When Andrew Morse joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as its president and publisher in January 2023, the company had plans to stop printing the newspaper by that June. He quickly hit the brakes.

The timing was not right, he told his new colleagues. The Journal-Constitution’s digital news product was not yet robust enough to compel enough readers to subscribe and make it profitable on its own.

Now, he said, the right time has come.

The Journal-Constitution will stop publishing a print newspaper at the end of the year, Mr. Morse said, and divert all of its resources into the digital news operation. The company has published in print since 1868.

“The fact is, printing newspapers and putting them in trucks and driving them around and delivering them on people’s front stoops has not been the most effective way to distribute the news in a very long time,” he said.

Still, The Journal-Constitution is one of the largest daily newspapers yet to completely abandon print. Local newspapers have faced precipitous declines in circulation for the last 20 years, and much of the advertising revenue long ago moved to online platforms. But most major American cities continue to have some version of a print newspaper, in part because the print editions often remain profitable, at least for the moment, unlike the online operations of many outlets.