Atmore Advance
The Atmore Advance is a weekly broadsheet newspaper serving Atmore and surrounding Escambia County in southwest Alabama, hard against the Florida state line. Founded in 1927, it has published for nearly a century from a small city that grew up around a railroad, rich farmland and longleaf timber, and it remains the community newspaper of record for a place where city government, school sports, church and civic life, tribal affairs and the county courthouse all intersect in everyday news. The paper is published each Wednesday, and directory listings have put its circulation at about 2,171, or roughly 2,000 in rounded summaries — a scale typical of a healthy American county weekly serving one principal town and the rural communities around it.
That longevity matters in Atmore. The city was incorporated in 1907, only twenty years before the Advance appeared, so the newspaper has been present for most of the incorporated community's modern history. It has chronicled Atmore as a farm and timber town, as a railroad stop on the route south toward Mobile, and more recently as the neighbour and service centre for the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, the only federally recognised Native American tribe in Alabama. Few institutions in Escambia County can match that unbroken, week-by-week record of births, deaths, elections, ball games, business openings and public arguments.
Today the Advance is owned by Jeff and Michelle Schumacher and published by JM Media Group LLC, following a sale in the spring of 2025 that returned the title to hands-on, community-based ownership. Its office has long been associated with 301 South Main Street in Atmore, and its website, atmoreadvance.com, carries the paper's reporting, obituaries, classified advertising and subscription services to readers well beyond the print distribution area.
Founded in 1927 in a Young Railroad City
Atmore itself developed in the 1860s as the Mobile and Great Northern Railroad extended its line south toward the Tensaw River near Mobile. Workers laying track, and settlers drawn by fertile farmland and abundant timber, built a community in western Escambia County whose southern border is the Florida line. The town was officially incorporated in 1907 and had a population of nearly 8,400 in recent community profiles. Agriculture and timber were the twin foundations of its economy from the beginning, and they remain important today.
Into that young, growing town the Atmore Advance was founded in 1927. Library of Congress cataloguing under the title records the paper with ISSN 0746-1968 and OCLC number 9848767, the formal bibliographic footprint of a publication that libraries have collected and preserved for decades. Like most American weeklies of its era, it was built on a simple promise: that the doings of Atmore and Escambia County — its courts, councils, schools, farms, sawmills, churches and sports teams — deserved the same careful, permanent record that city dailies gave to larger places.
A Wednesday Weekly for Escambia County
The Advance is a weekly newspaper in broadsheet format, published each Wednesday by Atmore Newspapers, Inc. Wednesday publication is a longstanding rhythm for papers of its kind in Alabama: it lets reporters cover weekend sport and Monday and Tuesday government meetings, and it puts a fresh paper into readers' hands in the middle of the week, in time for weekend planning, church news and classified advertising to do its work.
Business listings for the paper describe the range readers expect from it: local news, weather, sports including basketball, softball and football, obituaries, lifestyles coverage, editorials and cartoons, and reporting on politics, health and entertainment, alongside a classifieds section covering real estate, transport, employment, recreation and pets, and a photo gallery. That mix is not filler. In a county weekly, the obituaries, the school sports reports and the legal and classified notices are often the most closely read pages in the paper, because they are the pages that cannot be found anywhere else.
Ownership: From the Morrisette Era to Morris and Boone
For much of the twentieth century the Advance was a locally rooted family-era newspaper. Bob Morrisette bought the paper in 1959 together with Philipp Sokol. Morrisette was a substantial figure in Alabama journalism, a past president of the Alabama Press Association, and when he sold the Advance he did not simply walk away from it.
In 1979 the paper was purchased by Morris Newspaper Corporation from Morrisette, in a transaction reported at the time alongside the sale of the neighbouring Brewton paper. Morrisette stayed on with the board of directors during the transition, a pattern common in community newspaper sales of the period, intended to preserve local knowledge and advertiser relationships while corporate ownership took over the business side. The Advance subsequently spent decades in the orbit of larger regional newspaper groups, ultimately under Boone Newsmedia, Inc., the Alabama-based group long associated with community papers across the Southeast.
The 2025 Sale to the Schumacher Family
The most recent chapter in the paper's ownership began on 30 April 2025, when Boone Newsmedia sold four Alabama newspapers — the Atmore Advance, the Andalusia Star-News, the Demopolis Times and the Brewton Standard — to Jeff and Michelle Schumacher. The Schumachers operate through JM Media Group, and current listings name them as the paper's owners and JM Media Group LLC as its publisher, with Andrew Garner as editor.
The sale was presented by both sides as a return to local stewardship. Boone's leadership said the family was proud the Schumachers would continue as stewards of the community newspapers and noted that the acquisition placed management of the newspapers in the communities served. Jeff Schumacher brought more than thirty years' experience as a publisher to the purchase, and Michelle Schumacher more than fifteen years in newspaper sales; both are originally from North Dakota. Their stated aim on taking over was to continue creating a first-class experience for readers and advertising clients and to integrate themselves into the communities their papers serve — the classic, necessary ambition of the small-town publisher, whose business succeeds only when the town does.
Andrew Garner and the Newsroom
Andrew Garner's name is closely associated with the modern Advance. He was named publisher and editor of the paper and its associated media products in November 2017, after serving as its editor for the previous two years and earlier working at the Andalusia Star-News and the Greenville Advocate. In a 2019 reorganisation under Boone, Kendra Majors became regional publisher for Andalusia, Atmore and Brewton, while Garner took on the role of managing editor for Atmore and Brewton, working on content development for both newspapers and their websites.
Current reference listings continue to credit Garner as editor of the Advance. That continuity of editorial leadership through successive ownership changes is significant: in a weekly newsroom, the editor is the institutional memory, the person who knows which county road floods, which family has farmed which section for four generations, and how the last three bond issues were argued. Readers experience a newspaper's stability largely through that kind of knowledge.
An Editorial Voice That Once Broke with Tradition
One of the best-documented moments in the Advance's editorial history came during the presidential election of 1964. Through its early history, the paper's editorial board was supportive of the Democratic Party, then the dominant political force across the one-party South. In 1964 the board broke with that tradition and endorsed Republican Barry Goldwater for president — an event notable enough to be remarked on at the time by the Montgomery Advertiser under the theme of a first-time departure.
The episode is a useful reminder that small weeklies were never merely noticeboards. Their endorsement columns were read closely, argued over in cafes and barbershops, and understood as the considered position of a local institution. Whether readers agreed or disagreed, the Advance was participating, on the record, in the great political realignment that reshaped Alabama and Southern politics over the following decades.
Covering the Poarch Band of Creek Indians
No account of the Advance's beat is complete without the Poarch Band of Creek Indians. The Poarch Band is the only federally recognised American Indian tribe in Alabama, operating as a sovereign nation with its own system of government and bylaws. Its reservation lies in Escambia County about eight miles northwest of Atmore, and the tribe's community at Poarch, just north of the city, is one of the defining features of the Atmore area.
The tribe's modern history — federal recognition in 1984, the growth of its government services, and the development of enterprises including the Wind Creek Casino and Hotel about five miles north of Atmore and the Poarch Creek Indians Museum — has been one of the biggest continuing stories in Escambia County for forty years. The tribe also holds an annual Thanksgiving Pow Wow each November, a major cultural and community event. For the Advance, tribal government, tribal business success, cultural celebration and the ordinary neighbourly life of Poarch families are not an occasional feature topic; they are core county news.
Atmore Life: Heritage, Timber and the Strand
The community the Advance serves wears its history visibly. Atmore Heritage Park on Main Street gathers relocated historic buildings, and the downtown Strand Theater is prized locally as one of the last true small-town theatres. The city offers recreation facilities including tennis courts, walking trails and swimming pools, and a calendar of annual events that gives a weekly newspaper a steady diet of civic material.
Underneath the events calendar sits the older economy. The farmland and timber that drew settlers after the Civil War still shape employment, land use, county politics and school life in Escambia County, and they shape the Advance's advertising base as well — equipment, land, timber and farm services, local retail and professional notices. A weekly in such a place is an economic institution as well as a journalistic one: its pages are where a small market announces itself to itself, week after week.
The Paper in the Digital Age
Like every American weekly, the Advance now lives in two forms at once. The print edition arrives on Wednesdays, in mailboxes and on racks, in the broadsheet format listed in its cataloguing records. The website extends that edition with news updates, obituaries, classifieds, advertising and subscriber services, and the paper maintains a social media presence that carries its stories to former residents and family members who have moved away — a diaspora audience that small-town papers have always served by mail and now serve instantly online.
Digital reach does not change the paper's essential economics or its essential duty. Its reporting cannot be replaced by a state or national outlet, because no state or national outlet sends a reporter to an Atmore city meeting or an Escambia County school game. The website is best understood as a new delivery truck for a very old product: verified, named, accountable local news.
Place in Alabama Journalism
The Advance belongs to a dense, durable network of Alabama community newspapers represented through the Alabama Press Association, of which its former owner Bob Morrisette was once president, and through the statewide newspaper advertising network that lists the Atmore Advance among its south-region titles. That network matters practically — it lets a small paper sell advertising beyond its own county — but it also matters professionally, connecting Atmore's newsroom to shared standards, legal support and training across the state.
Approaching its centenary in 2027, the Atmore Advance stands as a case study in why some weeklies endure. It has survived the Depression era into which it was born, the long decline of print advertising, several changes of corporate ownership and the arrival of the internet, and it has emerged, since April 2025, under local family ownership again. For Atmore and Escambia County, it remains what it was founded to be in 1927: the written record of the community, published every Wednesday.
