An Encore for Encore

When SHANNON RAE GENTRY decided to revive Encore Magazine last year, she envisioned a broad role for the publication in the greater Wilmington community. She also knew the effort would be a challenge.

After thirty-five years of covering the area’s arts scene, the alternative weekly stopped printing in 2020 as a casualty of COVID.

Gentry was Encore’s staff editor at that time and watched the inevitable happen.

“We had no advertising,” she says, recalling how the pandemic withered the local economy. “Shutting down was not an easy decision for then-publisher JOHN HITT to make, but not one he could avoid.”

Both Gentry and her husband TOM DORGAN, whose side gig concert photographs often ran in the magazine, were heavily rooted in the publication and its mission. But they felt helpless to rescue it back then.

The present seems like the right time, she says.

“Ninety-eight percent of the feedback we’ve gotten since our May 2025 soft launch has been positive,” she says. “Getting the print paper out there: that really got people excited; they really want a print newspaper. Consuming so much information online is not necessarily healthy.”

Gentry learned the value of storytelling from a young age as she was raised among four generations of family near Mt. Airy, N.C.

“I consumed a lot of media by whatever radio and TV channels I could pick up. The media I watched at an early age definitely added to the foundation of my principles and beliefs,” she says, adding she also liked to spend time in nature, as well as listening to family members talk. “I had the pleasure of knowing both my great-grandmothers; I’d go over there after school. We talked a lot. I ended up learning a lot about their childhood and family experiences.”

Gentry was the first in her family to graduate from college and eventually worked for two years with the Peace Corps, in the Kingdom of Tonga, where she taught English as a second language and restarted a village’s library.

“While in the Peace Corps, I started blogging,” she says. “Enough people told me that I was a good storyteller, so I had it in my head that after I wrapped up my service I would go back to school and get an MFA in writing. I thought I might write a memoir about my experiences.”

She landed at the Savannah College of Art and Design, which exposed her to magazine writing. She also met her future husband, who left Savannah to take a job at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Gentry followed him soon after, finishing her degree work remotely, and started an internship at a local magazine called Encore.

“I realized, through that internship, that I liked telling other people’s stories more than my own,” she says.

Storytelling, Gentry believes, can help bring people together. Drawing on her broad interests, she’s reimagining Encore as a coastal journalism hub that attracts not just an arts audience but a readership of curious people.

“But, we still feature a lot of artists and musicians; we’re coming back with a lot of what Encore was known for,” Gentry says.

To get Encore rebooted, Gentry took on the role of executive director and mapped out the publication’s return. She applied to the state for an LLC, creating Encore Magazine LLC as the legal entity within which Encore operates.

“From there, I started a nonprofit, and got nonprofit status last June,” Gentry continues, explaining that operating as a nonprofit opens funding opportunities like donations and grants.

Encore’s first grant came from Cape Fear River Watch, which is funding the publication’s Tides of Change climate change reporting project. That initiative, headed by JOHN WOLFE, pilots a yearlong science series, with a resident artist who is interpreting the journalism through visual art. The goal for science pieces is to “tell compelling stories that are rooted in data,” Gentry says.

She says Encore will have four foundational areas of coverage: creative arts, journalism, communication and media literacy. She hopes the science series serves as a model for future special topic projects and sparks community conversations and connections as well as engagement with regional issues.

Right now, Encore is primarily online but print is slowly rolling out.

“We are quarterly right now but publishing monthly in print by 2027 is our goal. We are still building the infrastructure back to be able to hire people,” she says, adding that she brought a publishing consultant on board for the short term to help ramp up operations and advertising sales. She’s leaning on interns from area colleges as Encore’s staff writers. There’s some money for contributing writers, she says.

“Our print publication is solely about the community, written by people who know the community, not by robots,” she says. “We’re running on a small budget and a lot of goodwill.”

To view more of photographer Madeline Gray’s work, go to madelinegrayphoto.com.

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