List: 6 ways TCB grew in its third year

1. Growth
That Triad City Beat has been alive and breathing for three years now surprises me as much as it does anybody else. But here we are. And we’re growing at a clip steep enough to satisfy my various business coaches. I’m thankful to this amazing staff for staying on the grind long enough to see some results.

2. New boxes
We put more than 40 new newspaper boxes on the street in the last 12 months, each one hand-painted by Art Director Jorge Maturino. We’ve got the classic white TCB box, a few that are black with white accents and a few chromed-out jobs that don’t do as well on the street as the others in terms of numbers, but look cool enough that I’m keeping them that way.

3. New writers
There’s been a shuffle in our editorial department in our third year as Eric Ginsburg took on managing editor duties and eased off the cultural and news writing. We’ve moved Senior Editor Jordan Green off the music beat and onto the news desk full time, and picked up poet and novelist Spencer KM Brown in his place. Spirited specialist Kat Bodrie took over the Barstool column. And after Nicole Crews shuttered All She Wrote, we enlisted international freelance gadfly Jelisa Castrodale to create Triaditude Adjustment. We took on a new intern this year as well, Joel Sronce, who is now penning our sports column, Sportsball.

4. Our first national award
The Association of Alternative Newsmedia, which includes such luminaries in our industry as IndyWeek in the Triangle, the Village Voice from New York City and New Orleans’ Gambit, awarded Jordan Green Second Place in the Best Political Columns category for papers with a circulation below 45,000 — some of them about four times the size of ours.

5. The website
A great paper needs a vibrant website. Ours, triad-city-beat.com, just posted a record month with almost 99,000 pageviews. The surge came from two big stories we broke — threats against Muslims and a billboard on Business 40 that generated outrage and debate. As of this week, we are just a few months shy of cracking 2 million all-time pageviews.

6. New products and services
A mature altweekly looks like an advertising agency that puts out a website and weekly newspaper. So we’ve created a full-service marketing department that incorporates print, digital, content and social strategies with an eye towards helping small, local businesses. This is as much a part of Beat Media’s mission as the journalism.