As the aging founder and majority owner of Mountain Xpress, I’ve been asking myself for some years when and how I would find a plan for the paper to continue without me. The solution has been surprisingly tough to find — particularly given my determination to protect Xpress from market forces, which of late are predominated by private-equity firms gobbling up small businesses and sucking the lifeblood out of them.
But I am delighted to announce now that Xpress has a succession plan under which, in just a couple of months, a local nonprofit closely associated with Mountain Xpress, the Fund for Investigative Reporting (FIRE), will acquire the paper’s corporate stock.
FIRE’s mission is similar to Xpress’: to promote Western North Carolina journalism. So I don’t believe it will be inclined to operate Xpress as a moneymaking venture or to try to increase the paper’s market value so it can be sold at a profit.