Locals plan new Chapel Hill paper

Gap left by Chapel Hill News sparks push; DTH also expands

Chapel Hill is not a news desert: Local outlets such as WCHL radio and The Daily Tar Heel, regional papers The News & Observer/Herald-Sun and several television stations cover major news from the thriving university community of about 60,000 people.

But Chapel Hill is a town that lost a local newspaper and still feels the effects of that loss, as Nicole McNeill chronicled for the U.S. News Deserts project at UNC's Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media. The closing of the Chapel Hill News (once a six-day-a-week paper) was not just a business change but the passing of a local institution, one seen in many other communities, as the News Deserts project documented.

One group of residents in Chapel Hill thinks the need for an independent local news source is too great to ignore, and has set out to launch a new paper to cover local government and civic life. They've formed a nonprofit organization, Friends of Local Journalism, and have spent a year surveying Orange County residents about news, talking with leaders of area media companies, hosting meetings and securing pledges and donations (roughly $18,000 in hand so far) from about 100 local donors.

The group is working on a pilot edition of their paper, The Local Reporter, and digging into a fundraising strategy, they told me last week. Board Chair Del Snow said the group wants to fill a coverage gap they think has only grown over the past two decades, since The Chapel Hill News was absorbed into The N&O, reduced amid the recession and newspaper advertising collapse in the late 2000s and eliminated entirely in early 2018.

“The day-to-day life of what makes a community was being ignored,” Snow said. “It got more and more frustrating especially as Chapel Hill was growing, because people were unaware. They would say, what is this building going up, or, who’s that, or who’s running for council? So, we realized that we need a local paper.”

I worked for The N&O when the paper bought the Chapel Hill News in 1993 and McClatchy bought both in '95, and was executive editor from 2002-07 as The N&O and the News' local news staffs merged. I can appreciate both the business reasons for The News' demise and the Friends group's desire for a locally based outlet for independent journalism.

Around the country, the contraction of local newspapers and the opportunities of digital distribution and social media have birthed a slew of local news startups, from the small scale (the Tyler Loop in Texas) and Charlotte's QCityMetro, now 10 years old, to the larger-bore (the Daily Memphian in Tennessee and the Hendersonville Lightning, which started in 2012 and has both print and online distribution). The Institute of Nonprofit News has 200 members and expects a leap in nonprofit news organizations, as NC Local reported in February; another growing group is LION Publishers (Local Independent Online News), which includes both for-profit and nonprofit local newsrooms.

Friends of Local Journalism's organizers have talked to other Triangle media leaders about their hopes and ideas and enlisted some local journalists and retired news veterans as advisers or members. They've heard plenty about the costs and challenges of starting a local paper, and are far short of the money they'll need, but hope the pilot edition will help them make a pitch for grants and donations. About half of their survey respondents preferred print, but the Friends group hasn't settled yet on a format for The Local Reporter.

The group explored a possible partnership with The Daily Tar Heel, which launched its OC Report email newsletter and website amid those discussions to demonstrate what the student-run newspaper could do, said Erica Beshears Perel, the DTH's general manager.

"The OC Report is basically an extension of our city desk, which we have had for 30 or more years at the DTH," Perel said. As the student paper reduced its number of print pages and days of the week, she said, "we never stopped writing the city stories but they got hard to find because they were online mostly, and they weren’t packaged so they were easy to find."

The two sides couldn't agree on terms for a partnership, but Perel said "The DTH believes in the idea of a news ecosystem" and considers the door still open for working with Friends of Local Journalism.

"Everyone can agree that we need better and more comprehensive news for the Chapel Hill community," Perel said.

The OC Report web page has a link for community contributions and details how much money it would need to expand coverage in various ways, including print pages. Also, Perel said the DTH won a small grant recently from the local Strowd Roses Foundation to support development of the OC Report.

Along with the DTH's offerings and other regional media coverage, WCHL's Chapelboro website, linked to the radio station, features news and community features from Chapel Hill, Carrboro and the surrounding area. The News of Orange County covers news from Hillsborough.

Yet Snow, Lampe and David Schwartz, another Friends of Journalism supporter, told me they see big gaps in both quantity and quality of news about local government and civic life around Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and hope soon to hire a professional editor and begin building the local newspaper they envision.

"Everybody’s just offering just a little slice, so you have to go to six different places to get it all together,” Snow said. "To us, the community is the whole package. It’s the obituaries, it’s the births, it’s the school news, it’s the update on council meetings, it’s art events, it’s all that stuff."

Snow and some of Friends of Journalism's members also worked together on Save the Chelsea, a successful effort in 2017 and '18 to buy and sustain the Chelsea Theater in Chapel Hill by forming a local nonprofit and raising money to stabilize the theater's finances. They see the need for an independent, locally based journalism as a similar kind of civic cause.

Some of the group's supporters also are active in the Chapel Hill Alliance for a Livable Town (Schwartz was a founder), which endorsed Friends of Local Journalism on its website, but Snow said the two organizations are separate and independent of each other.

If you'd like to contact Friends of Local Journalism, email them at localnewspaper@outlook.com. If you want to contribute to the fundraising, find the form here.

Storylines

Brunswick growth; Charlotte news collaboration

Port City Daily's Johanna Ferebee has zeroed on the unglamorous topic of sewer capacity in Brunswick County, North Carolina's fastest-growing county for much of the past decade, and broke a story last week on the Wilmington-based digital news site that the state had issued a moratorium on new sewer permits in the northern part of the county. Ferebee also has been tracking pressure on the county's schools, which just commissioned a capacity study amid increasing overcrowding.
The Charlotte Journalism Collaborative recently published its first major story in a joint effort focused on affordable housing in the urban region, demonstrating some of the benefits for the six participating news organizations. The collaborative is being coordinated through the Solutions Journalism Network with funding from the Knight Foundation:
- Reach: The deeply reported, magazine-style piece by Pam Kelley, a former Charlotte Observer veteran reporter and nonfiction author, reached audiences through partners on multiple platforms, some of whom built broadcast or radio programming around Kelley's work: The Observer, WCNC television, La Noticia, QcityMetro and WFAE's website and "Charlotte Talks" program. The collaborative's own website, built and hosted through the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, also hosted the story.
- Resource extension: By teaming up to commission a story, the partners shared in reporting that looked back at decades of what Kelley described as missed opportunities, market responses and policies that worked against efforts to expand the supply of affordable housing. (Kelley described some of this history in her 2018, Charlotte-based book, "Money Rock: A Family's Story of Cocaine, Race and Ambition in the New South.") Meantime, "From Brooklyn to Ballantyne: The story behind Charlotte's affordable housing crisis," added substantive coverage in an area of high priority for the partners, several of whom have dedicated additional reporters and attention this year to housing and related issues.

Bulletin board

Changes in Asheville and Morehead City; funding opportunities

Two columns in North Carolina papers at opposite ends of the state told readers about changes in operations: News director Kate Wadington explained the Asheville Citizen-Times' planned move to new quarters one floor up in the building the paper has occupied since 1939; JJ Smith's "In this Corner" column in the Carteret County News-Times described the paper's end of printing in Morehead City (the News-Times will be printed in Greenville) and that its building is under contract for sale. The headline: "Support local journalism or find yourself in a news desert."
July 1 is the deadline for nonprofit news organizations to apply to be members of the Institute for Nonprofit News. Along with many other benefits of membership, INN members are eligible to apply for the end-of-year matching-fund program NewsMatch 2019. Deadline to apply for NewsMatch is Aug. 1. Apply for INN membership here (deadline is July 1) and for NewsMatch here.
Local newsrooms have a little more than two weeks to apply for investigative project support via the PBS program FRONTLINE via its new Local Journalism Project. The program is open to newsrooms on any platform (not just video); it will support a reporter's salary, training and related expenses for an investigative project produced in partnership with FRONTLINE. Partners also will receive support from FRONTLINE's editorial and audience development teams. Learn more and apply here. Deadline is July 15.

Just seeing NC Local? Find past issues and sign up

Starting Up: The Charlotte Ledger

Veteran reporter launches email newsletter for business readers

After the Weekly Standard shut down in December and left him without a job, award-winning business reporter and editor Tony Mecia faced choices that have become too familiar for North Carolina journalists: Move to another city or state for a job, rely on freelancing or leave journalism.

Mecia chose a fourth option: Starting his own news service, an email newsletter and website for business readers

in the Charlotte area, where he had worked for The Charlotte Observer, based a national freelance career and built a family and a home.

"There's so much going on nationally: Reporters go to (Washington) DC, they go to New York, they go to San Francisco — there's just this giant sucking sound of reporters leaving," Mecia said. He asked himself, "can I do something here that would make some sense?"

The Charlotte Ledger started up in March with a mix of original reporting, news items, observation and context on business news. Chris Roush noted some of the newsletter's early impact in a piece for the Talking Biz News blog in May. I caught up with Mecia recently to talk about his startup: Responses have been edited for length.

Charlotte has the Business Journal, The Observer, Business North Carolina and other media outlets. How does the Ledger fit in?

"I think there’s a big appetite in Charlotte for business news that’s not being met. The Observer has cut back; lots of places are cutting back. There are a lot of really interesting business models nationally that haven't necessarily percolated down to the local level: Axios, The Hustle, The Skimm (newsletter-based services)."

Mecia aims to offer news plus "analysis and opinion, make it punchy, easy to read, easily digestible."

"I think there's room in a city the size of Charlotte for more options... Everything is going towards a niche market. You don't need 200,000" subscribers.

How are you building your audience?

"That's one part that I maybe underestimated a little bit, you actually have to work to build the audience. It was hard to set targets because I didn't know what to expect. I sent it out initially to a small number of friends and said, what do you think, and they gave me some feedback. Then when I started it, I put it all over social media. That initial boost was significant, and (growth) has been steady since then."

What's your business model?

"You can't do anything without an audience. Once you develop a significant audience you have some options. There are advantages or disadvantages to all of them."

Paid subscriptions or "freemium" (a free service with extra benefits for paying subscribers) could be an attractive model "in that it completely aligns your interests with those of your readers and those who are interested in your content." Corporate sponsorship or advertising would "require a little more of a business-side operation."

How do you know if it's succeeding?

"The number of subscribers is small but it’s a pretty good group of subscribers... in terms of city council members, business leader types. I think it’s getting noticed."

"I don’t know whether if I hit 5,000 (subscribers), is it a success? It’s hard to say what is successful; it’s growing. I’m encouraged by the growth, and I don’t have any plans to stop. My thinking was just get it up and running... If I need to change course, or say we’re going to focus exclusively on this kind of business news, there’s no harm in meandering."

Send suggestions for Starting Up to me at melanie@localnewslab.org or hit reply to this email.