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In the late 2000s, Greensboro political consultant Ross Harris couldn’t wait to get The Rhino Times as soon as it hit the streets. She’d rush to one of the red metal newspaper boxes downtown and nervously scan the free conservative weekly in her car with the engine still running.
“I had to know what was in there right away,” she said. “Were my candidates going to get a fair shake? What was I going to have to react to? How bad was it going to be?”
Harris had reason to worry.
The Rhino’s coverage of city and county government was always extensive, but its viewpoint was generally narrow.
In its pages, the government was incompetent on a good day and more often evil—too big, too quick to spend taxpayer money, too often lying to the public, too firmly on the side of liberals and minorities abetted by the mainstream media.
And those were the news stories.
Its blistering opinion columns often reflected local and national right-wing conspiracy theories. Its humor and satire pieces could be brutal.
It wasn’t just politicians who wound up in the crosshairs. Even other journalists—including yours truly during my decade writing for the city’s daily paper, The News & Record—took some hits.
“Honestly, when I moved back to Greensboro after living in Chicago, I saw people reading it but I didn’t think anybody took it seriously,” Harris said. “I learned how wrong I was.”
Starting as a small newsletter produced in editor John Hammer’s spare bedroom, the Rhino grew in size and influence over more than 30 years. In Greensboro, a stubborn blue dot in a largely red state, it reflected the voice of a conservative minority, providing a sense of community and a rallying cry. And it became a force to be reckoned with.
Those who dismissed the Rhino as unserious or inconsequential watched as its stories became the focus of local government meetings, driving news coverage. Republican candidates vied for its endorsement. And as The News & Record, the once-dominant daily paper that the Rhino often sparred against, was repeatedly sold and downsized, its coverage became increasingly essential.
“I do think the Rhino had a huge impact on local politics,” said Mayor Nancy Vaughan, a Democrat whose political career in the city stretches back to the late ‘90s. “I think you could argue it was often more editorial than it was reporting. But you always knew where they stood.”
The Rhino’s outrageousness attracted eyes, which attracted advertisers—especially during the housing bubble of the early aughts, when it featured a special pull-out real estate section. The paper expanded into new markets and bought an office right across from city hall. Its front page banner proudly sported twin slogans that defined the paper’s ethos and ego—“All the Rumors Fit to Print” and “Greensboro’s Only Newspaper.”
The Rhino broke news. It broke rules. And if you didn’t like it? Well, at least you were reading.
The onset of the Great Recession hit media hard, and the Rhino was no exception. It shrank its footprint, shed staff, and eventually went under in 2013. But it was revived later that year, bought by billionaire developer Roy Carroll, who thought it was important to maintain a strong conservative media presence in his home city.
Most agree the Roy Carroll era was different—including Hammer. A bit more staid, a lot less vicious. Stories grew shorter, less freewheeling and take-no-prisoners. It abandoned its weekly print edition in 2018 and moved entirely online. Hammer’s voice moderated and then began to recede altogether.
Last week, Hammer officially announced his retirement, and Carroll announced he was selling the paper to veteran writer Scott Yost. The news came quietly on a Friday afternoon, overshadowed by the previous day’s news that President Donald Trump had been convicted on 34 felony counts.
Hammer wasn’t available for an interview. He was already at the beach.
The Rhinoceros Club and Beyond
After earning a degree in philosophy at Duke in 1975, Hammer knew he loved to write and wanted to get paid for it. He was inspired by Hunter S. Thompson, whose drug-fueled “gonzo journalism” was a mixture of straight reporting, opinion, brutal humor, and political satire.
But while Thompson wrote book-length screeds against President Richard Nixon, Hammer enthusiastically voted for him. He’d never rebelled against the values of his large and conservative Catholic family.
Why not?
“Because they were right,” Hammer said in an interview this week.
Hammer quickly learned the news business was less fun than Thompson made it seem.
He quit his first journalism job at a small paper when a publisher refused to run a political cartoon about Hammer’s attempt to expose a town council meeting illegally held in a private home. He lasted a couple of years at another small paper and about six months in radio—but neither was the job of his dreams. He’d have to create that himself.
Its front page banner proudly sported twin slogans that defined the paper’s ethos and ego—“All the Rumors Fit to Print” and “Greensboro’s Only Newspaper.”
That opportunity came when he returned to his hometown, where Hammer worked the door at The Rhinoceros Club. The Rhino, a private bar opened by local nightlife legend and raconteur John Rudy in 1982, was popular with newspaper people and fans of live music. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band famously dropped in one night in 1985 when they were playing at the Coliseum.
“John Rudy wanted to have a newsletter for the club,” Hammer said. “On one side, it would advertise bands that were playing there. But on the other side, I could do whatever I wanted.”
The result, the first iteration of The Rhinoceros Times, is an interesting artifact. Unabashed promotional material, it also had some myth-making about the bar and its patrons and humorous essays that wouldn’t have been out of place in The National Lampoon. It picked up momentum, gaining hundreds of subscribers and allowing Hammer to go to the 1984 Democratic National Convention as the first credentialed correspondent from a barroom newsletter. That first version wrapped in 1986, when Hammer left for graduate school at Georgetown University and some missionary work abroad.
When he returned to the city in 1991, he revived the newsletter and the next year took it independent of the bar. Now a weekly paper, it covered Greensboro’s nightlife more broadly, getting by on ad dollars from local bars and restaurants. But even in those early days, it was pushing into politics—often with tongue firmly in cheek.
“Our coverage of the Greensboro City Council is already the most complete to be found anywhere,” Hammer boasted in a 1993 column.
“Our coverage of news will continue to be irreverent at best and scandalous at worst,” he wrote. “But if you can’t laugh at politicians you have to cry at all the money they spend, and we plan to keep laughing.”
Hammer saw it as a throwback to the early history of American journalism, when papers wore their politics proudly and didn’t take themselves so seriously.
“I always thought, it’s more honest to let people know what your politics are,” Hammer said. “If you’re a liberal newspaper, be a liberal newspaper. If you’re conservative, be conservative. Let people know that’s your viewpoint and let them read and decide for themselves.”
In the early ‘90s, Ed Cone was a young journalist also returning to his hometown. He pitched the Rhino a weekly column. Though Cone was unabashedly liberal, Hammer took him up on it. The two shared a sensibility—and a love for Thompson-esque antics.
Cone remembers filing a column about sneaking into the ACC commissioner’s box at the Greensboro Coliseum and drinking all the beer until he was thrown out. Hammer thought it was hilarious.
When Hammer’s brother Willie wrote a piece calling the 1985 novel The Old Gringo a horrible, anti-Catholic work that should be removed from Grimsley High School’s International Baccalaureate program, Cone wrote an opposing column. The byline identified him as “Guy Who Actually Read the Book.”
But it wasn’t long before Cone felt a shift. He was already being courted to write a column for The News & Record when Hammer came to him to complain about something in his Rhino column. Cone had taken to calling North Carolina’s Republican U.S. Sen. Lauch Faircloth “Pigpen” because of his opposition to regulations that impacted his own hog farming operations. He couldn’t do that anymore, Hammer told him.
“I said, ‘So I can’t call him ‘pigpen’ but you can accuse the Clintons of having people murdered in Arkansas?’” Cone remembers asking Hammer, who by then was amplifying national right-wing conspiracy theories in the paper.
Not long after, Cone took his column to the local daily, where it ran for many years.
Hammer doesn’t remember their falling out quite that way, but admits Cone’s liberal sensibility wasn’t perfectly aligned with the paper. In the many years after, Hammer said he would occasionally look for another liberal columnist but never actually made it happen.
Cone still has fond memories of Hammer and the old Rhino, but sees its hard-right shift as part of a larger movement.
“People forget this now, but the ‘90s was really an inverted ‘60s,” Cone said.
Multiculturalism was becoming mainstream, access to safe, legal abortion was popular and enshrined in law, and LGBTQ equality was making great strides. Clinton, a moderate Democrat, played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show on the way to becoming the first Boomer president.
But all that led to conservatives casting themselves as an aggrieved minority, under attack from “political correctness” and in rebellion against an ascendant “Big Brother” government. Suddenly, Cone recalls, there was a movement of conservatives using the tools of traditionally left-leaning alternative culture to advance conservative positions—Rush Limbaugh on talk radio, Fox News on cable television, Hammer with his own DIY alternative weekly.
“When you think about it, what John did was very punk and very counterculture,” Cone said. “The culture was just more liberal.”
The Rhino’s opinion archive is a document of conservative obsessions and culture war battles over the last three decades: Islamophobia after 9/11, questioning former President Barack Obama’s birthplace, assertions the federal government should be overthrown by force if it recognized same-sex marriages. Then there’s the constant drumbeat that “mainstream media” is lying to you—but you could trust the Rhino.
In many ways the paper’s edgy tone and seamless combination of reporting and opinion predicted what was to come.
Brian Clarey, now the publisher of the alt-weekly Triad City Beat, was a freelancer who wrote what he calls “pay for play” pieces for the Rhino back in 2000.
“Back then they were doing something we do now, but it didn’t have a fancy name,” Clarey said. “They were doing ‘sponsored content.’”
Legacy media and even other alt-weeklies looked down on that sort of thing at the time. It wasn’t until years later, when ad and subscription revenues dried up, that the rest of the industry took it up.
“When you think about it, what John did was very punk and very counterculture. The culture was just more liberal.”
Ed Cone
Clarey said the Rhino also paved the way for what many alt-weeklies are doing now as dailies die off: filling the gaps in coverage of local government.
“What we’re trying to do now is what the Rhino did then,” Clarey said. “Which is cover local government, cover the hell out of it.”
“I don’t think the quality of the coverage was that great,” Clarey said. “But the model, you know, that’s what we need right now.”
Last week, as the news of Hammer’s retirement and the Rhino’s sale slowly made its way across the city, former long-time News & Record reporter John Newsom took to X to say what many reporters and editors were thinking silently. Hammer, he wrote, “has more institutional knowledge of local govt than probably anyone else alive.”
Real Impact and Real Damage
Much of the content of Rhino’s first two decades is almost completely inaccessible now, the archives of its old website are gone and physical copies hard to find. Even the city’s library, with extensive collections of many local publications, doesn’t have any.
The paper’s impact on local politics can’t be denied, most agree. Whether that impact was a net positive is a tougher question.
Robbie Perkins, a former mayor the Rhino once embarrassed with a story on his failure to pick up after his dog, said its coverage contributed to a more contentious and less business-like atmosphere on the city council.
“The way it used to be, the council was a board of directors,” said Perkins, a Republican.
The Rhino’s antagonistic coverage of the council created a public soap opera where elected officials suddenly believed they were the stars and should have their hands in everything, Perkins said, leading to micromanagement of the city manager and professional staff.
Perkins’ successor, Vaughan, said she always enjoyed a warm and collegial relationship with Hammer despite being a Democrat. But she’d pick up the Rhino and read things so vicious they’d bother her for weeks.
“It was very different, the John you got in person and the one in print,” Vaughan said. “I thought Scott Yost covered the Guilford County Commissioners like they were Rhodes Scholars and John covered the city council like we were the Keystone Cops.”
The Rhino staff also directly inserted themselves into local politics, with Hammer once mounting a write-in campaign for mayor and getting 30 percent of the vote.
While some council members could laugh and roll their eyes, Councilwoman Sharon Hightower said she never found the Rhino amusing. A Black Democrat representing East Greensboro, Hightower said she found the Rhino’s coverage of the city’s Black neighborhoods dismissive at best and often deeply insulting.
“When they write about the east side of Greensboro, if they do, it’s never anything positive,” she said. “There are good people doing good community work here and you never see that. It’s very one-sided.”
When there was controversy over reopening the White Street Landfill, Hightower said, the Rhino could be counted on to dismiss the concerns of Black residents. When a major controversy over alleged racism in the Greensboro Police Department erupted, the Rhino had best-selling true crime writer Jerry Bledsoe write a 90-plus part series attempting to refute allegations that the white police chief had done anything wrong.
“You can say this is a liberal city and we do have liberal-thinking people here,” Hightower said. “But there’s a strong conservative undergirding in this city … The Rhino Times appeals to that conservative base, which is here and has always been here.”
Race has always been a thorny issue with the Rhino. In 2006, the paper sued the KKK to try to block the group from inserting racist and anti-semitic fliers into its free print edition. The paper won a permanent injunction and $25,000 in damages.
Hammer celebrated the victory, but lamented he’d heard from readers who said they always suspected the paper’s staff were racists and the KKK fliers simply confirmed that.
“I would hope it would offend anyone to be called a racist,” Hammer said.
“There’s a strong conservative undergirding in this city … The Rhino Times appeals to that conservative base, which is here and has always been here.”
Councilwoman Sharon Hightower
Conservatives are often cast as racist whether they deserve it or not, Hammer said. His views may put him on the opposite side of many Black people and politicians in Greensboro, where politics and race are always intertwined. But prominent Black politicians like Guilford County Commissioners Chairman Melvin “Skip” Alston and Yvonne Johnson, the city’s first Black mayor, have defended Hammer against charges of racism over the years.
John Robinson, retired editor of The News & Record, said Hammer and the Rhino clearly filled a void for conservative readers, but a majority of the publication was opinion, satire, rumor, and innuendo. It could be difficult to tell what was what.
“Maybe 25 percent of the Rhino had some value,” Robinson said. “The rest of it I thought was garbage.”
Jeff Phillips, former Republican chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, said the Rhino was refreshing for conservatives like him, who felt they were never fairly represented in local media.
The paper taught him and other conservatives to understand and care about local politics, he said, which inspired them to get involved.
“If you were looking for information about the things we were really concerned about in an in-depth way, you had to read The Rhino Times.”
Back to the Future
The Rhino’s new owner, Scott Yost, has been with the paper since 2002. Like Hammer, he was a philosophy major at Duke—something he jokes has come in handy in covering endless local government meetings during which he can’t help but ponder why we are all here.
Yost joined after a brief run with the now-defunct Triad Business News, but found the Rhino’s freewheeling style more his lane.
He loved writing for April Fool’s Day issues, in which all the stories were fabricated. He still laughs remembering when the paper flew him to Hawaii so that when the Guilford commissioners got off the plane for a national conference there, they’d see his face. For years, he appeared in a Rhino column called “Scott’s Night Out” in which he was regularly photographed with various scantily clad women in bars and nightclubs.
“I really felt like it was the best job anybody could have,” Yost said.
When Hammer retired, Yost wanted to be sure the Rhino kept going. He approached Carroll with an offer to buy the publication.
He feels there’s still a place for their coverage, which he knows still has a loyal following. As the local media ecosystem continues to crumble, readers tell him they’ve never needed the paper more. Without the cost of a print edition, Yost said there may be opportunity to expand the staff and coverage areas, or get into video and audio. He’s even open to bringing in a liberal columnist for a little balance.
In that way, the Rhino may actually go back to its earlier and less politically dogmatic days.
While Yost considers himself a conservative, he’s always leaned more Libertarian and preferred skewering officials with humor to wielding a battle ax.
“Some of my problems with the Rhino over the years were like, I thought it was too negative,” Yost said. “I felt that we lost some goodwill to that.”
While the tone may soften a bit, Yost said the conservative values will remain.
“I want to sort of do more stories that are intriguing, that people care about in Greensboro, but are not necessarily related to politics,” Yost said. “I think there’s a place for that.”
Hammer plans to enjoy his retirement, but doesn’t want to stop writing. He’s started a Substack newsletter. The Rhino will be in good hands with Yost, he says, who he calls a great journalist and a big part of the paper’s identity for decades.
“It will be different, and it should be,” Hammer said. “It’s Scott’s publication now. He’ll be calling the shots. You know how hard the news business is these days. I hope Scott can find the formula that makes it work.”
Joe Killian is The Assembly’s Greensboro editor. He covered cops, courts, government and politics at Greensboro’s daily paper, The News & Record, for a decade. He joined us from NC Newsline in Raleigh, where he was senior investigative reporter.