Feb. 8, 2026

Another update about changes at the Forum. Earlier articles are from Sept. 9, Sept. 26, Nov. 13, and Nov. 18.

Saturday night I inadvertently caused a part of the Forum website to go offline. Within 6 hours, techs had the website problem mostly fixed, but I have not been. An increasing amount of my time lately has been consumed correcting my errors before they get to the Internet and confuse people. I don’t have enough energy both to keep up and to correct. So:

I have suspended publication of written Announcement summaries with the Jan. 30 edition. Time at Forums may continue to be set aside for individuals to make community announcements, and a video record of those announcements generally is part of the day’s Forum video. But the writen announcements have for years been mostly gleaned from fliers, newsletters and other material sent to the Forum by e-mail, For now, I am squirreling away that material. If a volunteer or group of volunteers steps up, there will be some catching up to do, but no substantial break in the archive. The time commitment varies from 2 to 10 hours per week, 52 weeks a year. Interested? Send Laura McClettie an e-mail.

Some portion of my energy lately has been redirected to helping Ché Abdullah take on the tripartite Forum role he has chosen – to continue the livestreaming of Forum meetings; to ensure the longterm availability to the public of the resulting archive; and to reshape the Forum’s substantial amount of community information into the smaller video bites that young audiences prefer and will help them know their community better. These are costly and time-consuming tasks that are initially being supported by a grant from the NC Local News Lab Fund. Those tasks will continue if additional funders get behind them.

– Steve Johnston