In Scott Yost’s article about the lawsuit filed by the News & Record, The Carolina Peacemaker and the Jamestown News and The High Point Enterprise against the State of North Carolina and Guilford County over their former monopoly on legal advertising, Yost wrote that there were 13 municipalities in Guilford County and I thought he was nuts, but it turns out he’s right.

There are 13 municipalities in Guilford County. In my list I came up with 11, but here is the complete list: Greensboro, High Point, Jamestown, Stokesdale, Summerfield, Oak Ridge, Sedalia, Whitsett, Pleasant Garden, Gibsonville, Kernersville, Burlington and Archdale. I missed Burlington and Archdale in my list but both extend into Guilford County.

Brown Summit, Colfax and McLeansville are not incorporated, and since the smaller towns in Guilford County incorporated the state has made it more difficult for an unincorporated area to incorporate.

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I have survived another hurricane. I have no idea how many that is, but it’s every one since Hazel, except for a couple of years when I was living elsewhere. I’ve never bought water, bread, milk, eggs, paper products are anything else in preparation for a hurricane. I do keep a good supply of batteries, but that’s year round. I did spend some time in the yard making sure I hadn’t diverted the water to flow under my house, which I did once, and getting potted plants out of the wind. But none of that took very long and it didn’t cost a dime.

This was a bad storm for eastern North Carolina because of the tremendous amount of rain, but here in Greensboro we got enough rain to flood the new and improved Latham Park, which used to flood regularly but that’s about it. All of that hype turned out to be just that as far as this area was concerned. Down East is still flooded, so it was a completely different experience there.

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It’s not part of the paper most people notice, but the publisher’s box for the News & Record is depressing. The publisher, Alton Brown, is in Winston-Salem and is also the publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal, and that appears to be handwriting on the wall.

But the really discouraging part is that there is no editor, no executive editor, no managing editor, no interim editor, no nothing. There are two editorial page editors but they don’t have anything to do with the news.

The N&R recently has laid people off and had people leave without replacing them. It appears that they are going to see how well a newspaper operates without an editor. It’s like having a train without an engineer; things might go along fine out in open country but when the train needs to stop at a station you’ve got some real problems.

If they didn’t have anyone ready to replace Danny Finnegan, why did they let him go? Unless they have decided to run the paper completely out of Winston-Salem and don’t want to admit it yet.

It appears that as reporters leave and aren’t replaced the newspaper will die a natural death. One day, instead of the News & Record in our driveways, we’ll wake up to the Winston-Salem Journal (Greensboro edition).

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Folks who go to our website should see an old familiar name popping up on articles there soon. Paul Clark, who covered the schools, High Point and Greensboro for The Rhinoceros Times and the Rhino Times has agreed to start doing some freelance writing for us.

He’s getting his fingers limbered up after a long break, but we expect to start publishing his articles online in the near future.