Thank you and goodbye

Dear readers,

We are sad to share that this is our final letter to you. Atlanta Civic Circle is closing its doors. After more than five years in operation, despite our best efforts, we were unable to secure the consistent funding needed to sustain our work.

Our belief, from the beginning, has been that metro Atlanta deserves journalism that genuinely engages and is informed by residents. We believe we fulfilled that promise. ACC has played a key role in contributing to solutions journalism in our region.

Our work made a difference where it counts. ACC reporting has been cited from the halls of Congress to Atlanta City Hall, shaping public policy and the lives of Atlantans. Just as important as influencing public policy decisions has been helping you understand them. We worked to connect the dots: explaining why an obscure policy or a little watched elected office mattered, and how it affected the rent you paid, the wages you earned, and the choices your elected officials made on your behalf.

Through our award-winning voter guides, we gave people the trustworthy information they needed to cast informed ballots in local and state elections, the kind of races that shape daily life but too often go uncovered.

We also invested in the future of this profession. Through our internship program, we mentored the next generation of journalists, from high schoolers to college students, helping them find their footing and their voice in a changing industry.

This goodbye doesn’t come in a vacuum. The media ecosystem in Atlanta is fragile, with newsrooms across our city on precarious financial footing. Journalism is not free. Reporters, editors, and the time it takes to do this work well all come at a cost. The loss of any one of us leaves our communities with fewer eyes on the institutions that affect their lives. ACC’s closure, for instance, leaves metro Atlanta without a dedicated affordable housing reporter.

A free press is essential to our democracy, and a community that loses its trusted news and information sources loses something it cannot easily get back. We hope our closure is a reminder of how much is at stake, and how much local journalism needs and deserves support.

We have been proud to partner with many of our nonprofit newsroom peers, and hope you’ll read and support them and their essential work in Atlanta, including: 285 South, centering immigrant communities; Atlanta Community Press Collective, pursuing accountability reporting on everything from civil liberties to local power; Canopy Atlanta, practicing community-oriented journalism; Capital B Atlanta, delivering Black-centered reporting on housing, elections, and beyond; and Georgia Recorder, covering democracy and policy at the state level.

What’s next? You’ll continue to see our reporters’ bylines at other outlets. We are working to archive our site so the reporting we’ve done remains accessible, and we’ll share more details as they become available.

We are pleased to share that our Atlanta civic engagement and policy initiative, POV (Priorities, Opinions and Values), will be transferred to our partner in this work, Neighborhood Nexus, which is fiscally sponsored by the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta. As metro Atlanta’s civic data intermediary, Neighborhood Nexus helps organizations find, understand, and use data to create smarter strategies.

Finally, and most importantly, thank you. To the readers and sources who trusted us, shared our stories, completed surveys, showed up to vote with our guides in hand, and told us our work mattered, you were the reason we did this. To the partners, funders and supporters who believed in an informed and engaged citizenry and the value of solutions journalism, you made it possible.

It has been an honor and a privilege to serve this community.

With gratitude,

The board of directors and team of Atlanta Civic Circle