The Assembly: “Ride through downtown, past the Old Guilford County Courthouse and under the 21-story Lincoln Financial tower, and there it sits: a 158,000-square-foot monument to Brutalist architecture, all sharp angles and skinny windows.
“News & Record, Greensboro, North Carolina,” the sign out front of 200 East Market Street declares, though the paper hasn’t been there for two years.
The building is part eyesore, part health hazard. Squatters called dibs just weeks after the paper left, smashing glass door panes to occupy a building with no power or running water. Since then, police have arrested at least nine people for breaking in, and filed three arson reports. The first-floor windows are periodically boarded up with plywood, as they are today. Piles of half-eaten fast food often clutter entryways, attracting an alarming number of rats.
The building’s owner is the world’s fifth-richest man: Warren Buffett. BH Media, a division of Berkshire Hathaway, famously dabbled in news in the 2010s before selling the News & Record and its other holdings to Iowa-based Lee Enterprises in 2020. But BH Media hung onto the 6.6 valuable acres, which are now on the market for $11 million.
In arrest reports, some Greensboro police officers have charitably referred to Buffett’s building as a “commercial office.” Others have called it what it is: abandoned.
The News & Record, too, has been abandoned, mostly due to decisions made after BH Media bought the paper in 2013. At that time, it employed 23 journalists. Today, just six are left to cover the news in a city of 300,000.”