The Asheville Blade: Asheville's Cooperatively Run Watchdog
The Asheville Blade is an independent, cooperatively run local news outlet in Asheville, North Carolina, publishing at ashevilleblade.com. From its beginning as a single post in 2014, it has grown into one of the most distinctive voices in western North Carolina media: openly left in perspective, long-form in format, and focused relentlessly on how Asheville city government actually works — who decides, who benefits, and who pays.
Where much local coverage treats city hall as a calendar of meetings, the Blade treats it as a system of power. Its reporting follows housing, policing, development, and public money through council chambers and board rooms, and it does so for a readership in Asheville and Buncombe County that wants explanation as much as headlines. A decade after its launch, the Blade marked its tenth anniversary in 2024 as a journalism co-operative sustained directly by its readers.
Overview
The Blade is a digital-only publication covering Asheville, a mountain city in Buncombe County, North Carolina. Its beat is deliberately narrow and deep: municipal government, housing conditions, policing, development fights, and the social issues that flow from them. The outlet describes its own work as in-depth and hard-hitting, and its archive bears that out, with lengthy reported pieces and essays rather than brief news items.
The publication is run as a journalism co-operative. That structure matters to its identity. Instead of a single owner or a distant chain, the Blade presents itself as a collective of reporters accountable to readers and to each other, funded through subscriptions and reader support platforms including Patreon. Its independence is not a marketing line; it is the reason the publication exists in the first place, as its founding story shows.
History and Founding
The Blade began in March 2014, in circumstances its founder, David Forbes, recounted in a year-end account published on December 31, 2014. Forbes was then a reporter at Mountain Xpress, Asheville's alternative weekly, and had been involved in efforts by staff to unionise amid departures and disputes over working conditions and editorial ethics.
According to that account, Forbes had investigated dangerous housing conditions in the county, but the publisher declined to run the story in accurate form and pressed for it to be reframed favourably toward landlords. Forbes refused, was warned about possible termination, and decided to publish the work independently. The Blade was created as a blog for that purpose, and on March 31, 2014, its first story appeared under the headline treatment of that housing investigation.
Forbes has said the page was originally intended to be used exactly once. Instead, readers responded, the one-off blog became a continuing publication, and Forbes was subsequently laid off from Mountain Xpress in 2014. What began as an act of editorial defiance became, over the following years, a permanent part of Asheville's media landscape.
Ownership and Business Model
The Asheville Blade operates as a co-operative, a model it emphasised when marking its tenth year in 2024. Its statements in that anniversary year were issued in the name of the Blade co-op as a whole, thanking supporters and setting out a shared path ahead, rather than in the voice of a proprietor.
Its revenue model is reader-centred. The Blade has used Patreon since its early years to connect directly with readers, a relationship examined by Nieman Lab in a 2017 piece on how the platform helped the outlet fund its journalism. Reader subscriptions and support drives remain central; in its tenth year the Blade ran a summer subscriber drive offering supporters items such as a thank-you letter, a bumper sticker, and its distinctive Gentry Tears mug — a piece of merchandise that captures both its politics and its humour about Asheville's development pressures.
Forbes has expressed a strong scepticism about advertising as a foundation for this kind of journalism, a view consistent with a publication whose founding act was refusing to soften reporting to suit commercial interests. Reader funding, in the Blade's model, is what buys editorial freedom.
Coverage and Content
City government is the Blade's home ground. Its coverage follows Asheville City Council and Buncombe County decisions in unusual detail: budgets, policing policy, firefighter pay, surveillance tools such as police drones, and the pay of senior city officials. A representative recent line of reporting contrasted spending on police technology and executive raises with the comparatively low pay of firefighters who, as the Blade noted, struggle to afford rent in the city they serve.
Housing and development form the second great strand. That is fitting, given that a suppressed housing investigation launched the publication. The Blade has reported for years on rents, evictions, short-term rentals, landlord power, and the influence of real-estate money in local politics, including reporting in 2024 on real-estate industry dark money in a city council race.
The third strand is accountability reporting on power and speech. In 2024 alone, by its own year-end summary, the Blade reported on the Asheville Tourists baseball team's co-owner Mike DeWine, on Mayor Esther Manheimer's record on free speech, on city government allowing hate speech while shutting out anti-genocide speakers, and sustained coverage of the proposed downtown Business Improvement District — a plan critics, and the Blade, framed as a form of private government for downtown, and which local opposition continued to resist as it moved toward a final vote.
Editorial Voice
The Blade does not pretend to neutrality, and its voice is part of its appeal. It writes from an explicitly left perspective, in plain and often combative language, naming gentrification, corruption, and callousness as it sees them. Its headlines argue as well as inform, and its essays blend reporting with analysis and moral judgement.
That voice is rooted in a particular theory of local journalism, which Forbes has articulated in interviews: city government is where power touches the ground, where national and state policies are carried out in people's rents, streets, and safety, and yet it is the level of government residents often know least about — sometimes following Congress more closely than the council that could affect their housing within a year. The Blade's entire editorial project follows from that observation: make the local legible, and make it impossible to ignore.
Audience and Reach
The Blade's audience is Asheville itself: residents who attend, or wish they could follow, council meetings; tenants and workers affected by housing and wage pressures; activists and organisers who use its reporting in campaigns; and readers across Buncombe County who want a counterweight to boosterish accounts of a fast-changing tourist city. Its tenth-anniversary statements spoke directly to that community of supporters as partners in the enterprise, not merely consumers of it.
Its reach extends beyond page views through conversation. Forbes has discussed the Blade's work on community platforms including Firestorm Books' community programming and Asheville FM, and the outlet's reporting regularly becomes part of local political debate — cited, contested, and shared precisely because it takes positions and documents them at length.
Digital Presence
The Blade lives at ashevilleblade.com, organised around reported features, essays and its Views commentary, with a deep archive stretching back to 2014. Its digital presence is inseparable from its funding presence: Patreon is a core channel, where Forbes posts updates to supporters, and subscriber drives are promoted through the site itself.
The site's presentation is text-forward and unadorned compared with commercial news sites, reflecting both its resources and its priorities. Photography from contributors such as Bill Rhodes and Max Cooper has illustrated major pieces, including its anniversary coverage, but the product is fundamentally the reporting and the argument, delivered directly to readers online.
Notable People
David Forbes is the founder and editor of the Asheville Blade and remains its best-known figure. Forbes grew up in rural northeastern North Carolina, began reading newspapers as a child, and built a career in Asheville local journalism before the break with Mountain Xpress. In interviews, Forbes has discussed class, political participation, Asheville's lack of diversity and de facto segregation, and low wages as central concerns — themes that became the Blade's editorial compass.
Around Forbes, the co-operative structure means the bylines and credit are collective. The Blade's anniversary and appeal posts are signed by the co-op, and its 2024 recovery appeal was issued in the co-op's name, with artwork credited to Matilda Bliss. That collectivism is deliberate: the institution is meant to be bigger than a single columnist, even one as closely identified with it as its founder.
Reporting Through Hurricane Helene
The Blade's tenth year brought its hardest test. Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina in the autumn of 2024, and Asheville was at the centre of the disaster. In a December 15, 2024 appeal, the co-op reported that all of its reporters were unharmed but that they had been reporting from a disaster zone while enduring it as residents themselves.
The Blade covered Helene's aftermath including the city's shattered water system and, characteristically, how local elites were, in its assessment, worsening the crises that followed. At the same time, supporters who had lost housing or jobs were less able to sustain the publication, and the Blade appealed openly for help to recover. The episode captured the fragility and the value of the model at once: a small reader-funded newsroom, hit by the same disaster as its audience, continuing to report on it.
Recent Developments
Entering its second decade, the Blade's agenda has remained consistent: the downtown Business Improvement District fight, police spending and surveillance, firefighter pay, housing, and the conduct of city hall. Its tenth-anniversary statement in 2024 set out a path ahead built on the same formula — more hard-hitting journalism and sharp perspectives, funded by a summer subscriber drive and continuing reader support.
In a local media economy where many outlets have shrunk or closed, the Blade's survival itself is a development worth noting. A publication founded to print one story a publisher would not run is still publishing ten years on, still cooperatively run, and still arguing that the most important politics in Asheville happen in Asheville. For readers who share that conviction, it remains essential; for officials who do not, it remains unavoidable.
