ACC tournament the biggest story in Greensboro. There’s barely a hometown paper left to cover it

The media workroom at the Greensboro Coliseum is all beige-painted cinder block walls and harsh fluorescent lighting, a drab space in every way except for one: all the history lining the walls. In that way, the workroom is a little like a museum, with framed copies of local newspaper pages commemorating the most memorable college basketball games ever played here.

Most of those have been part of the men’s ACC tournament. The Coliseum this week is hosting the event for the 29th time. But there’s also been all the NCAA tournament games, including the 1974 Final Four, and then the 23 women’s ACC tournaments, too. This place has seen a lot of basketball. The oldest of the newspaper pages are fading to yellow, the pictures grainy.

There are 37 of those pages in all, spaced out around the room. The earliest is from March 1967, when the Coliseum hosted the ACC tournament for the first time. “Carolina Tops Duke 82-73 For Title,” was the headline in the Greensboro Daily News and, under it, there’s UNC’s Larry Miller and Duke’s Mike Lewis grappling over a loose ball. Dean Smith won his first ACC championship.

To follow the newspapers around the room is to embark on a self-guided ACC and college basketball education. There’s South Carolina winning its one and only ACC championship. And N.C. State beating Maryland in overtime in 1974 in what many still consider the greatest college basketball game ever played. There’s Mike Krzyzewski winning his first ACC title in 1986, and Wake Forest going back-to-back in the mid-1990s.

The pages become more modern-looking; the photos clearer, the graphics sharper. Black and white turns to color. The history becomes less distant and more recent. Earlier this week, on Tuesday night, Ed Hardin walked around that room — one he’d spent countless hours in during his decades with the Greensboro News & Record — and reminisced. He relived some of the moments he covered; he saw a younger version of himself staring back at him from his old columnist headshot.

“That hit home,” Hardin said, of being back in a place where he’d spent so much time. “I mean, I love this house ... this is like a little second home here.”

It was the first time he’d been back since 2020, and the day the ACC tournament abruptly ended with the onset of the pandemic. Six months later, in September 2020, Hardin was at home one Monday morning, cleaning out his garage. He’d just covered the UNC-Syracuse football game in Chapel Hill a couple days earlier, and chronicled the bizarre scene of a college football game playing out in an empty stadium at the height of a global pandemic.

Hardin’s phone buzzed. It was the News & Record’s managing editor at the time, “and he’s gone now, too,” Hardin said.

“And I just remember him saying, ‘I can’t even believe I’m getting ready to say this.’ And, ‘We’ve had to make some cuts, and you’re one of them.’”

At the time, Hardin was the reigning and back-to-back recipient of the National Sports Media Association’s North Carolina Sportswriter of the Year award, an honor he received five times — including in 2020. He was a 32-year veteran of The News & Record, where he started out covering auto racing before working his way up to sports columnist. He’d become a leading voice of his paper and community and, in a lot of ways, a voice of this state, too.

And then, Hardin said, “you look around one day and it’s like — it’s over.”

As much as the pages on the wall of the Coliseum workroom tell the story of all that’s happened here over the decades, they indirectly tell another story, too, and underscore a bygone time. When it’s in Greensboro, the ACC tournament is always the biggest story in town and, for a long time, The News & Record went all out to cover it. The paper brought it to life for a city that came to embrace the ACC, and its tournament, like no other place.

After years of budget cuts and staffing reductions; after Lee Enterprises, The News & Record’s parent company, decimated the newsroom, the paper that helped give rise to this event barely has anyone left to cover it. Hardin was once part of a small army of local journalists who documented the tournament for the local paper. When he arrived at The N&R in 1988, the sports staff included more than 20 staffers, he said, including copy editors and designers.

As recently as 2003, the paper still employed about a dozen sportswriters, said Eddie Wooten. He worked at The N&R for 24 years, most of them as the sports editor, until he left the newspaper business last fall. By the time he did, he barely had a staff to lead.

The round of layoffs that claimed Hardin in 2020 also cost the job of another veteran N&R sports reporter, Jefe Mills. After a day of brutal cuts, Wooten went from a staff of seven — some of whom were based out of the Winston-Salem Journal’s newsroom — to a staff of three.

“They were the soul of the Greensboro sports staff,” Wooten said of Hardin and Mills. “Their institutional knowledge, their writing ability. And that was — that was really, really, really difficult.”

The N&R once canvassed the ACC tournament like few other outlets could. This week, it has two staffers here — one of whom is Skip Foreman, a veteran North Carolina sports journalist, and former Associated Press reporter, whom Lee hired to fill Wooten’s position. (Foreman declined a request to be interviewed for this story.)

The N&R’s sports staff, dozens strong during the newspaper heyday of the 1980s and 90s, consists of one Greensboro-based reporter and another in Winston-Salem. Overall, The N&R employs five reporters, according to its website, to cover North Carolina’s third-largest city. The financial struggles of local newspapers, and the companies that run them, is hardly new. The financial crisis of the late 2000s led to massive cuts throughout the industry. In Greensboro, they kept coming.

In the span of about seven years, the paper changed ownership three times, from Landmark Enterprises to BH Media — owned by Warren Buffett — to Lee Enterprises, which acquired The N&R in 2020. Each time, the staff became smaller. The N&R and Winston-Salem Journal, both owned by Lee, have essentially merged, with skeletal staffs left to try to cover two large cities and a region that is not often served by larger outlets in Raleigh and Charlotte.

One of the turning points, for Hardin, came when the paper decided not to send him on the road to cover North Carolina’s run to the national championship in 2009. It was a story that, in the past, wouldn’t have required much of a debate about covering.

“Of course, they went and won it, and we weren’t there,” he said. “That’s when I knew — it’s never going to be like it was. And just, over time, just less and less and less. And layoffs. And cutting back on travel.

“I don’t even recognize the paper anymore.”

With the cuts in sports coverage came cuts everywhere else, too — cuts that inhibited the paper from its greater mission of covering the city and holding to account those in power. It’s one thing to be so short-staffed that it’s now a strain to cover a college basketball tournament that, Wooten said, “We wanted to own.” It’s another to lack the resources to cover a city and a region that remains an economic and cultural hub of the state.

That’s what most concerns Hardin now, as a citizen of that region.

“Like, who’s covering the courthouse?” he asked. “Who’s covering the commissioners? Who’s covering the money? Who’s covering the corruption? It’s going away, if it’s not gone already. And God knows what’s going to happen after that.

“And it’s not just Greensboro and Winston. It’s the small towns. Throughout the South, and probably the country, too.”

These days, he doesn’t miss the games. The camaraderie among the writers? The annual reunion in the old workroom, where newspapers all over the South — and plenty of national outlets, too - once sent scribes to chronicle what was once the greatest conference tournament in the country? Hardin does miss those things. He misses the Daytona 500, which was always his favorite event to cover.

He doesn’t miss the paper, though. After a lifetime in journalism, Hardin, a Winston-Salem resident, doesn’t subscribe to either The N&R or the Journal. At the end, he came to feel like a line item on a spreadsheet, decades of work reduced to a dollar figure a flailing company could cut to save a little bit of money. The last time he posted anything on Twitter, in September of 2020, days after he learned he was out of a job, Hardin wrote, “-30-.” It was old-school journalism parlance, a reference to when writers wrote “-30-” at the bottom of their copy to let editors know they’d reached the end of a story.

“The weird thing is it wasn’t even the paper that made the decision,” he said. “It was Lee. And I don’t even know where they are. Omaha? Dubuque? I couldn’t tell you.”

He never heard from anyone with the company, but only “got a form letter saying that I can’t talk to any news organizations about it, or I’ll lose my severance.” Enough time has passed now that it doesn’t matter. When Hardin visited the Coliseum earlier this week, he felt a sense of somber nostalgia, a longing for how things used to be.

“It is sad,” he said of the state of journalism, at large, before repeating those three words again. “It is sad. What hits me when I come here this week is how much of what I did, simply no longer exists.”

It was a different scene than it used to be. Fewer press rows near the court, because there are fewer reporters and columnists to fill them. The rows that were there were, for the first time at an ACC tournament, stood behind a row of courtside seats that spectators could buy — undoubtedly for no small price. Sports journalism itself had changed, too, from an enterprise more focused on the craft of writing and reporting to a melting pot of hot takes and Twitter memes. Hardin spent much of his career competing against other journalists; now those journalists compete against the entities they cover, a lot of which have created their own media networks.

Nothing is as it was. The old newspapers on the wall inside the Coliseum feel quaint, and of a much different time. Hardin stopped before a few of them earlier this week and took them in.

“It’s out of my system, you know?” he said. “I would write again, I think.”

But not sports. Maybe outdoors.

He spends most of his time on the 15-acre lake near his house, fishing. That’s always been his passion. He writes songs and teaches harmonica to COPD patients and embraces time with his six grandchildren, who keep him from “growing old too quickly,” as Hardin wrote in a text message.

In another life, he’d have been in the Coliseum all week this week, grinding away. But now the weather was starting to turn warmer and there was a lake full of bass, and no deadlines.