This month marks the tenth anniversary of the Blade’s launch. Our co-op offers our thanks to our supporters and this statement about where we’ve been as well as the path ahead
Above: The skyline of part of downtown Asheville by night. Photo by Max Cooper
Ten years ago this month, readers, the Asheville Blade formally launched.
We would not have made it a single year, let alone a whole decade, without the support of communities throughout this city. So, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you to everyone who’s subscribed, donated, supported what we do, given us a news tip, sent honest feedback and encouraged us to keep fighting.
The genesis of the Blade lay in a union fight at Mountain Xpress, the weekly publication where Blade editor David Forbes then worked as senior news reporter. In March 2014, as part of that effort, she published an expose on a slumlord in Buncombe County that Xpress‘ management had repeatedly tried to bury, then tried to force her to rewrite in favor of the landlord. She refused, and revealed that corruption as part of the larger union fight. On March 31 she posted Home, bitter home the story Xpress‘ higher-ups tried to kill, on a just-created site called “the Asheville Blade.”
At the time the point was to reveal the piece outside of any avenue that would make her money or be one of Xpress‘ rivals. When management fired them in retaliation Forbes — with a wide array of community support and participation — launched the Blade as full-fledged alternative, backed directly by local subscribers rather than advertisers. Among many other things, the actions of Xpress‘ management and her experience navigating the world of Asheville’s establishment press had provided a master course in how not to run a publication.
The name was carefully chosen, as “Blade” has a history, used by militant abolitionist and pro-labor media in the 1800s and then by groundbreaking queer newspapers in the mid-1900s. The word itself also sends a message: in a city that too many media try to turn into a marketing brochure to keep things “nice” for the tourists, the Blade was here to fight.
As the saying goes: if it can be destroyed by the truth it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.
Too often the establishment press in this city has acted as a de facto marketing arm of the tourism industry. So instead the Blade focused on in-depth reporting and sharp viewpoint pieces that tore through that facade. We’ve never cared about the latest new restaurant, but how the people working there are paid and treated.
So we have, with all the challenges we face, tried to chart a different course. Journalists can be community chroniclers, investigators and storytellers. We can call a lie a lie. We can be honest about what we face and our views about what to do about it, yet independent of any outside group.
As one of our first pieces, An Asheville for the rest of us, put it:
“The time comes when ‘that’s the way it is’ becomes a route to disaster, when survival requires change that’s not universally comfortable or flattering. The worst issues Asheville’s people face aren’t yielding, and they threaten to undermine the future of the whole area. Cities that don’t tackle those end up footnotes or cautionary tales.
The migrating wealthy can find another palace if they wish; and the second the wind changes, they probably will. But this is not their home. It’s far past time to ask what a functioning city for the rest of us actually looks like.”
So we did. Indeed one can feel a bit like Cassandra looking through the warnings in our pieces over the years about topics like redlining, city hall refusing to pay a living wage or the damage done by the hotel industry and the Tourism Development Authority. The problems were bad then. They have since become far, far worse.
Yet we should not surrender to despair, as it’s often too easy to do. There is nothing inevitable about gentrification or the power of the gentry who drive it. A decade on Asheville is also angrier, more mobilized and more willing to push for the many radical alternatives we so desperately need. Cops have quit in droves. The segregationist monument that towered over the center of downtown is gone after locals covered it in graffiti and threatened to tear it down themselves.
The Vance monument covered in graffiti in summer 2020. Special to the Blade
Mutual aid networks are, for all the challenges they face, far stronger than they used to be. There is more widespread willingness to take direct action and far less to wait for the false promises of politicians and process. As we write this a surge of anti-gentrification organizing has drawn informationa directly from our in-depth reporting on the threat posed by the Business Improvement District.
Over this decade our own views and approach evolved. In 2020 we became a co-operative. This was honestly a natural fit, as the Blade has always been highly community-focused and part of our origins lay in seeing up close how the traditional newsroom hierarchy is deeply damaging to good journalism. After enough hours spent covering local government two of our reporters became anarchists, seeing the oppressions that lay at the heart of these power structures. All of us are leftists. Asheville is a sterling example of why we face the choice of either radical change or apocalyptic dystopia.
The Blade co-op is entirely made up of working class trans and non-binary people. Yet despite hardships, we endure due to the support of a wide array of locals who subscribe or donate to directly support our work.
That work has, of course, not come without retaliation, for beneath their veneer of “Asheville nice” the gentry here are deeply devoted to petty cruelty. The police have repeatedly arrested Blade reporters for doing their jobs, so flagrantly that it’s drawn condemnation from civil liberties and press freedom groups around the world. Even now two of our reporters are, with the assistance of the Duke Law First Amendment Clinic and local attorneys, appealing their convictions for covering the APD’s infamous Christmas night crackdown on a homeless camp. Wealthy property owners have sent copies of our articles to police commanders, designating us a problem that must be crushed. We have faced slurs and death threats more times than we can count. Yet here we stand.
Asheville police in Aston Park on December 25, 2021. Photo by Veronica Coit, who was arrested immediately after taking it
We come through all this more dedicated than ever to the path ahead.
Radical? Proudly so. That simply means “getting to the root.” Most of the “muckrakers” who forged the best of journalism were radicals. Ida B. Wells, to pick one example, didn’t just investigate the horrors of lynching, she openly called for people to shoot the klan with guns.
Biased? We’re leftists. We’re honest about it. That’s the perspective we bring to the facts that we report and the investigations we do. We reject the “objectivity” that amounts to little more than regurgitating whatever the police and business owners say as the gospel truth. We’re journalists, not their p.r. hacks.
Angry? The anger you will find in these pages is a fraction of a fraction of what we see among the people of this city every single day. Like it or not that is the reality of our town.
The gentry taking over Asheville with airbnbs and the tourists looking to get drunk have mouthpieces aplenty. The Blade is not for them. They are not this city. They are not who we care about or who we are dedicated to.
But if you’ve ever been paid damn near nothing, survived homelessness, fought a bigot, been attacked at a protest, fed your neighbors, faced an eviction notice or had a law try to make your existence a crime then welcome.
There are, blessedly, far more of us than there are of them. And our swords are sharp.
To the next ten years,
The Asheville Blade Co-op
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The Asheville Blade is entirely funded by our readers. If you like what we do, donate directly to us on Patreon or make a one-time gift to support our work. Questions? Comments? Email us.