A new editor for BNC.

• Position: Business North Carolina

BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA turns 20 this year, my 15th as its editor. The time is right. So I'm stepping down by kicking myself upstairs. On July 9, Tim Gray, who has been in New York on a Knight-Bagehot Fellowship at Columbia, will return to the staff as the new editor. The old one will take the title of editor-in-chief, which will allow me to devote more time to new ventures and my dual role as publisher.

There's no job, I believe, better than editing a magazine. And there's nobody better to edit this one than Tim. Though not a native Tar Heel, he's about as close to one as you can get. His family moved to Chapel Hill from Baltimore when he was 5 and his dad joined the faculty of Carolina's med school. Tim never put the bachelor's in foreign service he earned at Georgetown to work, opting to cover Capitol Hill for Tax Notes, a Washington public-policy magazine. In 1991, he returned to North Carolina as a business reporter for The News & Observer in Raleigh. He wrote the paper's first personal-finance column and covered banking and high-tech.

In 1995, he jumped to The St. Petersburg Times, where he covered banking and insurance. "That transition was easy," he says, "since North Carolina's biggest banks -- Bank of America and First Union -- happen to be Florida's. My toughest task was molding a crew of out-of-shape reporters into the Times' first competitive rowing team."

But home tugs hard at the hearts of Tar Heels. When we offered him a job as a senior editor two years later, he grabbed it -- though it meant a pay cut. He did good stuff for us. Judges of the Association of Area Business Publications' editorial competiton thought so, too. They gave him the silver award...