It didn’t come as much of a surprise when the board of directors for Triad Stage announced via a press release that they were permanently closing the doors to its 20-plus-year-old organization on Tuesday morning.
What was slightly more shocking was the local news’ coverage of the event, or lack thereof.
As you can read in TCB’s piece on the closure, Triad Stage was mired with financial difficulties that ultimately led to its demise. But part of that story is the fact that one of the co-founders of the organization and the artistic director at the time, Preston Lane, was accused of sexual assault and sexual misconduct back in 2020. That story was first reported by Jordan Green, who was senior editor of TCB at the time.
One could argue, nay, insist, that the incident played a crucial part in the domino effect that led to Triad Stage’s closure on Tuesday.
And yet, none of the local news reported that part. Not the local TV stations and not our daily paper of record, the News & Record. In fact, the N&R’s piece was the shortest of them all. It wasn’t until Tuesday night that the daily updated their piece to include more context, adding the history about Lane. Yes! Weekly only republished the press release.
It’s hard to decipher why such a significant event would be left out of all of these outlet’s reporting.
In our world, errors of fact are the most egregious of missteps that a journalist can make in their reporting, but an omission of fact is a close second.
But that’s the realm in which we operate. It’s why we continue to write and report and put out papers.
My story took all of 20 minutes to write and put together. We weren’t the first, but we certainly were the most thorough. And that’s how we’ll continue to operate. Because if not us, then who?
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Sayaka- thank you very much for reporting on this in this week’s TCB. I’m hoping the article continues to raise the public consciousness even more about what a loss this is. But I don’t think it’s quite cricket to drop in the sexual assault component and “insist” that it’s a major contributor to the theater’s demise– without going into more detail and description about the “domino effect” you allude to. Another significant fact omitted is that while the testimony out there seems damning, there were no criminal charges filed in Guilford County as a result of the alleged event. In fairness I think that’s important to note. Overall, keep up the good work for us and I appreciate the TCB.