Triad City Beat founder looks back on publication's legacy in its final hours

Feb. 28 marks the final day of existence for Triad City Beat, a Greensboro-based weekly alternative newspaper that ran for just over a decade. 

Brian Clarey founded Triad City Beat in 2014. In the decade since, TCB came to be known for its tenacious reporting on topics like law enforcement, local politics and civil unrest. 

Clarey looked back on what made his publication unique. 

"We didn’t do that view from nowhere like, ‘well these folks think that LGBT folks shouldn’t have equal rights but these folks do.’ We had a sort of moral underpinning to what we did and you can paint that as a political bias or a stand or whatever, but I think of it as morality," Clarey said. 

Clarey and his family were involved in a major car accident late last summer. While recovering, he says he lost the fire necessary to stay in his position as publisher and executive editor of the paper. 

With the publication already in financial turmoil, TCB announced in January it would only be open for one more month. 

Throughout its tenure, the publication picked up multiple awards for its reporting, editing and opinion writing.
 

Santiago Ochoa covers healthcare for WFDD in partnership with Report For America. Follow him on X and Instagram: @santi8a98