The closing of the Atlanta Civic Circle feels like a death in the family.
SaportaReport helped launch the Atlanta Civic Circle in 2018, providing a place where journalists could do “deep dive” reporting on issue of critical importance in the Atlanta region. (We announced the concept at a Commerce Club event in December 2017). ACC received its nonprofit status in 2018, and SaportaReport nurtured the nonprofit news operation until it established its independent website in January 2021.
At the time, SaportaReport called the ACC a sister site, so it really was a member of the family.
The core leadership included Bill Bolling, ACC’s first chair, who had led the effort to put together the nonprofit organization. I served as a senior advisor, offering SaportaReport’s assets to help launch the Atlanta Civic Circle.
Britton Edwards served as director of ACC, assisted by several board members, including Lauri Strauss, Ayesha Khanna, Lesley Grady, Doug Shipman, Peter Aman and Saba Long, who later became its executive director. Derek Prall served as editor until he switched to become editor of SaportaReport.
We brought on Sean Keenan to cover affordable housing. We also focused on democracy, creating a voters’ guide in 2021 for the municipal elections.
Then, in the spring of 2022, board members expressed concern that there was confusion in the community about SaportaReport (a for-profit) and Atlanta Civic Circle (a nonprofit). So, we made a mutual, but difficult, decision to part ways.
Even though I was no longer involved, I was proud to see ACC evolve into an important source of local news in the areas of housing and democracy. In family terms, it was as if a baby I had helped birth had earned its wings and left the nest.
Ayesha Khanna, who had succeeded Bolling as ACC’s board chair in December 2024, reached out, saying that she and Bill wanted to visit with me on May 25 to talk about ACC on background. That’s when they told me ACC would be shutting down within a week.
A week later, Khanna posted a note on ACC’s website announcing the site was shutting down. Bolling, Khanna and I got back together on June 3 to review what happened.
Bottom line, these are tough days to be in journalism. Gone are the days when metro daily papers made a healthy profit from classified and retail advertising, so they could support robust news organizations. I was fortunate to be part of the glory days of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1981 to 2008, when I took a buyout. Then in February 2009, I launched SaportaReport while also contributing to the Atlanta Business Chronicle.
Whether you’re a for-profit or nonprofit news site, the challenges today are real.
We are all on a journey seeking to develop a model to keep local journalism sustainable while providing valuable information that strengthens our community.
The Atlanta Civic Circle’s challenges became almost insurmountable when it lost its nonprofit status. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, ACC’s latest 990 tax filing was for 2021, when Britton Edwards and I were managing the enterprise.
“It certainly wasn’t helpful,” Khanna acknowledged. “While that was an administrative lapse, that’s not the issue that played out in the closing ACC.”
In her mind, the problem was the inability to secure consistent funding to sustain its work. “There’s fragility among nonprofits in the journalism ecosystem,” she said.
Sadly, the closing of Atlanta Civic Circle has left its two main journalists, Keenan (housing) and Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon (democracy), without an outlet for their reporting.
“I just lost my most reliable source of income,” Marazzi Sassoon said in a phone interview. “A voice just left the conversation in Atlanta.”
No other media outlet has a reporter dedicated to housing or democracy, which leaves a void in the city.
“There have been big rounds of layoffs in corporate media and a collapse of nonprofit media,” said Marazzi Sassoon, who added that it’s a reflection of society not valuing journalism.
Keenan said the timing couldn’t be worse as the community is trying to understand the Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative, the extension of the tax allocation districts and who to vote for while we’re in the middle of the midterm elections.
“Our voters’ guide and our explainer on the primary were among the most-read stories of the year,” Marazzi Sassoon said.
I wish SaportaReport was financially secure to hire them both, but alas, we’re not. As a sign of the times, both said they’ve been down this road several times before.
Keenan used to write for Creative Loafing when it had an active news team. He also wrote for Curbed Atlanta until it pulled out of the market. Patch used to have a robust team of local journalists. Months after ceasing its print publication, the AJC had another round of layoffs, this time affecting 25 people in the newsroom. HealthBeat ended its Atlanta newsroom. The AP just cut 20 people, including Jeff Amy, a political journalist in town.
Sadly, the list goes on.
Let me share some bright spots.
Keith Pepper, who purchased the Reporter Newspapers in December 2020 and rebranded those papers as Rough Draft, is showing there’s still a hunger and market for local news.
“I’m paying five times as many people as I was when I bought Rough Draft,” said Pepper, who has the tagline: “We give people the news they need and the stories they crave.”
While Rough Draft, a for-profit, still has a monthly print product, it has doubled down on providing multiple newsletters that cater to a myriad of local interests.
“The newsletter is the new morning paper,” Pepper said.
Another success story in the making is the Georgia Trust for Local News, which has found a sweet spot. The Georgia Trust, a nonprofit, has acquired multiple small-town newspapers that continue to operate like for-profit businesses. It’s a hybrid approach.
“We are all trying to figure this out,” said DuBose Porter, the publisher emeritus of the Georgia Trust for Local News.
The closing of the Atlanta Civic Circle has been another opportunity for soul-searching about the future of SaportaReport. I tell people I’m looking for a legacy strategy, not an exit strategy. I’m really intrigued by the possibilities of a hybrid operating model.
We have already been dipping our toes in these uncharted waters.
When Britton Edwards and I left ACC, we worked with incredible community partners to start Atlanta Way 2.0, a 501(c) (3) nonprofit focused on strengthening greater Atlanta’s civic fabric.
One of the key initiatives of Atlanta Way 2.0 is to nurture the next generation of civic journalists, and we are in our second year of having two summer interns, in cooperation with the Partnership of Innovation (PIN). We also have a nine-month journalism fellowship program. The Atlanta Way 2.0 interns and fellows can have their work published in SaportaReport.
We would welcome all our readers to donate to SaportaReport or to Atlanta Way 2.0.
As we mourn the death of ACC, let’s do all we can to support the local journalism outlets still among us.
Leave a comment