Editorial memories from Xpress’ tricky, triumphant teens

Editor’s note: August marked Xpress’ 30-year anniversary. Throughout September we’ll be celebrating the milestone with articles, photo spreads and reflections from current and former staff members. Thank you for reading Xpress, and please consider becoming a member. 

You shouldn’t be reading this. Or rather, the odds were stacked against anyone reading this 30th-anniversary issue of Mountain Xpress. I know this because I helped shepherd the paper’s editorial content through some of its bracing teenage years (mid-to-late 2000s), wherein the internet tried its damnedest to eviscerate print journalism while the Great Recession delivered a double whammy.

As daily newspapers whittled down and shuttered, print magazines and alternative newsweeklies like Xpress faced existential threats as well. Many of the nation’s venerable altweeklies did not survive. Others are now shadows of their former selves, having shrunk in size (and relevance) after being bought up and homogenized by distant corporate chains.

So, to have this publication, this locally owned, locally focused (and free!) newspaper, still available for your perusal both online and in print is something of a minor miracle. And I can offer some memories and musings on how editorial magic manifested during some of Xpress’ boom years that could have gone bust.

(An important note: In every cycle of Xpress’ life, it takes a small army of reporters, designers, advertising reps, administrators, distributors, etc., to sustain the paper, to say nothing of the bedrock of thousands of small businesses and readers that have backed the paper. Here, I’ll speak briefly and vainly of strictly the editorial side of the effort.)

One thing that kept the paper afloat during challenging times was sticking to its traditions: a focus on local matters, chief among them the inner workings of local government and the protection of the environment. A dedication to fairness and to advancing official accountability. A generous helping of local arts and culture. And always, there was that tsunami of work that hit a hard, inescapable deadline, whatever was transpiring on the internet: You had to get the paper out, every week, come what may.

As we turned a corner on the recession and scaled back up to full bloom, a long-standing principle of the paper that seemed to grow with Xpress’ print circulation and digital awakening was community engagement. The inescapable conclusion for me was that a local news source, particularly the altweekly sort, lives and dies on its role as a community partner.

The partnership wasn’t always amicable, of course; some of our most devoted readers were also some of our most persistent critics. But I always pitied other publications whose readers were in lockstep with them and counted Xpress lucky for having so many readers who would hold us accountable.

Of course, no local newspaper that has survived and thrived has done so strictly on its traditions, not in the internet age. During my years at Xpress, the press for our staff to join the digital revolution was relentless. A bit late off the starting block, perhaps, we sprinted to catch up with the latest skills and systems, experimented with them and adapted them to our mission.

For some longtime journalists, the shift proved painful at times. You want me to write two in-depth articles this week and also crank out daily content for social media? Now I’ve got to respond to readers in real time? What the hell is a hashtag? 

For others, it was a time of refreshing possibilities, of ways to reach new audiences and engage with old ones. And lest there be any doubt, it was always the oldest player on our team (no slight, Jeff Fobes) who pushed hardest for adopting new technologies. In the end, even those veteran news writers among us, the most ink-stained of wretches, learned new tricks and clicked our way to vastly more readers.

Not all of our adaptation was digital; some of it was the periodic work of adding fresh content and new voices to whatever publishing format. Again, this was not always a seamless process. When we sensed a local hunger for more and better food and beverage coverage, for example, we plunged pretty headlong into restaurant reviews and expanded food news. To put it mildly, some of the reviews were received distastefully by local restaurateurs, and Xpress was forced to eat a little crow.

But ultimately our culinary coverage found the right recipe of insightful reporting and community engagement. The more the voices of folks in the food industry graced our pages, the better the coverage became. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that Xpress’ pioneering food writers from that period, Mackensy Lunsford and Hanna Raskin, are now two of the Southeast’s most highly regarded food journalists.)

Sometimes, our “innovations” were throwbacks to traditional techniques we’d never really tried before. A small example and fond memory: One of the news milestones of my time at Xpress was our exhaustive coverage of the exhausting federal trials of the late former sheriff of Buncombe County, Bobby Medford, and his criminal gang. The trials were actually frequently quite riveting, as they unraveled tales of extortion, gambling rings, bagmen and vast official lawlessness (to say nothing of the sheriff’s pet parrot). But the court prohibited cameras, so we were challenged to add visual elements to the story until we took the old-fashioned step of hiring a courtroom sketch artist. It proved a nice move, giving us faces to accompany the sometimes confusing cast of characters, and adding a layer of gravity that the saga deserved.

I’ll wind down my ramble here by revealing a secret ingredient that has helped Mountain Xpress keep the pages turning all these years: humor. Of course, this includes the rib-tickling that finds its way into the publication, in the editorial cartoons and comedy-scene coverage, in the witty turns of many a writer. (During my years, we added the cartoons of Brent Brown and the Asheville Disclaimer page to Xpress, helping the city recover its lost funny bone.)

But I’m really talking about the haven of humor that envelops journalists at the workplace. Newspaper work is generally not sexy or lucrative. It’s a grind, even (especially?) when you’re doing the job right. Without some wry cynicism and the ability to laugh at it all (and a generous tolerance for puns), a journalist’s path would be a harder one indeed.

Some of the best in-jokes at Xpress were aired quite publicly. For example, our anxieties about the internet disrupting journalism were on full display on April 1, 2009, when the paper issued its Twitter Manifesto. More than a few readers took our faux news — that the newspaper was ceasing print publication and would henceforth exist only on Twitter — as fact, until the April Fools factor kicked in. (I guess we can all be forgiven for wondering, now, if Elon Musk is having the last laugh.)

And lest we on the editorial staff ever forget the need for periodic levity, we could count on someone from the advertising staff to remind us. This story is 100% true: One fairly slow news day in 2010, Xpress’ senior classified rep, the inimitable Tim Navaille, sauntered into the newsroom with an admonition: “This ain’t no ice cream shop. Get out there and get us some scoops!”

Jon Elliston is a former managing editor of Mountain Xpress.