Gridlock Guy: End of print is reminiscent of Skycopter’s grounding

The news that many suspected but few knew finally broke just before Labor Day. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution told readers and the world that its daily print edition would cease on New Year’s Eve.

One can bet that most people learned of this print benchmark from a mobile device. The feelings it evokes remind me of when the WSB Skycopter took its last flight at this time last year.

As I wrote at the time, the cessation of Atlanta’s only traffic helicopter seemed inevitable, but was sad nonetheless.

WSB Radio pioneered airborne traffic reporting in Atlanta over 60 years ago. The Skycopter once flew in the skies of the 1980s and ‘90s when many TV and radio stations — even music radio stations — had their own news and traffic copters. But as mergers and acquisitions expanded in the late ‘90s and as technology advanced at a hyper pace, what was once a necessity became a nice extra.

And just as it was in the 1960s, WSB Radio was flying over traffic solo by the late 2000s.

Reporters like me could easily find out traffic conditions that used to be impossible to know without a firsthand witness calling them in. Google and Apple Maps, along with the extraordinary late-2000s proliferation of online traffic cameras, allowed traffic anchors to cover the south like kudzu.

Now where have we heard that phrase?

I literally spent more time looking at my phone for new traffic information in the Skycopter, which I sat in regularly for over 10 years, than I did looking out of its giant windows. The Skycopter give us some exclusivity, but it did so far less often than when I started my career in 2004.

This story is similar for the print edition of this fair newspaper. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is undoubtedly the print voice of record in Atlanta news. Birthed like a paper phoenix in Reconstruction Era Atlanta, the morning Constitution and the afternoon Journal (now combined) meticulously recorded Atlanta’s rise from a small railroad town to a world-class metropolis.

But remaining a viable recorder of Georgia’s capital requires change. This paper has repeatedly reimagined its online presence during the 30-year supernova known as the internet.

My recent years as a columnist (and subscriber) have seen the debut of a new app and a major investment in multimedia assets. Thorough podcasts, glossy social media videos and documentaries are all part of the AJC’s recent evolving repertoire.

Holding a printed paper is nice. Carrying one and then having a few weeks of papers stack up is not. Daily papers are also static, whereas the online edition morphs with the news cycle.

And the media landscape is much more fractured and niche, meaning the revenue to keep a printed edition and it be profitable is simply not there.

Really, as soon as people could read the news on their phones, the distant sirens sounded. Change was rapidly on the way.

The same change happened with smartphones and traffic reporting, too. People were starting to get instant microreports on their own commutes and did not need radio reporters like me to tell them every single part of their story.

But drivers still need details that their GPS apps cannot give — the severity of an incident or what a reporter is exactly seeing in the moment on a camera. Context and expertise in heightened situations are far less replaceable than generic information on an average day.

The delivery method has changed in both the print and broadcast media, as that rich information needs to be available immediately. While radio and TV can still point to their traditional, linear broadcasts as the main vessel for their audience, newspapers cannot say the same about their print editions.