Forty-five years of print, brought online in waves.
When Pulse Chronicles was acquired in 2025, roughly 1,800 pieces of reporting sat in filing cabinets in a Castleberry Hill warehouse. This page is the working record of what has been digitized, what is being digitized, and how you can read it.
Acquired & digitized.
Pulse Chronicles is a revived American masthead. Founded in Atlanta in 1978, hibernated in print in 2019, acquired in 2025, and rebuilt as a digital-first newsroom in 2026 — with a forty-year print archive being brought online in waves.
- 01 · 1978 – 2019
Founded, then hibernated.
Richard E. Spoon founded The Weekly Pulse on August 14, 1978 at 145 Edgewood Avenue SE in Atlanta. Over four decades it grew into a national long-form magazine, peaked at ~214,000 circulation, and was twice nominated for the National Magazine Awards. Print operations were suspended in March 2019.
- 02 · May 2025
Acquired by new ownership.
After Richard Spoon's death in April 2025, the masthead, trademarks, ~1,800-piece editorial archive, and operating company were transferred to Peachtree Editorial Holdings LLC, a newly formed Atlanta media company, with a single mandate: take the paper fully digital and bring the vault online.
- 03 · 2025 – 2027
Digitized and relaunched.
The print archive is being inventoried, scanned, OCR'd, and released in waves through 2027. A reconstituted editorial team relaunched Pulse Chronicles as a daily digital newspaper in 2026, operating from Atlanta with the same masthead lineage that started on Edgewood Avenue in 1978.
The source material.
The physical archive is roughly 1,800 discrete pieces of reporting published between August 1978 and March 2019: broadsheet weeklies (1978–1986), monthly long-form magazines (1986–2015), and quarterly issues (2015–2019). It also includes staff photography negatives, contact sheets, and the paper's internal editor's-note memo archive from 1978 onward.
What is not being digitized: display advertising, subscription-fulfillment records, the paper's business books, and personnel files. Those remain in the warehouse under a records-retention policy and are not part of this project.
Pieces are presented as they originally appeared, with the language and conventions of the year they were published. Where errors of fact have been identified since publication, we add an inline editor's note. We do not silently revise the historical record.
What's online right now, by decade and desk.
- 1970s1 piece
- 1980s1 piece
- 1990s2 pieces
- 2000s2 pieces
- 2010s2 pieces
- The Chronicles3 pieces
- News2 pieces
- Culture1 piece
- Opinion1 piece
- Business1 piece
Four waves, through 2027.
- Released · Q4 2025Wave 1Online
Landmark features & editor's picks (1978–2019)
A curated first pass — the pieces that mattered most to the editors and to the readers who wrote in about them: the Enron Southern utility investigation, the 1996 Olympics arc, the post-Katrina Gulf Coast reporting, and Spoon's founding editorials.
- Q2 2026Wave 2In progress
The Chronicles long-form catalogue (1986–2015)
The full monthly-magazine feature well — investigative reporting, essays, and criticism from the National Magazine Award years. Roughly 420 pieces, fact-checked against the original bound volumes.
- Q4 2026Wave 3Planned
News & Politics desks (1978–2019)
City-hall reporting, Georgia statehouse coverage, and the Washington bureau dispatches. This is the largest single wave — roughly 900 short-form pieces indexed by byline, date, and beat.
- Q2 2027Wave 4Planned
Reviews, Culture, and the photo archive
Product reviews from the buy-what-you-test years, criticism, and — for the first time online — the loose negatives and contact sheets of the three staff photographers who worked the paper between 1981 and 2011.
How a bound volume becomes a page you can read.
- 01
Inventory
Every bound volume, loose issue, and photo envelope pulled from the Castleberry Hill warehouse was catalogued by issue number, date, and page count. The inventory is public and living.
- 02
Scan
Pages are scanned at 600 dpi on a flatbed rig by an outside vendor under supervision of the current editorial team. Original bound volumes are never disassembled.
- 03
OCR & structure
Scanned pages are run through OCR, then structurally re-tagged — headline, byline, dateline, body — against the original page image so a piece can be read as text or viewed as it appeared in print.
- 04
Fact-check against the original
Every OCR'd piece is spot-checked against the print original for scanning artifacts and misreads. We do not edit the original reporting; where OCR failed, we correct only to match what was printed.
- 05
Publish
Pieces are released in waves under the Vault, indexed by section, byline, and date. Each piece carries a note identifying the original issue and the digitization date.
Scanning and OCR are performed by an outside vendor under a written data-handling agreement. Original bound volumes are returned to climate-controlled storage in Castleberry Hill within 72 hours of scanning.
Four ways to read the legacy collection.
The Vault
The full Wave 1 collection, filterable by decade. This is the primary entry point.
Enter the Vault →The Chronicles desk
Long-form features and investigations — including the digitized magazine feature well.
Read The Chronicles →By byline
The masthead page lists every current editor. Byline-indexed archive browsing lands in Wave 3.
See the masthead →Verification page
What is verified, what is still being rebuilt, and how to fact-check the digitized record against us.
Read the methodology →OCR is imperfect and forty-year-old newsprint is imperfect too. If a digitized piece differs from the print original, or if a scan is missing a page, write to archive@pulsechronicles.com. Corrections are logged on the corrections page.