Welcome back: for the magazine's new editor it's dela vu all over again.

• Author: Kinney, David
• Position: Up Front

Not long after I hired Dave Mildenberg the first time, I got fired. That was 29 years ago at Fortune Media Inc., which has been out of business nearly that long but back then published Charlotte magazine and a couple of business periodicals. His coming--he had been a business reporter for The Charlotte Observer--had nothing to do with my going. The publisher and I butted heads over what I considered an ethical issue, so I quit, was persuaded to return, then canned.

Five years later, I hired Dave again. By then, I was editor and publisher of this magazine and he the business editor of the Greensboro News & Record. After four years as BNC's managing editor and then executive editor, he realized he missed the adrenaline rush of daily newspapers and returned to the Observer as its assistant business editor. That was 20 years ago.

After the Observer, he spent nine years, broken by a year teaching math to seventh-graders in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, with American City Business Journals. He was a reporter for its Charlotte weekly, editor of the Raleigh one and on the corporate staff back in the Queen City developing a Web strategy for ACT's 40-plus papers nationwide. Dave then worked seven years for New York-based Bloomberg News, one in Atlanta covering transportation, three in Charlotte reporting on finance and three in Austin on the news service's municipalities/states team. Now he has returned from Texas to be our new editor.

"No other place felt like home," he says, "not surprising given my previous tenure in North Carolina. I missed friends and relationships I made working in our state's three major metro areas. And I wanted to work...