I can trace my professional and personal roots back to the predecessor of the Mountain Xpress — Green Line. When people ask why I do what I do, part of the answer is my time as a reporter for the Green Line in the early ’90s. At the time, I was assigned to write a […]
Tag: Xpress 20th anniversary
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The Julian Price-Xpress connection
In the early 1990s, Julian Price and Jeff Fobes began working together to transform Jeff’s tiny monthly eco-newspaper called Green Line into the snappy, colorful, popular weekly — chock-full of local news and features — that we know today as Mountain Xpress. The Xpress offered Julian a place to express his quirky, contrarian outlook via […]
Corporate experience but with a new flair
The years 1996-2003 were a great time to be in Asheville. Little did I know I was a part of the root-feeding system of a most successful alternative newsweekly. Mountain Xpress was just becoming known when I was offered the position of advertising director. To watch the product grow year after year was one of […]
Twenty years, day in and day out
Having worked at Mountain Xpress for 20 years, I have seen many changes — in staff, in technology, in delegation of duties and, of course, in the growth of the paper. Back when I started in 1994, Xpress had only a dozen employees or so, and not all were full-time. Jeff Fobes, our publisher, oversaw […]
How citizen-based reporting got the news
In the early ’90s, more than 20 people filed for the Asheville City Council primary election. Instead of Mountain Xpress reporters interviewing the candidates, the paper asked for community volunteers to help. A group of volunteers met with Julian Price in an upstairs room on Page Avenue. We were given a set of questions to […]
We were dirt poor, but had a wealth of pride
One of the first connections I made when arriving in WNC in 1991 was with Green Line and Jeff Fobes, and right away I got the go-ahead to do a piece on the proposed passenger rail service to Asheville. Now, 20-plus years later, rail service to Asheville is still “proposed” (dream on), but Green Line […]
Heady and hard to typify: Asheville clubs & music in the ’90s
Asheville’s a great place to live, unless you suffer from FOMO (fear of missing out). Even if you catch the drum circle, a gallery crawl, three bands and a late-night DJ, your Twitter feed will still be full of reports and photos from the indie-film screening, book launch, poetry reading and symphony concert that you […]
Chasing crack rabbits
Grace Slick sang, “One pill makes you larger, the other makes you small. And the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all,” on Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” cementing the figurative connection between Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the ’60s drug culture. Perhaps that’s why an educational anti-drug video, produced 20 […]
Tapping into the local debate
In the days before commenting on websites, Facebook and other social-media platforms, Mountain Xpress got readers talking each week. Every issue featured two, three and sometimes four commentaries, often from wildly different worldviews. The Aug. 31, 1994, Xpress featured four, including the first “Gospel According to Jerry [Sternberg].” Readers reacted strongly to Sternberg’s support for […]
Covering local government, one meeting at a time
Talk about the people. Find the drama. Look where no one else is looking. That’s what Mountain Xpress publisher Jeff Fobes told me and Neal Evans when we started covering local government in 1994. Neither of us was on staff for the nascent publication, despite what the masthead said. Seemingly there were 15 or so […]
The day Hazel Fobes showed me up
When I look back at the early ’90s, I can remember a lot of issues that everyone worked on. Specifically, though, when I think about Green Line and then the Mountain Xpress, I am reminded of publisher Jeff Fobes’ mother, Hazel Fobes. She attended meeting after meeting, waiting to speak her opinion on all kinds […]
Pre-millennial Asheville: No renovation required
In 1994, the year Mountain Xpress started, I was sharing a $365/month place in Montford with my sister. It was a narrow little flat in a Victorian-era home, its backyard adjacent to the property where Zelda Fitzgerald died in a mental-hospital fire in 1948. The same apartment, no bigger but much refurbished, rents for $950 […]
An Xpress roll call
Miles Building, Elwood Miles, hot summer days, sketchy Lex Ave (Welcome to Wally World), Grey Eagle in Black Mountain, Leni Sitnick, Julian Price, Be Here Now, Gatsby’s, Danielle Truscott, Marsha Barber, phones with cords, fax paper rolls, boot leather and notebooks, Carey Watson, Wanda Edney, paper ballots for Best of WNC, Patty’s little girls roaming […]
Twenty years before the masthead
Time may not be strictly linear, but a weekly production schedule definitely is. That daunting fact had a good deal to do with my leaving Mountain Xpress almost as soon as it began. I was the editor of Xpress’ monthly predecessor, Green Line, from 1991 to ’94. After nearly seven years, however, it had become […]
Xpress made the community’s housing a priority
I moved to Asheville in 1989 and remember how excited I was to read the Green Line. As Western North Carolina director of the Self-Help Credit Union, I’ll always remember the day that Julian Price walked into our little office at 12 ½ Wall Street and made a substantial deposit. I know his support of […]
A journalist’s rite of passage
I remember editor Peter Gregutt helping my writing recover from four years of grad-school jargon and two years of technical writing. I remember the excitement of working on emerging social issues, such as the gay rights movement (still a work in progress). I remember thinking that my job was to “take down the bad guys” […]
It must be a Coincident…
When the Green Line, Asheville’s monthly environmental newspaper, decided to go weekly, all of us who worked on it got together to talk about what that would entail. How would production be affected? Would there be enough to fill a weekly? And what toll would a new ramped-up schedule take on all of us? I […]
We lost Green Line, but we gained Xpress
remember being relieved and deeply pleased in the late 1980s, when Jeff Fobes and the WNC Greens formed and initiated Mountain Xpress’ predecessor publication, the Green Line. Asheville and Western North Carolina had lacked intensive, in-depth coverage of controversial environmental and social-justice issues.
Challenging the status quo, cleaning up local government
Twenty years ago, law enforcement in Asheville and Buncombe County was unaccountable, environmental regulations were a joke and local government was a perpetual backroom deal. Mountain Xpress’ investigative reporting and commitment to community involvement helped changed all that in ways that I might not believe possible if I hadn’t seen them myself — from the […]
On Wednesdays, everyone was reading it
Mountain Xpress added to the vibrancy of an already out-of-control energy level around Asheville in the ’90s. Events and causes finally had a voice, and everyone pitched in to get the word out. We knew it was a successful publication because you would go through downtown on a Wednesday and everyone was reading it. It’s […]
Congratulations, Xpress
In 1994, the renaissance of downtown Asheville was still in startup mode. Jeff Fobes and his family were recent arrivals to the mountains. Vacant storefronts were plentiful, and no one had to circle the block to find a place to park their vehicle.