Triad City Beat leaders discuss the newspaper's legacy in its final days

Over the course of eleven years, Triad City Beat developed a reputation for its locally focused, dogged reporting. 

The publication was a landing spot for fresh-out-of-school journalists and a launch pad for stories some outlets didn’t cover.

Despite staving off financial ruin multiple times, a devastating car accident involving its founder — coupled with continued financial strain — knocked the wind out of the newspaper’s sails for good.  

Brian Clarey and Sayaka Matsuoka, TCB’s founder and managing editor respectively, joined WFDD’s Santiago Ochoa for a post-mortem on the plucky alt-weekly a day before it closed.

Interview Highlights

On what Triad City Beat's reporting offered the community: 

Clarey: "I think a few, a few different things. One is institutional memory. I've been a journalist in the Triad for almost 25 years. I go back five mayors in Greensboro, just one in Winston-Salem. But I have relationships with a lot of elected officials and a lot of newsmakers.

And we also did news from a point of view. 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. The other thing is that we did a lot of stories that other folks wouldn't do, in terms of the daringness of it, the less risk-averse. Our pieces about Preston Lane at Triad Stage in the sexual scandal — that was very, very difficult to nail down sourcing for that story, and most news editors would, or publishers who don't want to feed the lawyers would just wave that off and say, go find something else to write about."

Matsuoka: "I'll echo that. I think the other thing that I like to think set us apart is that in the last couple years, we started to call ourselves the people's paper, and I think that was drawn from this want and commitment to telling stories that were deeply rooted in the communities that we covered. So, not necessarily like a top-down approach of writing stories that we thought needed to be told, but ones that we heard from the community that said, 'Hey, this is something that's important to us, that's happening.' And I think, you know, the stories that we wrote did reflect those things."

On the struggles of operating a small newspaper:

Clarey: "Well, part of it is a broken business model, and maybe broken isn't even the right word, because that implies it can be fixed. We're talking about advertising, which is how news has been funded forever. But there was a time when there just weren't that many places to advertise, and a daily newspaper had, like a monopoly on it. Most folks coming in from out of market, if they had an event to advertise, that would be their very first stop, and if there was an alt-weekly, that would be their second or third stop."

Matsuoka: "I think we're at a point in journalism where a lot of news outlets, not just ours, are really thinking deeply about what is a sustainable business model for news? What does it look like, and what can we get to because this is a problem that is impacting all newsrooms everywhere, not just Triad City Beat. Every single news outlet is going through the same crisis of how are we going to fund this and make sure that journalists are paid well enough to stay where they are, and they don't get burnt out, and we can continue creating high-quality news."

On looking back and looking forward:

Clarey: "It feels so good, doesn't it? Just to know how important our work was to these people, many of whom we never laid eyes on or met. And it feels so good to feel like we've made our mark or a mark in this little, short piece of very recent history in our time and place. It just feels really good that our work had an effect, that it wasn't just cast off into nothingness, that it wasn't forgettable, that it had an effect on people and their lives. And that's what good journalism is supposed to do, not just the news reporting, but the cultural stuff, the personal reflections, all of it is supposed to help people live their lives. And in that way, we were quite successful."

Matsuoka: "I think journalism is sort of everywhere, and exists everywhere, all around us, all the time. Because I think that journalism at its core and at its base is storytelling, and that's something that regular people do all the time, you know? When they share stories with each other, or, you know, even gossip about, like their favorite sandwich at the close by bodega. Like, to me, that's a nugget for a story, you know? And so we didn't create stories at Triad City Beat so much as we did find stories that already existed and gave them a platform and amplified those stories. You know, we weren't writing things from our imaginations. We weren't doing fiction writing. We were finding stories that already existed, things people were already doing, and people will continue to do those things, whether we're around or not as a paper. And so I think the onus is on all of us to sort of find those stories, because they exist all the time, everywhere, all the time anyways, and give a platform to those things. And so the work of Triad City Beat, and what made Triad City Beat, what it was, I think, is still happening and will continue to happen, so long as people continue to do things and then tell stories, which I think they will."

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