NIMBLE AND HUMBLE.

• Author: Mildenberg, David
• Position: UPFRONT

A few days after this magazine is distributed monthly, I often get a call from my journalist friend Marion Ellis. He helped the Charlotte Observer win a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 by exposing the health dangers looming in textile mills. He later found a more lucrative niche, authoring histories of famous North Carolina businesses, families and politicians. He's a classic old-time journalist with a crusty exterior and big-hearted interior.

"How do you get so much into the magazine with such a small staff?" Marion asks. Then he goes on to praise a story or a photo. Big surprise: It's become one of my favorite moments of the month.

After five years here, I've learned the answer is simple: I work with very talented people in sales and editorial roles who believe in the mission of providing a statewide perspective on business. We also know the local and regional media world is in a precarious state, requiring more smarts and nimbleness than in the '80s, '90s and early '00s, when media profit margins often approached those of cigarettes and soft drinks. Now, Google and Facebook are taking much ad spending, which is why more than a fifth of U.S. newspapers have closed in the last 15 years, says Penelope Muse Abernathy, a UNC journalism professor and an expert on media economics.

Nimble, of course, is code for doing more work in the same amount of time. That's true for virtually everyone I know working at Bank of America and other giant concerns, but their margin for error is greater.

For us, it's meant adding events such as manufacturing expos and CEO summits that my colleagues Ben Kinney and Norwood Teague have organized with support from great sponsors.

Nimbleness also refers to producing a Daily Digest newsletter of key N.C. business news and adding more online stories...