that a perception exists, that really important

institutions that have invested heavily in quality journalism and quality journalists for a long time somehow have failed the public or no longer trusted by the public. It’s been cognitive dissonance, been hard for the industry to wrap, cetera. I think we have to look in the mirror a little bit and say, well, how did we arrive here and why did we arrive here? And I think there are several fundamental reasons for it. I I think one is the disaggregation of sources and the

Power of the internet obviously made it easier for people to consume whatever they want and exist a little bit in an echo chamber. And so when you gravitate towards that, it’s disaggregated eyeballs and people have gravitated towards tribes and comfort. So that’s, think, one thing that’s real that we’ve all had to struggle with. On top of that, though, think secondarily, over the course of the last decade, we have seen, arguably from both Republicans and from Democrats, efforts to discredit media organizations when the news, the facts, didn’t suit them. And it’s happened on both sides. Now one could argue one politician or some politicians have done it more aggressively than others for sure. But I think you can find no shortage of examples of politicians trying to undermine…

…credibility in the media. And by the way, it’s happened a lot in the last 10 years, but you can look all the way back to the really bitter election between Jefferson and Adams, for examples of both of them trying to undermine the media at the time. So this is not new, but along with the technological change that’s happened. But the third is, Eric, that I think is really important, is we also have to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, have we contributed to this perception? And I don’t think we have played an error-free ball as an industry.

Andrew Morse (08:20.523)
So now we’re at this point where we need to earn our trust back. We’d like to think we don’t have to as an industry, but frankly we do and we shouldn’t have to, but we do. And so that just is going to require a playing error free ball every day, but B making sure we’re really delivering value to people. And that value should come through fact-based, unbiased, distinctive, original reporting. There is no substitute for that. And if we do that, people will know the difference between that and somebody just bloviating with a microphone.

Eric Schurenberg (08:55.032)
So tell me a little bit more, I mean, you’ve raised a lot of really interesting questions there, Andrew. So let’s dig a little deeper. What were the errors that the legacy media made? And I assume you’re talking not just about the occasional factual error, but something deeper, something more about perhaps the attitude that we conveyed.

Andrew Morse (09:18.903)
Well, so to continue the analogy, a little bit of error, error free ball. It’s interesting because, you know, so what I would play baseball as a kid, or when I coached my kids baseball team, I would always say physical errors happen. It’s the mental errors that we can’t have any of. you know, organizations will make a mistake. Nobody is infallible and reporters will make mistakes. Editors will make mistakes. Organizations will make mistakes. We don’t like them, but

It happens and you brush yourself off, you get up and you go forward. The unforced errors, the mental errors are more challenging. I think increasingly as attacks mounted over the course of last decade, and look, I think President Trump’s approach to the press in his first administration was very different than past presidents. And what began, I think, is an effort to simply identify…

…where the president and his policies in his first terms might have veered from the facts, which I think is the job of journalism and job of journalistic outlets, I think it veered into advocacy. I think there was moral indignation on the part of some outlets and on the part of some personalities, understandably, I think, in certain cases. But once you cross that line into advocacy, it becomes very hard to dial back. And I think that’s what…

…we’re reckoning with a little bit. Now again, not reversible, but I think unless you acknowledge that, you know, we can, we, the media allowed at times, we played into the attacks on the media. And a lot of times when people are attacking you, the best thing you need to do is to hold your ground and stick to your guns. And I do think that to some degree, the media, quote unquote, I even hate that term, you the mainstream media, we got a little bit off our game.

Eric Schurenberg (11:12.622)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Morse (11:16.237)
But I think you see a lot of organizations right now returning to their roots. My colleague, Jim Bandeje, and Mike Allen, the founders of Axios, have a great term for it. They want their coverage of this administration to be clinical. And that’s what I tell our folks as well here at the AJC. We want to report. We want to be precise. We want to be specific. And I think if we do that, we will deliver value to people who want and need our journals.

Eric Schurenberg (11:47.438)
Clinical is a term that I hadn’t come across that I appreciate that. There have been arguments that objectivity is unreasonable to expect, that every newsroom, every reporter brings their biases and that the solution is perhaps not to cloak yourself in claims of objectivity, but just to be frank about where you’re coming from.

It sounds like that’s not what you aspire to at AJC.

Andrew Morse (12:19.383)
Yeah, look, I don’t buy that. So every month I write a letter to our subscribers. And sometimes it’s about being related to politics, sometimes it’s not. When it is related to politics, I get a lot of responses. And there’s some people who respond who think that the AJC has a left leaning perspective and some people respond and they think we have a right leaning perspective. And my answer to them…

…to all of them is the same, which is that when it comes to our reporting, the big J journalism that we do, we stand for a relentless pursuit of the truth and the facts. And that’s what we tell our reporters. We want the truth, we want the facts, we want to present them as such. Do we get it perfect in every story? No. Or sometimes are there adjectives that we don’t need? Sure. Sometimes are there headlines that are, you know, we’d like to pull back?

Yeah, but those are, you know, we can work on those. And I say, so that’s the job of our reporting of our newsroom. In addition to that, I feel very strongly that we need to have a really robust opinion section digitally and in our newspaper and on our podcasts. We want to have an opinion capability to make sure we are surfacing a broad range of opinions and perspectives. We don’t want that to be an echo chamber. We want our opinion section to…

…challenge the way people believe. Again, that’s not, we shouldn’t be there to advocate for one worldview. think yesterday we saw an announcement from the Washington Post where their editorials, their editorial page now will have a specific worldview. We don’t want that. We want you to be able to see the opinions and perspectives from the AJC and get a broader range of issues, opinions, and perspectives.

Eric Schurenberg (14:00.387)
Hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (14:13.666)
Let’s talk about business models and the business of journalism in this modern digital disrupted era. When we spoke yesterday, you talked about four kinds of business models, which I thought was a very useful way to kind of categorize the news organizations that exist now. Would you like to run through that?

Andrew Morse (14:37.581)
Sure. And it is a bit of a construct because I do think what’s important for any news organization, and I don’t refer to the AJC as a newspaper anymore. I refer to it again as a modern media company. And so I think it’s important as we talk about these outlets for any news organization, whether you’re legacy television, legacy print, legacy digital, to figure out again, what is the business model that will allow you to be successful? So you have

…

Number one is a number of outlets that are owned by large corporations. So you have CNN, which is owned by Warner Brothers Discovery now, ABC News, has been owned for decades by the Walt Disney Company, NBC News, although they’re splitting off their cable channels, NBC News, which has been owned by Comcast, so on and so forth. There are great benefits in some cases to being a part of those big companies. You have resources, you have scale, you have visibility, you have access to bigger sales organizations and their drawbacks, entangling alliances, complicated relationships, shifting priorities, shifting budgets, quarterly earnings pressures, but that’s one model. The second model is, I see, which is unfortunately the model that’s plagued a lot of the newspaper industry, is private equity ownership, where private equity is swooped in, bought a lot of the companies that owned many newspapers.

And the role of private equity is to find value for shareholders and to take costs out of businesses and to drive efficiencies. And I don’t think that that’s a playbook to the kind of growth and transformation that news organizations need. And so that’s why you’re seeing, I think, a lot of the struggles from those individual organizations really to find audiences and subscribers. The third model is nonprofit.

You have to be honest about the addressable audience. You have to be honest about the kind of scale that you could achieve. And unless you can grow a substantial subscriber base, you probably aren’t going to be able to grow a profitable business because ad revenue can be so volatile. So pursuing a good nonprofit model, there are a number of outlets out there that have done this very well, whether it’s the Texas Tribune or the Baltimore Banner or the current here in Georgia. Like those are, those are great businesses that should really be applauded. Mississippi Today.

Andrew Morse (17:04.599)
You know, these are really, really great organizations, but there’s a cap on how big they can be. And they’ve determined we, we, we shouldn’t and can’t be profitable. Then there’s the fourth path. And this is what we’re trying to do. And I would sort of say it’s along the lines of what we’re trying to do is follow the, the, the business model innovation of the New York times. If you can identify it a big enough addressable audience, invest in the right product, technology, analytics and marketing capabilities to grow those audiences, invest in the kind of world-class reporting and content you need, there is a path to being able to support a scalable, sustainable, and profitable business. The Times has proven that out on a global scale really well. We are trying to take some of those fundamentals and execute that on a local and regional and statewide, and in some cases, broader range.

The key to that, and I think part of, the Times of course is a publicly traded company now, but they don’t have a corporate portfolio they have to be mindful of. They wake up every morning focused on the New York Times. We’re fortunate to have private ownership, and so we wake up every morning focused on the AJC. So that makes us, our model, a little bit different from the other three that I laid out.

Eric Schurenberg (18:19.362)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (18:23.694)
The idea of expanding what had been a Metro brand into a regional brand has been embraced by a few other newsrooms. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, for example, is now the Minnesota Star Tribune. And on the nonprofit side, you see Texas Tribune, which aspires to be statewide and not just focused on Austin or CalMatters in California. It is a way to broaden the audience.

At Inc. and Fast Company, when I ran those brands, the strategy was to diversify revenue streams as sort of advertising, which we had relied on, became challenged. And as you noted earlier, kind of hard to count on, we looked for other things like things that were kind of different from the basic journalism model. So recognition programs and subscriptions and data and things like that. Is that diversification of revenue streams part of the model at AJC?

Andrew Morse (19:29.983)
It is, but I think it’s a lag. here’s, and again, to me, it gets at the heart of kind of digital transformation and business model transformation that yes, absolutely diversifying our revenue is really important, but the North Star goal is growing digital subscribers. There’s a Meredith Levin, the CEO of the Times has a great quote, which I use a lot, which is that you’re advertising business should run on the same high-actane gas as your subscription business. And again, fundamentally, the beauty of leaning into a subscription business is that A, you have repeatable and dependable revenue that you’re growing over time. So that built-in revenue stream is really important. But two, as you grow that subscriber base and you begin to understand…

…the affinities of your audience and the engagement patterns of your audience, you’re able to deliver better products and services to them, and you’re able to know more about them. And as you deliver them more value and they engage more deeply, you gain much better insights that are much more valuable to advertisers. And then once you have those deeply engaged audiences, you’re able to offer your podcast to them. You’re able to offer your live events to them. You’re able to consider distribution revenue. the revenue diversification…

…comes through a product led approach. And so the long answer to your very good question is yes, we’re focused on diversifying revenue, but we get there by laser focusing on building our digital subscribers. the one note that I would have too, that’s really key to that whole strategy, Eric, is really like, look, lots of places have desired to be quote unquote, regional. We’re not trying essentially really necessarily to do that either. So when we…

When we got here, I drew a dartboard on a whiteboard in my office and at the middle of it is Atlanta. The next ring out is Georgia. And the next string out is the South. And as we began to size the audience and thinking about the reputation the AJC has always had, where we’ve been kind of a paper of note, an organization of note throughout the South, we have a distinctive growth strategy predicated on picking up subscribers in each of those three areas, but tied….

…to very specific audiences and products. So it’s not just as our, we’re in Georgia, come to us, it’s we’ve got a very specific product suite in each geography that we think will bring in new subscribers.

Eric Schurenberg (22:02.126)
Do you have newsrooms spread around the state? Is that what you’re describing?

Andrew Morse (22:06.141)
Well, we’ve opened up small bureaus in, we’ve got a bureau chief in Savannah, bureau chief in Macon, bureau chief in Athens to start. But again, I’d look at it a little bit differently. as we have tried to look at the audience and we’ve tried to figure out where are going to subscribers going to come from, not just geographically, but where they interested in? So as we look at our data and we look at where our audiences and subscribers, particularly where they engage with,

There are a couple of advantages that the AJC has. Georgia is the center of the political universe. It has been for the last several cycles. And so we’ve made a real bet and investment in a brand called Politically Georgia newsletter podcast events, great original reporting. And so we have found we’re growing subscribers, not just in Atlanta and Savannah and Macon and Augusta, but in Washington, DC.

and in New York City and in parts of California. The second area of focus for us is Atlanta’s really unique and dynamic black community. So we’ve launched a new product called UATL. It’s our answer to cooking and games. Atlanta has a dynamic and vibrant black community. There’s a slogan, Atlanta influences everything. So with that product, we’re picking up subscribers, not just in Atlanta, throughout Georgia, but in places like Charlotte and Memphis and Baltimore.

You know, The Atlanta Braves have fans and followers throughout the Southeast. So through the strength of our Braves coverage or the University of Georgia football coverage, we’re picking up subscribers. again, yes, we’ve got bureau chiefs in these cities, which is really great, but the growth strategy is really predicated on delivering really unique value in each of these product lines.

Eric Schurenberg (23:56.642)
want to shift a little bit to the question of journalism as a public service. And the observation that a number of people have made is that standards-based publications, so the New York Times and the Washington Post, the AJC, have instituted paywalls. And they have the kind of reputation that allows them to block people who, after a certain number, I’m not exactly sure what the model is at AJC, but after a certain number of visits, you have to subscribe or you can’t read any further. The upshot of that is that standards-based journalism becomes paywalled and blocks some readers and journalism organizations or influencers that don’t adhere to standards tend to be free. So there tends to be an imbalance in the quality of information that is available to the public.

I was speaking to a reader at Columbia Business School just the other night who said that’s how he determines what his newsfeed is, is where he can get the information for free, regardless of kind of the quality of it. Doesn’t seem to do any investigation further than that. What’s your response to that complaint?

Andrew Morse (25:17.027)
Look, I think that’s why the news industry is in such a terrible, terrible state and having an existential crisis. The notion that news should be free is a relatively new and novel concept. Nobody debated whether or not credible news sources or legacy news sources, standards-based news sources, as you said, ought to be free when William Randolph Hearst was minting money and printing newspapers.

Nobody questioned whether news should be free when, know, the news should be profitable, I should say, when, you know, the broadcast news networks, you know, were, you know, minting money as well. It’s when the industry was disruptive that all of a sudden this, and as the internet commoditized information, that all of a sudden this concept arose that news should be free. News serves a very important public need.

But you used to walk down the street and pop a quarter into a box and take out a paper where you used to subscribe to a paper that would be dropped at the, you know, your driveway. And so I think, I think we need to begin to re, you know, re reimagine this notion that because what we do is important, it should be free. And in fact, I believe you get what you pay for. And so the challenge for us back to something we talked about before, is to prove our value and to prove our worth. Paywall, again, paywall is not bad. Now also the notion of a quote unquote paywall has been a bit clunky. We have the ability and we do today to offer, you know, to be dynamic with what we are charging to subscribers and what we’re giving away for free. So on important stories, on some news that breaks, we’ll give away that story for free. If there’s something like a hurricane and there’s critical information we want to get out to people.

We make that available, but for the kind of premium journalism and well-resourced reporting and quality content and podcasts that we have to spend money on to produce, sorry, it’s not gonna be free. And I think it’s incumbent upon us to work really, really hard to get that Columbia student you mentioned and help him understand the value that comes through our product and the difference between that and… some guy bloviating with a microphone.

Eric Schurenberg (27:43.896)
I couldn’t agree more, thank you… the problem is I’m already in the camp and the audience that needs to get the quality journalism from your institution and others and become an informed citizen and sort of informed actor in reality doesn’t understand necessarily how newsrooms work doesn’t do the kind of vetting that is probably required now in the 21st century to understand whether what’s popping up in your TikTok newsfeed is truthful or not. Do you have any efforts underway to increase media literacy? Do you see that as an essential part of this climb back towards the level of trust that that we once enjoyed in our profession and that we need to reestablish.

Andrew Morse (28:46.667)
Well, Eric, it’s why I’m here talking to you today. It’s, I think these issues are really important and I look for every opportunity that I can take, you know, on a podcast like this with an audience like your audience to talk about how important these issues are. think, again, I think, look, it’s the old Einstein quote, you know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. I care deeply about this industry, about this craft, about the importance of journalism, free information. And I look at how we have operated a little bit in recent years and we’ve operated from a defensive crouch, from a woe is me place, from a beleaguered place. we want to cast blame and we want to point fingers and we want to beat our breasts and wonder how things got so bad. And in actuality, I say like, okay, well, let’s do something about it, prove our worth.

Let’s prove our value. Let’s recommit to what’s most important. Let’s not whine about the fact that people don’t like the fact that we have a paywall. Let’s make sure that we’re delivering people enough values so that they feel really good about paying for the content that we deliver to them. it’s a little bit of a tough love that I think there are a lot of media literacy programs. There are a lot of big conferences where thinkers and leaders gather to talk about challenges with funding and their calls for consortiums. And again, I don’t mean to criticize it. It is all so well-intentioned. And it’s also important that we collectively get behind the need to support great journalism. But the reality is we’re doing great journalism. There are outlets every day, local, national, global, that do great reporting. If we allow people to just kick us in the teeth every day.

It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So part of my effort and our institutional effort on media literacy is to have conversations like this, but it’s also to lean into what we think is a viable business strategy, a sound growth strategy, and what we believe very strongly every day is original impactful journalism. And so if you haven’t checked out the AJC, check it out because we think it’s valuable.

Andrew Morse (31:11.895)
I think the best way to do media literacy is not necessarily to lecture. It’s to just roll up your sleeves and do the work.

Eric Schurenberg (31:19.788)
Hmm. What gives you hope?

Andrew Morse (31:24.589)
I get hope all the time when you see signals, when I see the New York Times adding 350,000 digital subscribers in a quarter, that gives me hope. When I see the Baltimore banner emerging from the ashes in a town that was a really proud news town and emerging from the ashes to do something impactful, that gives me hope. When I see a startup like the Mississippi Today, which has a fantastic editor and founders who believe deeply in quality nonprofit journalism. When I see them winning Pulitzer prizes, that gives me hope. And every single day when I walk into the newsroom of the AJC and I look around and I see people, reporters who have been here for decades, sitting next to young journalists who are in their first jobs, turning out reporting that is not only growing subscribers in Atlanta, but beginning to resonate throughout Georgia and the South and the rest of the country.

It gives me hope. There is hope all around, Eric. But if we wake up every day and we read the incessant newsletters about the media, the media loves to talk about the media. And if we just believe everything is doom and gloom, it will be doom and gloom. So I’m a bit of an eternal optimist or a happy warrior, however you want to frame it. But I don’t think this fight is done.

Eric Schurenberg (32:46.432)
All right. Well, I think this particular podcast episode is done and I can’t think of a better place to leave it, Andrew, on that ringing endorsement of standards-based journalism. Good luck to you at the AJC and the work you’re doing there.

Andrew Morse (32:51.767)
Yeah

Andrew Morse (33:02.327)
Thanks, Eric. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

---

Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Mar 13 2025

---

Share this episode: