Story by: Sophie Whisnant
Photos by: Jayme Johnson
CHARLOTTE, North Carolina –At midnight Ryan Pitkin was experiencing his greatest nightmare, but he wasn’t asleep.
Just weeks after making the bold decision to start an alternative weekly newspaper in Charlotte, Pitkin was scrambling to meet his first print deadline as editor-in-chief. He paced around his new office’s common area, screaming curse words with his business partner and publisher, Justin LaFrancois, by his side.
“Everything crashed; everything went bad,” Pitkin said.
Far from the operating system at their old office, the guys didn’t know what to do when the computers they needed to submit their first issue kept malfunctioning. What should have been an easy submit at 2 p.m. turned into a night long panic.
Finally, once technology decided to cooperate, the two-man team sent their first paper off to print. With that QC Nerve was born, but the future seemed daunting.
“How are we ever going to get ourselves to a routine where this doesn’t happen?” Pitkin wondered.
After being suddenly laid off from their jobs at Creative Loafing Charlotte, Pitkin and LaFrancois decided to fill the alternative media void in Charlotte by starting their own alt weekly from scratch. Now the guys live, eat and breathe journalism as they try to prove that print isn’t dead in 2019.
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Before QC Nerve, there was Creative Loafing. CL had been covering arts, news and entertainment in Charlotte since 1987 and was serving as the city’s primary alternative voice.
LaFrancois had never dreamed of working at the Loaf when he picked up the paper for the first time as a teenager. After dropping out of high school his second semester senior year because the principal threatened to suspend him again—the same day he returned from his previous suspension—he got his GED and started working in restaurants, climbing his way from busboy to general manager at local restaurant Moo & Brew.
He eventually stumbled into his job as account executive at Creative Loafing after impressing sales manager Aaron Stamey with his Charlotte connections and sales skills. Working at CL meant planning events like the annual Margarita Wars festival and promoting the paper, all the while going to concerts on weeknights and keeping a bottle of Tito’s vodka on his desk.
“I couldn’t believe that I was working at Creative Loafing,” he said. “I thought that was so f***ing cool.”
Similarly, Pitkin started reading Creative Loafing when he was a teenager out skateboarding with his friends.
“We would pick it up because that would be the cool s***,” Pitkin said. “We couldn’t do any of that stuff but we wanted to so bad.”
Pitkin interned at CL while studying English and journalism at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. From then on he knew he wanted to work there. After years contributing and working as the news editor, Pitkin was promoted to editor-in-chief, a job he had for three months before the whole staff would be laid off.
Right after sending the next Creative Loafing issue off to print last Halloween, the entire staff’s emails went dead. Soon after, publisher Charles Womack was at the office, telling everyone that the paper was closed, and they had five minutes to collect their belongings and get out.
Womack had decided to cancel the print edition of CL and give his son control of the online component. Since then, Creative Loafing has come back to Charlotte as a print paper but with a whole new staff.
“If they would have given us a two-week notice and let us put out one last paper we would have put out a goodbye issue,” Pitkin said. “Then we wouldn’t have had this, but they lit the fire that made this all happen.”
While the CL staff drowned their sorrows at a local watering hole, condolences and Venmo donations to the group’s bar tab poured in from journalists across the country. As word of the shutdown spread, community support grew. It was only a couple of days before investors reached out to LaFrancois about starting a new paper, QC Nerve, an ode to Charlotte’s moniker as the Queen City.
The goal of QC Nerve is to support their community through investigative and opinionated journalism. The paper has featured stories on educational inequality, female boxing and neighborhood protests supporting Black Lives Matter. But one of LaFrancois’s favorites has been about Foster Village Charlotte, a non-profit that provides welcome bags for children entering a new foster home, which hit home with LaFrancois because his own parents took in foster children.
The Nerve keeps Charlotte locals updated on the hippest arts, music and food events in town. LaFrancois and Pitkin set out to create something true to the city and their own, uncensored voices.
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The decision to invest in print journalism now might seem counterintuitive to someone keeping up with the news. Talk of mass layoffs and shutdowns at papers across the country seem to dominate the news about the news. CNN reported in January that the media industry lost about 1,000 jobs.
Jeri Rowe, long-time journalist and former alt weekly editor of Triad Style and Go Triad in Greensboro, has studied the state of print journalism. He said newspaper advertising revenue has fallen 63 percent since 2008. Newspaper jobs have fallen by almost half, and 24 jobs are lost every day. Since 1990, nearly 65 percent of newspapers have been eliminated.
“Now we’ve heard about fishing, we’ve heard about steel, we’ve heard about coal, but we sure haven’t heard about what greases the wheels of our democracy,” Rowe said.
These concerns weren’t entirely lost on LaFrancois and Pitkin as they pondered the offer to start a paper from scratch.
“We just worked at (an alt weekly) that just shutdown, why are we going to start a new one?” LaFrancois said.
It didn’t take them long to decide to give it their best shot. LaFrancois stepped up as publisher and Pitkin as editor. Other staff members from Creative Loafing got on board and work now as contributors to the Nerve. With that, the paper was off and running.
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Pitkin and LaFrancois did not give themselves any time to slack off. After losing their jobs on Halloween, they planned QC Nerve’s release date for Dec. 6. Pitkin said they knew they had to fill the alt weekly void quickly if they wanted to survive.
The weeks between Creative Loafing ending and QC Nerve hitting newsstands were grueling, but LaFrancois and Pitkin knew the work they were doing was important. Charlotte is the biggest and youngest market in North Carolina, Rowe said, which means it’s a perfect spot for a different kind of media.
“An alt weekly can tell those zany, wacky, in the corner of the community stories that show the richness of where we live,” Rowe said, “and that’s important.”
Brian Clarey founded his own alt weekly in Greensboro, Triad City Beat, five years ago and has been serving as a mentor for the QC Nerve team. He said that an alt weekly is necessary to correct the bad behaviors of daily newspapers.
“There’s a media crisis certainly in this state,” he said. “So many of our legacy media are letting us down.”
Daily publications are “culturally illiterate,” Clarey said, and an alternative voice is needed to create a healthy, vibrant media ecosystem that holds newspapers to a higher standard. Reporting on the nooks and crannies of Charlotte’s news and arts scene is a priority for the Nerve.
“It’s real and raw,” LaFrancois said. “We’re not regional, we’re hyper local. It’s all about Charlotte.”
The team would have to cling to their vision to get through their toughest moments and prove that an alt weekly could still be successful.
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QC Nerve distributes 15,000 print copies to 500 locations around Charlotte every two weeks. LaFrancois and Pitkin spend about five hours driving newspaper routes LaFrancois meticulously planned. The two are joined by Courtney Mihocik, QC Nerve associate editor and former CL employee, as well as community volunteers.
Print is important to them, but to survive and succeed the team also runs a constantly updated website. LaFrancois was able to get former Creative Loafing advertisers on board with the Nerve, including Matt Comer, communications director for Charlotte Pride.
“Even though we live in an incredibly digitally connected world there are still people who have difficulty accessing the digital world,” Comer said. “Print advertising allows us to reach a more diverse audience.”
To bring in revenue beyond advertising dollars, LaFrancois is planning an event called “The Vodka Masters,” a craft cocktail competition. This day of drinking is one of the first of many major events he wants to do.
Working this hard has been a lifestyle change for both men. No longer does LaFrancois have a night out during the work week.
“If someone offers me a beer I go straight for the coffee,” he said.
But the creation of the Nerve has made LaFrancois and Pitkin work husbands, even though the two had barely spent time together at their last job.
“We’ve spent probably one day apart from each other since we started this,” LaFrancois said. “Now I get separation anxiety when he goes to write a story in the common area and I’m sitting here without him.”
Mihocik has worked with Pitkin before and met LaFrancois when she started at Creative Loafing just a few months before the layoffs. As an editor at both papers, she’s been a firsthand witness to the growth of their friendship and business savvy.
“They’re very smart businessmen for being new business owners but they’re also a couple of nitwits,” she said. “They’re definitely Thing 1 and Thing 2.”
Part of their bond lies in the fact that they took a seemingly huge leap of faith, opening a newspaper in today’s journalism climate, together.
“Whoever owns a paper just wants to make millions of dollars because it’s possible but that’s all they want to do,” LaFrancois said. “All I want to do is just keep being able to afford my rent, and every now and then I’d like to eat.”
No sane person would think to open an alt weekly now LaFrancois said, but Pitkin and LaFrancois have seen the community be receptive to their work so far.
“From a practical standpoint, my God, why are you starting an alt weekly in this kind of environment? The answer in short is the community needs it,” Rowe said.
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So far, their risk has paid off.
The paper ran a profit in its first quarter, something LaFrancois said was unheard of.
The support from the Creative Loafing layoffs still seems to be there, and LaFrancois and Pitkin are seeing their livelihood and their dream unfold in front of them.
Today, a framed copy of QC Nerve’s first issue, the one that gave LaFrancois and Pitkin such a headache and made them fear the future of their paper, sits on Pitkin’s desk. The cover consists of a young newsboy holding up a paper, the QC Nerve logo, and three simple words: “Print’s not dead.”
“It’s like iconic to me,” Pitkin said. “I treasure this. If we don’t go one more paper I’m going to hold on to this forever and not be depressed about what we did.”
