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.
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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