The following message announcing the closure of Greenville, SC’s The Beat was sent on Friday, Feb. 1, by James Shannon, the paper’s editor and publisher.

Dear Friends,

With regret I must announce that The Beat has shut down after 69 issues over a 31-month span that represented a continuation of a newspaper that began in 1991 as The Edge, morphed into Creative Loafing-Greenville and then became MetroBeat. With my wife Amber and the dedicated efforts of a talented group of writers, artists and photographers, we stood firm in our desire to offer the Upstate a lively journal of diverse opinion. That task will fall to others now, but make no mistake — those voices will not be stilled. Their presentation will increasingly be on-line, as opposed to the more costly print product that requires a level of support hard to obtain without excessive pandering in a free publication funded solely by advertising dollars.

For myself, I will step back and concentrate on supporting the wife and child who have borne the brunt of our efforts here. Maybe I will have time to write a book on what I’ve learned in my nine years in Greenville. It’s been interesting, to say the least, and I have made many wonderful friends — and, I suspect, a few enemies. So be it.

The website will continue in an altered format yet to be determined, but the articles and columns from what would have been the January 23 issue will be posted in the coming days. Beyond that, stay tuned.

Thanks for your support of The Beat. We couldn’t have done it without you, and only wish we could have done it better and for a longer period of time. But hell, at least we tried.

James Shannon
Editor & Publisher
The Beat