Charlotte is losing another local news outlet.
Queen City Nerve announced Monday morning that it is closing immediately after nearly eight years covering local government, arts, music, food and culture.
The Nerve's publisher says a potential sale of the publication fell through, leaving the outlet with no way to keep operating.
WFAE's Nick de la Canal spoke with Queen City Nerve editor-in-chief Ryan Pitkin about what led to the sudden closure.
Nick de la Canal: Ryan, thanks for joining us, especially on what I imagine is a pretty difficult day.
Ryan Pitkin: Hey, Nick. Yeah, it's been a rough one, but it's also been great to hear all the support from folks. You sometimes feel like you're screaming into a void while you're doing local media, so all the support that we've heard from our readers has been uplifting today.
De la Canal: Well, let's start with what happened. Less than two weeks ago, Queen City Nerve announced that it would stop publishing a print edition, but you still planned to keep publishing online. Now you're shutting down entirely. What changed so quickly?
Pitkin: So, that announcement came as we were in talks with different groups about potentially acquiring our business and keeping it running.
We had one very interested party that was a local media company, very well established. Unfortunately, a team member with that company ended up leaving literally in the middle of our talks, and they just had to shut down. Once those talks shut down, we just sort of had to make the call.
De la Canal: Can I ask how close to a sale you guys got?
Pitkin: There was a letter of intent. That's as far as we got.
De la Canal: I want to go back to how Queen City Nerve started. You and several of your colleagues had worked for a different alt-weekly called Creative Loafing for many years, until its staff in Charlotte was laid off in 2018. Then you essentially turned around and built this new alternative newspaper. What were you setting out to create with the Nerve?
Pitkin: We really fully believed in the alt-weekly model and what it meant to cover some of the cultures and subcultures in Charlotte that we didn't feel like were getting enough coverage in other areas.
It's just something that I've always had a passion for, since going to school for journalism and discovering some of the writers who did things a little differently within the journalistic world.
The cliché is Hunter S. Thompson, but that is sort of the first person I read that made me realize, oh, journalism doesn't have to be square. It doesn't all have to be written the same exact way.
That's something that I still, to this day, think is a very important presence to have in any city — especially in Charlotte, such a fast-growing city.
Our slogan has always been at Queen City Nerve that if you don't think anything's going on in Charlotte, or you think it's a boring city, then you're just not looking hard enough, because it's really easy to find so much rich culture in a city on a daily basis.
And that's sort of what we existed for. And that's why we felt it was important to keep this thing going past the shutdown of Creative Loafing.
De la Canal: And now we're seeing several longtime Charlotte publications disappear. Charlotte Magazine shut down late last year after nearly six decades. QNotes ended its 40-year print run this spring and moved online. Now Queen City Nerve is folding. What do you think is happening to Charlotte's local media landscape and the business model for local journalism?
Pitkin: It's really tough out there. I mean, a lot of this is a shift in the way that companies see how they want to run their advertising budget. But it's not just that. There's also so much economic uncertainty.
We really started to run into problems with advertising revenue right as Trump took office for the second time. As soon as arts funding started to get cut on a federal level, that really hurt so many different organizations. And our No. 1 source of advertising revenue were arts organizations.
There's also just the whole uncertainty around tariffs. The first thing that sort of goes when you see this economic uncertainty is the advertising budget. That's something that they feel like they can cut and continue to exist. And that is the situation for so many local businesses, which were our main advertisers.
De la Canal: This has been your life for the past eight years. What are you planning to do just over the next few weeks? Have you even had time to think about what comes next?
Pitkin: Well, I have a couple of pre-planned vacations coming up in the next two weeks, so they're timed out pretty well.
In the very short term, this will be the first Monday night in years that I haven't assigned myself to watch City Council. Let's put it that way. So I don't know what I'm going to do with my Monday night.
I'll probably end up watching it anyway just because I'm that invested. I've been covering City Council for 10 years now. But for now, I'm going to take some time off, take some time back, and we'll see where I can find myself in the more localized news economy.
