SmartNews to auction funny buttons to aid antiques vendors
Jim McBee, managing editor of SmartNews, the free daily tab in Fayetteville, N.C., writes:
Some of you know that my newspaper burned down early Monday.
A recap for those who don’t know: I had visited but never worked in our office in downtown Fayetteville. It was in The Gas House, on the second floor. The first floor was mainly an antiques mall.
Anyway, Sunday evening I drove up to Fayetteville to spend a week working out off the office, to get some face time with everyone and so on. Staying at Mom’s house.
About 1:30 a.m., I get a call from my boss, the owner of SmartNews, to tell me that the office landlord just told him the building is burning down.
Whee. The building is totaled.
The latest, by the way: No foul play was involved. The culprit was bad wiring.
Anyway, back to McBee:
So our tiny staff gets together the next morning at a downtown coffee shop (aptly named Rude Awakening) and we spend the better part of the day trying to roust up temporary digs.
A friend of the General Manager lets us use a conference room for a couple days, and we bang out the Tuesday and Wednesday editions from there. Thursday and Friday editions we work on from a room in the back of offices of an ad/web design firm. We’ve been looking at sundry other more permanent spaces, too.
So, to laugh in the face of a catastrophe, a graphic-artist friend of one of our correspondents made us these buttons:
We are auctioning them off, starting at $50, and giving half the proceeds to vendors who got burned out of the antiques mall. Collect all nine!
The starting bid for each button is $50. Winners will be announced Oct. 12 — the Friday of the Boston workshop.
McBee adds:
If someone happens to buy all nine buttons, we’ll throw in a SmartNews T-shirt (thanks to the fire, they’re rare).
For more information call SmartNews at (910) 850-4447.
Or, contact managing editor Jim McBee at jimmcbee (at) smartnewsnc.com