Greensboro’s Media, Old and New

Morning, gang.

Joe Killian here — Greensboro Editor at The Assembly.

While we’re not officially launching our weekly newsletter until next month, so many of you have signed up that we wanted to give you a taste of what we’re up to, thinking about, and reading between now and then.

And, frankly, I could not wait to talk to you about the story we published last week about The Rhino Times, the conservative alt-weekly that’s made waves in Greensboro for more than 30 years. The publication recently announced it’s changing hands—new editor, new owner. That felt like the perfect opportunity to examine its history, influence, and future.

I was a reporter for the city’s daily paper, The News & Record, for a little over a decade. I covered cops and courts, higher education, and government at the local and state levels. This was at the Rhino’s mid-aughts high-water mark. It’s difficult to describe what it was like to be a young reporter learning his trade and finding his voice at a straight-laced daily paper while just up the street there was a weekly setting the journalism rulebook on fire and lighting cigars with it.

It often felt like we were sharing a field but playing two very different games.

As city editor of the N&R in the early 2000s, Mark Sutter wrote an annual market report assessing the competition, including the Rhino.

“Like a mini-Fox News, The Rhino was selling a relentlessly conservative point of view,” Sutter told me this week. “And many people will seek out a narrative they agree with. Facts or fairness are often just pluses. Near the end of my run, Stephen Colbert even gave it a name—‘Truthiness’—it felt right to a certain loyal audience, even when it wasn’t. The genius was, after a while those same readers looked at the N&R and thought its coverage felt wrong … even when it was right.”

“Isn’t this basically the media landscape we all live in today?” Sutter said. “The Rhino was an early adapter, and pretty good at it.”

This is all part of a larger, ongoing conversation about what constitutes “real journalism”—about objectivity, bias, advocacy, and “the view from nowhere.”

“I always thought, it’s more honest to let people know what your politics are,” Hammer told me last week. “If you’re a liberal newspaper, be a liberal newspaper. If you’re conservative, be conservative. Let people know that’s your viewpoint and let them read and decide for themselves.”

Years after my time at the city’s daily, I’ve come to understand the N&R and Rhino were absolutely playing different games—but they both, in their separate ways, reflected the city and its journalistic history.

William Swaim, an ardent abolitionist, was known as the “Fighting Editor” of my city’s first real paper of record, The Greensborough Patriot.

Here’s how he described its mission in 1829:

“To spread before the public a faithful account of all the events and transactions, both foreign and domestic, that may agitate the political world—to scrutinize closely the conduct of men in power, and chastize their misdoings without regard to rank — to pull the mask from the face of corruption and hold up popular vices to view in their ‘native deformity’—to break the spell, which has long palsied the energies of the Southern States, and show them the necessity of improving their advantages — and to influence our young countrymen, with warm hearts and ‘lips of fire,’ to ‘plead their Country’s cause…’”

Objectivity? He didn’t know her.

John Hammer’s journalism never looked like mine, Mark Sutter’s, or even William Swaim’s. That doesn’t mean he didn’t hit what he was aiming at for more than 30 years—and have a hell of a time doing it.

– Joe Killian

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A Town’s Entire Staff Resigned. What Happens Now? 

Summerfield was incorporated in 1996 to keep itself separate from Greensboro. Now that all nine town employees have resigned, the future of the antigrowth suburb is more uncertain than ever.

The Assembly’s Ren Larson takes a deep dive into how the mass resignation happened and what may come next.

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What We’re Reading

Old Controversy, New Fight: There’s been plenty of controversy over a proposed plan to move waste that caused the closure of Bingham Park to the White Street Landfill. For East Greensboro residents, it feels like another slight against a largely Black area tired of being the city’s dumping ground. Triad City Beat’s Gale Melcher takes a look at the plan, the opposition, and what it means to find the best among a series of bad options.

Closing Time: The Lost Diamond Social Hookah Lounge just off of UNC Greensboro’s campus was shut down after multiple complaints it was operating as a nightclub, leading to noise and traffic problems in the College Hill neighborhood. Owner Bradford McCauley previously ran the Blind Tiger, a bar and music venue where a bouncer shot and killed a 19-year-old in 2022. Yes Weekly’s Ian McDowell has the story.

Stories in the Ink: A couple of weekends ago, alumni of the News & Record— myself among them—got together to say goodbye to the old building on East Market Street. The paper moved out years ago, after which Warren Buffet’s BH Media so neglected the building that the city eventually had to condemn it. As the building finally came completely down last week, many of the paper’s old writers have been reflecting on it.

If you haven’t yet read veteran N&R columnist Jeri Rowe’s take, do yourself a favor. Published on his blog, the piece has everything that made Rowe such an important voice of the city in the years I was with the paper. I miss hearing him report from just a few cubicles away in that old newsroom—sighing, cursing, banging the keyboard. It took me back while making me think about the future.

Read this newsletter online or contact The Thread team with tips and feedback at greensboro@theassemblync.com.

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The bomb-throwing TV commentator and arch-conservative U.S. senator died 16 years ago, but his legacy is alive and kicking.

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Some of the worst brain injuries soldiers face come from their own weapons, and North Carolina is at the epicenter of this growing crisis.

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