The Atlanta Journal-Constitution welcomed MSCNE to its offices today to hear from Editor Julia Wallace, Editorial Board member Maureen Downey and Cartoonist Mike Luckovich. The way the AJC remodeled their newsroom last year was really interesting, and I was really excited to hear more from Wallace, especially in light of the changes they’re having to make now.

Wallace identified two big problems facing newspapers: advertising and readership. The AJC hasn’t felt the financial problems many papers face, she said, partly because they are privately owned. Their situation has been flexible, but “we are a business,” and they are trying to make it work.

She talked about the first round of changes, cutting the newsroom from 500 to 435 and the four departments, but sort of glossed over the merge this year of News & Information and Enterprise. All lot of what she said already is summed up in this interview she gave Creative Loafing. When I asked how you ensure quality investigative reporting as papers continue making cuts, she said that they’re increasing their watchdog reporting but sharing it in different ways.

She talked about their emphasis on the Sunday paper briefly, but said that while that’s the big thing now, something else could be the big thing later if readers express interest elsewhere.

As far as layoffs, they will begin at the end of this month if enough staff don’t accept the voluntary separation (Wallace: “Since there are no lawyers in the room I’ll call it a buyout.”). In the last round of buyouts, Wallace said they “lost a lot of good people, but we’re fortunate we have a lot of good people.”

Next month, “I may have to lay people off in the newsroom in the next month, something I’ve never had to do in my journalism career. I find that very, very difficult.” The goal is to get the newsroom down to 350.

Her advice to college journalists preparing to enter the job market in the next year or two was to try and spend their first five years in the business (if they are hired) at a newspaper, getting reporting skills while learning multimedia.

From talking with editors here at the conference though, many aren’t planning on careers in journalism. The job market scares people off for one, the pay secondly. Many are interested in PR or publishing. “I can’t see myself reporting for more than a few years,” they say. There’s frustration in general with many feeling they won’t be able to get jobs because they don’t have the skills (and there are a whole host of reasons why we don’t have the skills, from lack of training to lack of effort on our parts). And this is coming from college newspaper editors, a particularly dedicated bunch of those interested in journalism in the slightest. If journalism doesn’t attract them, who will it?