[gt_grc]

I've lived in Georgia (the U.S. state) my whole life, and when I read "Georgian" as an adjective, I usually assume it means Georgia the country. People here typically use "Georgian" only as a noun to refer to a resident of the state. In adjective form, you usually just hear "Georgia" (e.g., Georgia coast, Georgia pines).

[js2]

I wrote this elsewhere as an expanded form of my other comment here:

In the pictured headline, if "Georgian African American newspapers" is using "Georgian" as a demonym, then it means newspapers published by African Americans from Georgia.

But if the headline is using "Georgian" as an adjective, then lacking hyphenation, it's ambiguous whether it means newspapers published by African Americans from Georgia /or/ newspapers published in Georgia by African Americans.

We rarely use the adjectival form of U.S. states ("Georgia Peaches", not "Georgian Peaches"), so I found the headline a little garden path and initially started parsing it as if it were referring to the country of Georgia.

Then, right below the headline, the text reads "Georgia African American newspapers" which isn't ambiguous and means newspapers published in Georgia by African Americans. That's confirmed by the rest of the article.

Of course, the African Americans in question were likely also from Georgia, so to be pedantic, it's Georgian African American Georgia newspapers.

(I doubt any African Americans from Georgia emigrated to the Russian Empire at the time, otherwise we could be talking about African American Georgian Russian Georgia newspapers ... or something.)

Anyway if I were the headline writer, I think I would have used "African American Georgia newspapers..."

[watersb]

I was born in Georgia-the-US-State, and yet I stumbled a bit on the headline, parsing it as Tblisi-not-Atlanta.

Your careful analysis might explain my brain. (In this particular case. If that is even possible, because my brain...)

[abrowne]

Agreed, as an midwestern American. Hearing "Georgian", I would think of the country, then the Georgian era (especially regarding architecture) and only then the state.

[BurningFrog]

Yeah, had it said "Georgia" instead I would not have had the same confusion OP had.

I guess it's one of those unspoken rules we don't know we know.