OFF THE FRONT PORCH: Reconnecting With Old Love

Why Journalism Again After Walking Away?

Six years ago, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I walked away from a love affair that had captivated me for more than three decades, since my earliest days out of high school. With our world in chaos, and with the question of public health becoming so politicized and divisive on so many fronts, I turned my back on journalism.

It was not an graceful exit. I had become so frustrated with outlandish conspiracy theories, partisan gamesmanship, and strident opposition to drive-through COVID testing, pop-up vaccine clinics and seemingly innocuous requests to wear masks to help stem the tide of the disease that would end up killing more than seven million people. I literally threw up my hands and said I was done forever with the career that had fed my belly and fueled my imagination since I was 17 years old.

I reasoned, “What could a small-town weekly newspaper editor do that would ever again matter in a world gone mad?” I started looking for a way to make a living wage in the nonprofit sector.

My search eventually would land me in the classrooms of Saluda County Schools as a substitute teacher, then in time, on the campus of the South Carolina Governor’s School for Agriculture at John de la Howe in McCormick. For much of the past five years I have served as the resident storyteller at the nation’s only residential high school devoted to agricultural education.

Navigating The ‘Digital Disruption’

However far into the wilderness I ran, my love of trying to capture lightning in a bottle, of chasing good news narratives and delivering them to audiences of readers, listeners and/or viewers, never fully vacated my body. The soul of a storyteller still beats within me.

I am called to be a communicator, which is why in the fall of 2020 I eagerly embraced a request by a longtime friend and broadcasting colleague to help him launch an internet radio station after WKSX 92.7FM, the local station in Johnston, was sold to a religious broadcasting network. To this day, I still host the afternoon show on Timeless Jukebox Radio, though most of my shows are prerecorded.

While I have been blithely basking in farm living like Oliver Wendell Douglas, the sacred world of journalism I left behind has suffered a fate strangely akin to a pandemic. Over the past two decades, according to the Local News Initiative project at Northwestern University, more than 3,200 print newspapers have ceased publication. Researchers predicted that by the end of 2025, the United States will have lost fully one-third of its printed newspapers. Today, fewer than 5,600 newspapers remain, and most of them are community weeklies.

Just this past week, the venerable Atlanta Journal-Constitution – which has published a print edition of some iteration since 1868 – announced that its final newsPAPER would go to press on December 31. The AJC is pushing all its remaining chips into the dicey digital game.

Some call this phenomenon the “digital disruption,” and this is indeed an apt description. The good old days of opening up the morning paper over breakfast and flipping through the pages while sipping a soothing cup of coffee are seemingly fading into memory. But some of us remain nostalgic, no matter how tech-savvy we may be.

The Square In Edgefield
The Peach Exchange Mural in Johnston
The Grave of Governor “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman in Trenton
One of Edgefield County’s iconic roadside stands

Aiken County Boy In The Home Of 10 Governors

I began my journalism career in the summer of 1986 at a very fine print newspaper that is still cranking up the presses five days each week, The Aiken Standard. In time, I would follow a beloved mentor here to Edgefield County to join the staff of The Citizen News, a weekly that was in direction competition with South Carolina’s oldest newspaper right across the square, The Edgefield Advertiser.

My career aspirations and personal life choices soon would take me to Ohio, then to North Carolina, then to south Georgia. Finally, in 2002, after a heartbreaking split with the love of my life, I stumbled back home to the corner office of The Citizen News. I was proud to serve as editor and regional publisher for a while, covering the everyday happenings of Edgefield County and such once-in-a-lifetime uniquely-Edgefieldian stories as the 100th birthday of the legendary Senator Strom Thurmond, his death in June 2003 and the revelation a few months later of a daughter Ol’ Strom never publicly acknowledged. Soon, though, I followed another siren call into broadcasting.

The Citizen News folded in 2013, and today, the proverbial last-man-standing in the Edgefield County newspaper wars is the majestic old gray lady, The Edgefield Advertiser. My genuine prayer is that this classic small-town newspaper will continue to churn out a weekly print edition for many years to come, against all odds.

Still, after six years estranged from my love of community journalism, I once again heard the whispers that so often only men and women with storytelling in their blood can discern. That strange pull to get back into the craft has been nagging at me for some months now, even as I have tried to silence it by focusing on earning a state certification to teach middle-school social studies. But as the great Jackie Wilson once sang, the whispers have been “gettin’ louder.”

Last Friday night, that still soft voice became a full-throated call to action as I was sitting in the Timeless Jukebox Radio studio, producing our live broadcast of Strom Thurmond High School football. There was much conversation on the coverage about the pregame and halftime festivities honoring the 2005 state championship team, and in the words of an old Van Morrison song, it “cast my memory back there, Lord.”

A Non-Rebel With A Cause

It was a magical night that autumn exactly 20 years ago at Williams-Brice Stadium. It seemed that the whole population of Edgefield County had trekked to Columbia, and even though I didn’t graduate from Strom Thurmond High, I remember being as thrilled for those boys and Coach Lee Sawyer as if I had worn the blue-and-red myself back in the halcyon days of my reckless youth.

All that talk about the 20th anniversary of the state championship somehow crystallized for me that I do dearly love being a witness to history and having the privilege to compose whatever first draft of that history I can possibly muster. After our radio broadcast ended, I stayed up until the wee hours of Saturday morning putting together the pieces for this project and finally committed myself to do all I can to make this notion last as long as there is an audience.

Edgefield County News is now and always will be a work-in-progress. I have pressed a hard pause on my preparations to become a certified teacher to devote all available energy (beyond my work at Timeless Jukebox Radio, of course) to this project.

My first two actual stories are now underway, and in time I plan to add an audio podcast and video programming to a companion YouTube channel. I’ll be in constant prayer that between some advertising partners – and maybe a strategic donation here and there in the name of community journalism – I’ll be able to pay my bills and feed myself, my three-legged canine companion Tank and his feline brother Frankie.

I am excited once again to cover festivals and parades, government meetings and sporting events, and discover lively stories of the people, places and events of Edgefield County. Please bear with me as I knock the dust off my storytelling skills. As soon as we are eligible, I plan for Edgefield County News to join the South Carolina Press Association to give our community a wider voice in the world of community newspapering.

Personally, I don’t view Edgefield County News as competition to the resilient old Edgefield Advertiser. I have fully embraced the “digital disruption,” and there are no newsprint purchases in my future. I sincerely hope both our outlets can keep the home fires of community journalism burning in Edgefield County for many years to come.

For me, Edgefield County News is a letter to the love I left behind six years ago and a prayerful attempt to reconcile with the better angels of my sacred calling to the time-honored craft of reporting, feature writing and photography. May God smile on this effort as I grow every day to rediscover my lost love for storytelling.