Dear Gwinnett Reader,

Today we announced to our staff plans to discontinue our targeted community sections. This has particular resonance in Gwinnett, where we have produced a daily news section for 20 years.

While the Gwinnett News section, along with our weekly NorthSide, NorthWest and CityLife sections, will stop publishing Aug. 10, I want to assure you that our coverage here and in those areas, will continue.

We will keep reporters and editors in our Norcross office and they will continue to file stories daily for the newspaper as well as for ajc.com. We are expanding the Metro and Sports sections to allow for more news from Gwinnett. The Gwinnett channel on ajc.com is already our most visited community site, and we expect it to continue to build.

The decision to discontinue any section is never easy. It is particularly difficult when one has as much history as the Gwinnett section. However, this move reflects the evolving media habits of our readers — Gwinnett is a particularly wired, online-savvy community — and the challenging business climate we are in. Costs to produce and distribute the newspaper are at an all-time high — particularly paper and fuel expenses. As AJC Publisher John Mellott describes in his letter, the AJC, like most newspapers in the country, is making tough but necessary decisions to position itself for future growth.

The AJC is the leading source of news and information in the metro area. The number of people who read the AJC in print or online on any given week — 2.2 million metro adults — is larger than it's ever been, up 7 percent over last year. And we are determined to keep expanding our audience by listening to our readers and evolving in ways that make most sense to you.

We have enjoyed producing the Gwinnett News section over the years and we know many of you have enjoyed reading it. Now it's time to move to a new era in our news delivery here. We appreciate your readership and look forward to your feedback as we make this transition. If you have suggestions, please e-mail us at gwinnettcomments@ajc.com.

Sincerely,

Julia Wallace, Editor