Dave's guest borrower today, Ray Criscoe, who began producing the Randolph HUB, a local weekly paper that is everything the former paper isn’t. Ray is an App State graduate who got his early newspaper experience hands-on as a sportswriter and sports editor, editor, production manager and writer and yearbook co-editor. And in the real world he worked on a monthly retainer for the Winston-Salem Journal while in school. He worked for the Fayetteville Observer and put in 33 plus years at the Asheboro Courier-Tribune, in various capacities, including as editor from 1994-2014. He started the Randolph Hub on Sept. 1 2021 with lots of help from former co-workers. He calls the Randolph HUB a community project, a passion endeavor, some unfinished business and lots of other things all rolled into one.
So, when you think about the local paper, you might imagine, as I do, people scrambling to be the first to read the latest edition at the library. Sports, maddening letters to the Editor, coming events, obituaries, the law log, updates from yesterday’s fraught criminal trial, the school board election results, humorous Op-Ed columns from community wits and polemics from political wonks.
In recent history, this was what one could find, plus much more from our town's hyperlocal newspaper.
Mainly, local newspapers provided necessary context for events of great pitch and moment that were too close-to-home for larger papers and news organizations to cover. Regardless of whether we liked what we were reading, our hometown paper gave us the information so that we could make up our minds and over the years, I made note of several events that, without that information, who can guess how we might fare?
Today, our local paper is a shadow of its former self. Purchased by a larger media company, the community content all fell off and what most of us went to the paper to read became far more regional and less relevant to us. Mainly the context that used to be provided by hard working writers and contributors has disappeared.
To the rescue came the former Editor of that paper, my guest borrower today, Ray Criscoe, who stepped into the gap and began producing the Randolph HUB, a local weekly paper that is everything the former paper isn’t.
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