I’m pulling my usual Monday evening shift at Dusty’s coffeeshop, knocking out the last of my writing for the week and keeping up my end of the editing loop. I’ve found that a double Americano or two suffices as fuel for my weekly column, which since the dawn of Triad City Beat has hovered at around 400 words.
I pulled the cover story this week — checkitout on page 12 — and so I spent Sunday in the office with Jordan Green, each of us making sentences at his own pace, with varying degrees of success.
On a day like that, knocking out copy and sipping on coffee with Jordan Green at my side and my editorial and sales staff out on the streets making it happen, it’s an easy thing to convince myself that it’s always been like this.
And in some ways, it has.
But really, it’s only been three years — exactly three, this week — since Green, Eric Ginsburg, Allen Broach and I set out to make the best freakin’ weekly newspaper the Triad has ever seen. Many have joined us in this journey, with serious gratitude going out to Jorge Maturino and Dick Gray, who for some reason have stuck around, even though I know they both suspect I am insane.
For me, the time at TCB has been measured in weekly editorial manifests and distribution routes, payrolls met and missed, new skills and habits with an eye towards the ultimate goal, turbocharged by the exhilaration of creating something out of thin air and enticing it finally, slowly, draw breath.
It’s fitting, I think, that on the occasion of our third anniversary we break a huge story. Green’s piece on local troublemakers got picked up by both the N&R and the Journal, as well as WFDD, the Charlotte Observer, littlegreenfootballs.com, a few Reddit threads and some others described in our inbound-link stats. He’s on page 6 this week.
The yahoos who met in Kernersville now have a federal investigation on their hands, which is as good a reminder as any of this true thing: If a publication like ours does not have an effect on the world around it, then it might as well not even exist.
I believed when we started that there was a real need for TCB in the cities of the Triad. Exactly 157 issues later, I still believe.
Join the First Amendment Society, a membership that goes directly to funding TCB‘s newsroom.
We believe that reporting can save the world.
The TCB First Amendment Society recognizes the vital role of a free, unfettered press with a bundling of local experiences designed to build community, and unique engagements with our newsroom that will help you understand, and shape, local journalism’s critical role in uplifting the people in our cities.
All revenue goes directly into the newsroom as reporters’ salaries and freelance commissions.
Jordan’s piece was a scary reminder of what the real terrorist threat is in this country, and of how manifestly the current administration denies that this is the case. In terms of national security, this is like denying the law of gravity while in a windstorm atop a tall building with no guardrails.