Hobnobbing With Small Town Journalists

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the North Carolina Press Association’s annual winter conference and awards banquet. It was an opportunity to pick other newspaper folks’ brains for ideas and find out what the big news stories are in places like Elizabeth City, Murphy and Tryon.

Of course, the bigwigs from all of the city newspapers like The Charlotte Observer were there as well. But if you ask me, the best newspaper people are from the smaller towns where news doesn’t just happen every day. Places where you really have to work to make that story about the elderly man who found a deer in his screened-in porch come alive and jump right off the page.

One thing that makes newspaper folks from smaller towns so much better than their Winston-Salem Journal counterparts is our flexibility. At the larger papers it is regular procedure to have every employee specialize at one particular job. If you are the reporter covering junior high school girls’ tennis for The Raleigh News & Observer, chances are you are writing about little else. At the smaller papers you’ll often find the same person writing the news, editorials, sports and obituaries as well taking the photos and manning the delivery routes. This diversity keeps us well rounded...except for the delivery jobs which have a knack for slimming us down.

At the awards banquet you could tell which journalists were from the fancy big newspapers and which ones were from papers with names like Topsail Voice, Yadkin Ripple or Crossroads Chronicle…even before you looked at their convention-style nametags. The folks from the large newspapers gathered in cliquish groups, hardly ever straying from the fraternity of their own publication. The people from the smaller papers mingled freely, many being the only representative of their particular publication. (The small town journalists also seemed to have a better appreciation for the free food present at the banquet, but that might have been just the people at my table.)

There are all types of people working at the smaller newspapers in North Carolina—male, female, young, old, black, brown and white. One thing that we all have in common is that none of us are in the news game in order to get rich. Any of us wanting to make the big bucks would have long ago applied for a job at The Greensboro News & Record as a specialized reporter (writing only about white-collar criminals who commit identity theft on the weekends to support their online gambling addictions).

No, most small time newspaper people are in it because they love what they do and they love the places where they do it. I heard glowing reports of small towns I’ve never been to from newsfolks from papers such as The Sylva Herald & Ruralite, The Cherokee Scout and The Farmville Enterprise. These descriptions couldn’t have been more alluring if they had come from their respective chambers of commerce, at which I’m sure some of these people also work.

In addition to loving their work and their locales, these people have the satisfaction of occasionally making a difference in the lives of their readers. It is a misconception that newspapers are only allowed to report the news and not make it. When an investigative reporter sheds light on a previously uncovered news item, he can help swing public attention to a problem that needs fixing.

That’s what happened last year when reporters from The Raleigh News & Observer began looking into the backroom dealings of former NC House Speaker Jim Black. This week the story culminated with Black preparing to plead guilty to public corruption charges in Raleigh, ending the career of our state’s most powerful speaker of the modern era.

Under a plea agreement, Black will plead guilty to one count of accepting illegal gratuities, a felony charge that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. Black, a Mecklenburg County Democrat, will also surrender his house seat as felons are prohibited by the N.C. Constitution from holding office.

The court action this week ends nearly two years of investigation that led to five of Black’s associates being found guilty of crimes in state and federal courts. The investigation found evidence of illegal campaign contributions from a variety of sources, among other transgressions.

The point is, the investigation into Black’s crimes didn’t start with any government watchdog organization, nor did it start with Republicans trying to remove Black from power in the NC House. It started with some reporters from the News & Observer taking a lead and running with it, asking important questions all along the way. That in a nutshell is why newspapers, large and small, still matter in North Carolina.