IN PRINT: Editor’s notebook

Here I sit, at my desk in the corner, the hum of heavy machinery coming from the steel mill that looms outside my window.

Jordan Green is across the room, sweating out something for the website at the old architectural drafting table he’s using for a work surface. Eric Ginsburg’s taken to curling up with his laptop in the corner of a massive, vacant office space next door.

It’s a small space, barely big enough to contain our enthusiasm.

Here at the Nussbaum Center for Entrepreneurship, where we’ve cast our lot with 50 or so other start-up businesses, crazy dreamers one and all, enthusiasm is a kind of currency.

We’re fired up and ready to go. We’ve been loading the website, triad-city-beat.com, with fresh content every day, reconnecting with sources and structuring beats. We got the stories filed, the pages made.

We’ve got some new faces around here, some of them familiar and others you’ll get to know as this thing unfolds. There are new processes, new workflow arrangements, new titles, new technologies to master. We’re getting the hang of it. I’m extremely fortunate to have people around me who have taken this mission on as their own — both here in the office and out on the streets, where support of our work is what makes all of this possible.

I won’t lie: This is the biggest challenge I’ve faced in my life. But if you’re reading this on paper right now, that means our first print run was a success and that somehow an issue found its way to you.

Anyone who’s ever started a newspaper can tell you: The first one’s easy. It’s the second one that gets you, and then the third. By the time you catch your breath, you’re a year in.

That’s how I remember it, anyway.

Here is where I’m supposed to make the Big Pitch: a sparkling promise about what we’ll accomplish, a description of the things we’ve covered in these pages, maybe a little soft-shoe about the grand plan we are enacting. But I’m not gonna do that. Instead I’ll let the issue speak for itself.

Give it a read. Pull up our website, triad-city-beat.com, and see what we’re doing over there. If you like it, stick around. There’s a lot more to come.

If you want to let me know how you think we’re doing, alert us to breaking news or threaten to set my car on fire, do it to me directly at [email protected].

And thanks for supporting our work.

— Brian Clarey