We’re applying a more disciplined approach to business at Triad City Beat these days, as we’re looking to ramp up news coverage, reach and overall relevancy in 2023.
Our new CityBeat is part of it — reporter Gale Melcher’s work debuted this week, and will expand and develop as she learns the beat.
We created it on the assumption that people would be interested in it — a gamble, to be sure. Not everyone is interested in city government. Consider that just 32,960 people voted in the last Greensboro City Council election, held this past July. That’s just 16.2 percent of registered voters, which themselves only make up a shade more than half of the city’s population.
But we know that there isn’t much city council coverage coming from either city — the only regular attendee in Greensboro writes from a right-wing angle for a billionaire’s newspaper. And we don’t think his should be the prevailing voice.
We made a similar assumption back in the spring about elections. Technically, it was an assumption made a long time ago by the founders of this newspaper, namely that it is our responsibility to cover elections as closely and completely as we are able to. We’ve been doing it this whole time. But in spring of 2022, as we filed more and more stories about the upcoming primary — which, we’ve argued, is often more meaningful than the general election — we noticed that no one was following suit.
We created more election coverage for the 2022 primary than any other news outlet in the Triad. Confirming our assumption, the 2022 Primary Election Guide was the most-visited story on our website for the entire year, though it was only useful for a few weeks.
Our other election coverage made big numbers as well: Half of the year’s Top 10 were candidate stories and election results, reaffirming the assumptions behind those decisions made so long ago.
We believe this interest will dovetail nicely with our new initiative to own city council coverage in our cities. This, too, is an assumption, which means we will be watching the results closely.
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