Beginning the Work: Notes on the Digitization
Why a forty-six-year-old Atlanta masthead is being brought back online — one scanned page at a time.
This is the first dispatch from a newsroom that, until very recently, did not exist as a newsroom. It exists, for now, as a project — a long conveyor belt of cardboard boxes moving from a climate-controlled warehouse in West Midtown to a scanning bench in a converted printing plant on the south side of the city.
The boxes contain forty-six years of Pulse Chronicles: the original Weekly Pulse broadsheets from 1978 through 1986; the bound monthly volumes from the magazine years; the contraction-era quarterlies; and the last print issue, published in March of 2019. The total page count, as nearly as the archivists can estimate it, is just under one hundred and forty thousand.
Why now
Richard E. Spoon, who founded this title in 1978 and edited it, in one capacity or another, until his death in April, spent the last decade of his life quietly discouraging every offer that would have brought the archive back online. He said, more than once, that a newspaper without a newsroom was not a newspaper, and that scanning old pages without adding new ones was, in his phrase, taxidermy.
The family, in the months after his death, came to a different conclusion. They came to it slowly, and they came to it with the specific instruction that any relaunch had to include the work of doing new journalism. That instruction is why I am here.
What comes first
The archive itself will come online in phases through 2025 and into 2026. The digitization is being done by a small team led by a librarian on loan from the Atlanta History Center, and it is being done more slowly than any of us would prefer. We are not, for the moment, willing to publish OCR text that has not been proofread against the printed page. This means the archive will grow in the tens of pages per week, not the hundreds.
Alongside the archive, we will publish new reporting. In the coming months you will meet the editors we are onboarding and the beats they will cover. Some of that work is already in this issue. Some of the section pages will look, for a while, like buildings under construction. That is because that is what they are.
We will not be online in any serious form until the spring. What we publish between now and then will read as dispatches from a building under construction — because that is what they are.
Editor-in-Chief of Pulse Chronicles. Twenty years reporting on American politics and the South.
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