Introducing our newest columnist
Jeri Rowe's new metro column debuts Saturday. Get ready, too, because it will quickly become a must-read. Thanks to Jeri's past stints as editor of Go Triad and the now-defunct alt weekly TriadStyle, Jeri has one of the more recognizable writing voices in the arts and entertainment field. Now he's going bring his dynamic energy to cover the rest of the world.
He will alternate days with current columnist Lorraine Ahearn.
Jeri was one of our audio pioneers, founding Go Radio. He's spent the last several months helping us -- leading us -- envision the possibilities in the redesign of the Go Triad site. He won't be away from online.
I asked Jeri to write me a few lines about what he hoped to do with his column. He wrote more than a few lines, but I promise his editors will use the red pencil more liberally than I do when he's in the paper. Here's what he told me:
I plan to have fun on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. I hope readers will, too.
There's no grand scheme. I plan to trek across the Triad, looking for people and places that make the region what it is today -- a quirky, culturally rich region working to reinvent itself. And whatever I find, I hope to write it like a letter, digging into things that I hope will make readers laugh or simply think about where -- and how --- we live. Lorraine Ahearn has done that admirably for at least a decade as an N&R columnist. I just hope I can follow suit.
When I was running Triad Style and Go Triad, a retired federal cop I know from my days covering local courts used to call me from time to time. We talked about bunches of stuff -- anything from the need for Riders In The Sky coming to the Carolina Theatre, the joy of listening to Three Dog Night and, of course, the pain of putting up with what he called the "liberal media."
But sometimes, after reading something I wrote, he would give me good-natured jab and say, "Jeri, you just want to keep Greensboro weird."
Oh, I'd laugh. I still do. Because, maybe that's true.
I remember reading somewhere what Southern novelist Flannery O'Connor said about her South. When she was asked why she writes about all stuff freaky, she said something like this: "We Southerners don't hide our eccentric relatives in the attic. We like to bring them into the living room for everyone to see."
After 20 years as a journalist, 16 of which have been at the N&R, I always loved to find those personal stories that zeroed in on some bigger theme we've all run into -- the importance of love, the need to persevere, the fear of the unknown, etc.
And yeah, some of those stories I've found have had that touch of Technicolor, way-out-there weirdness. And that's cool by me.
And then, there's another thing nagging at me, like a week-old cold. We at the N&R work in a hand-wringing era when everyone I know is worried about dropping circulation and the perceived irrelevance of newspapers, the dinosaur in the Information Age. But in a show last week on PBS, I caught Jim Lehrer ask retired Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee on how newspapers can bounce back. He said simply, "Stories. Just good stories."
So, that's what I'll look for. I've got dozens of ideas already. But if readers have a suggestion, let me know. I'm all ears.
