Triad City Beat, an award-winning newspaper and website since 2014, is leaning into the gaps left by the decline in legacy news coverage in the NC Piedmont Triad. We’re interested in covering local government — city councils, county commissions and school boards — and reporting on the people most affected by the decisions made by those bodies. We also love elections; this far into the 2024 cycle no local outlet has published more election news that Triad City Beat. We tend to focus our light on marginalized communities — poor folks, houseless people, LGBTQIA2S+ North Carolinians, immigrants, laborers — and our cultural coverage skews towards BIPOC creatives. Behind it is one of the most diverse staffs in the state.

We used our NC Local News Lab Fund grant to hire a city reporter who covers city council meetings in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, filing three to five pieces per week about the meetings and the people affected by the decisions made there. No one had been regularly covering these meetings. Gale Melcher has filed 116 stories since she began in January, garnering nearly 1 million page views—one of her first pieces, on temporary housing for homeless in Greensboro, got more than 400,000 page views— and affected some policy decisions. We hope to replicate this project on the county level.