Demolition of the Greensboro News & Record

I mentioned it on the politics thread the other day, but the Greensboro News & Record's long-time home in downtown Greensboro has been under the wrecking ball for the last month. Warren Buffett sold the paper, but not the building, to Lee Entreprises several years back. With printing having long ago been moved to the Winston-Salem Journal, the N&R moved out of the downtown buildings four years ago and Berkshire Hathaway did nothing to secure or maintain the property, so it quickly became a public nuisance. The city gave BH Media some time to address it and then ordered its demolition.

Longtime (and former) News & Record columnist Lorraine Ahearn explains it way better than I ever could, with great photos from former N&R photographer (and feature writer) Robert Lopez:

Warren Buffett: It’s Not a Wonderful Life

 

Thanks for putting this together. While Raleigh and Charlotte carried on OK under the circumstances, it always seemed as if the downfall of print publications affected the Triad more than it did the other major metro areas of North Carolina.

What McClatchy did to damage Raleigh and Charlotte was bad. IMO, what Warren Buffett did to the Triad was worse.

 

I couldn't agree more. Raleigh and Charlotte also have decent TV stations that help fill the void, but the Triad stations are weak and always have been.

News deserts have been an issue in rural areas and smaller towns for going on 20 years now, but we haven't really seen a sizeable metro become a news desert yet. The Triad is very close to being one.

 

I read the link. The article blamed Warren Buffet for abandoning Greensboro. And as statement of fact he did and he could have afforded not to, I will leave it to others to argue the morality of that action.

But the article explained that the huge presses that are being destroyed could print 72,000 papers an hour. Today Greensboro would be doing well to have a circulation of 15,000. If your ales decline by that much your business will die,

Though the part in the article about the armored car company hauling coins out of the building brought back memories. When I was nine years old in 1967 I substituted as a paperboy for the Record. I remember we collected weekly, not monthly, so I had to go to every house and collect. I don't remember the rate but I got a hell a lot of quarters,

As for McClatchy's commitment to the community I disagree and cite the decline of the Durham-Herald Sun, which I understand to be a ghost paper(perhaps incorrectly, I don't live in North Carolina.

 

Among the many reasons almost no newspapers are sold out of boxes anymore, one is the lack of people carrying/using coins to pay for items.

Not to mention that many remaining papers charge $1.50 or $2 per issue (and twice that for a Sunday paper), so that’s a lot of coins to carry around and pump into the coin slot.

 

I live in Durham. The Herald-Sun is basically a local edition of the News & Observer at this point. When you see them side-by-side on the stand there's very little difference besides the nameplate.

McClatchy doesn't have clean hands, but I think the H-S would be gone entirely by now if they hadn't bought it. The quality under Paxton was even worse than what we get as the N&O's Durham edition, in my opinion, and Paxton was largely reviled in the community given how much goodwill they pissed away in their first few months of ownership.

On the Greensboro side of the atory, I agree with your point about circulation, but that circulation decline happened while BH Media was bleeding the place, and the press being destroyed was owned by BH not Lee which bought the paper four years ago.

 

Terrific, devastating piece.

 

Yesterday, my hometown’s VFW was doing a coin drop on both of the main roads heading into and out of towns, which is normally fine except that it’s Memorial Day weekend, tourists are up here visiting and the coin drop stations made traffic back up for a quarter mile.

Whenever I get change, I usually just toss the coins up in the little space in front of the car’s phone charger. So yesterday, with separate trips back and forth in both directions, I managed to clear out a lot of pennies, nickels and dimes out of my coin stash.

 

The only difference between The Herald-Sun and The N&O is, as mentioned, the nameplate, but the H-S is also smaller, so there is less content. The Saturday print editions are identical (there are no Saturday print editions). The staples of Herald-Sun sports coverage for years are gone, except for UNC and Duke football and men's basketball coverage.

 

Even though I was there for less than two years, one of the best working experiences I had in my career. The guys on the desk were great editors,opinionated and a hell of a lot of fun with which to hang out. We always found time for dinner, sometimes at the Rat in Chapel Hill (loved the Gambler), seafood, pizza, Bojangle's and the occasional inning or two at the DBAP on a nice summer evening.

Back then, Uncle Herald didn't cover anything in Raleigh, except when Duke or Carolina was playing at Reynolds. Jim Furlong had some beat for a Wake County extra, but it seemed like he only wrote about girls soccer.

And the N&O didn't care about the Bulls, although they did overlap on all ACC coverage. The Herald-Sun was all over anything and everything happening on the western side of the Triangle (even though a triangle actually has three sides), from N.C. Central to preps to church Dartball results. I typed a lot of agate and took a lot of calls back then.

I appreciated Jimmy Dupree agreeing to run my Raleigh IceCaps stories, probably because it didn't cost anything (I was getting paid as the PA announcer) and it gave the paper additional content.

Bonus: I got to play in the Herald-Sun Classic, even if I wound up in the last flight.

 

Icecaps! Lyle Wildgoose was the man. Were fog delays at Dorton Arena a thing?
Still have my hat from like 1993

 

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere come the IceCaps!

Hell, yeah! The first time we fogged up, I told the guy who kept the score clock, "This looks like an all-skate at the local roller rink." Management eventually brought in some industrial fans but the humidity made the temperature just above the ice surface drop right to the dew point many nights, creating a Dorton Arena mini-fog, particularly in the fall and spring.

Dorton Arena had glass windows so the ice was usually mushy. The acoustics of a round, concrete building made it hard for even myself to figure out what I was saying. The seats were old, wooden slats and not very comfortable. However, it was a cozy 5,600-seat horse barn that was a quick sellout -- and amazingly, Raleighites started scalping tickets that second season because seeing the ECHL IceCaps became the "it thing."

I always felt for poor A.J. Carr. The News & Observer had no one on staff who had seen a hockey game, so they sent their tennis writer to cover it.

Several of those players stayed around Raleigh after their careers were over. I think Jimmy Powers started a youth hockey camp.