Last week, the Charlotte Observer announced they had eliminated 8 additional positions, further shrinking a newsroom that had already shrunk from its heyday. The news comes less than a month after Queen City Nerve announced their immediate closure in August, and less than a year after Charlotte magazine closed its doors.
“Nearly 10 talented Charlotte Observer journalists committed to bringing positive impact to our community got laid off Sept 10 as part of a McClatchy sweep that claimed more than 90 jobs nationwide,” reads a GoFundMe launched to support the laid off journalists. “These local reporters have worked tirelessly to bring you the latest on education, public safety, transportation news, elections and so much more. They’ve investigated fraudulent companies, working conditions for city bus drivers and police.”
Two of the positions eliminated - the Charlotte Hornets reporter and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools reporter - are two of the most quintessential Queen City beats, and they’re being eliminated at a time when both education and sports reporting are shrinking in Charlotte.
Education Reporter Laid off at Critical Time for Schools
Rebecca Noel, the paper’s education reporter, has been let go in the middle of a chaotic period for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. In case you missed it, The school board paid for a $379,000+ investigation into superintendent Crystal Hill after putting her on leave. Then, in August, the board announced Hill was returning.
The Observer published a piece by Noel today on how CMS board chair Stephanie Sneed is fighting for her political life in the wake of the superintendent saga as the board prepares to vote on a motion to remove her as chair.
Hornets Beat Eliminated just as the Buzz Start Flying High
Meanwhile, we found out today that the Hornets position is being eliminated during an upswing that saw the team back in the playoffs while breaking attendance records.
Hornets reporter Rod Boone tweeted out the news from his personal account:
Last week, exactly 10 days before my 5-year anniversary at The Charlotte Observer, my position was eliminated by McClatchy along with 7 of my colleagues.
And it happened less than 48 hours after being told corporate had given the green light to bring back my podcast they whacked two years earlier.
This means the paper of record that has covered the franchise since its inception in 1987 will no longer have a writer dedicated to giving readers the latest daily insight on the team. Training camp starts in two weeks.
During my career in this industry, which has spanned more than 25 years, I've had my share of tough assignments. Following in the footsteps of a legend and someone whose name is permanently affixed to two areas in Spectrum Center ranks right up there.
I'm grateful, thankful and forever humbled that I was the one chosen to take on the huge responsibility. And I'm proud of the content I produced. Every single bit of it, including a recent string of nothing but exclusives.
Thanks to all those who consumed my work and musings about the #Hornets. It's deeply appreciated.
Cheers to what's next.
Cheers to you, Rod, and to all of the Observer reporters wondering what’s next.
You can support the laid off reporters on GoFundMe.
Additional Coverage of Observer Layoffs
In her Axios Charlotte story over the weekend, Alexandra Sands asked, “who steps up?” in a local news ecosystem decimated by private equity and dominated by crime coverage.
Sarah Stonbely, a researcher who’s studied Charlotte’s media landscape, attributes the recent newspaper firings to outlets “being beholden to private equity.”
“Private equity ownership of local news has been an issue for at least a decade,” Stonbely says. “They basically buy outlets and bleed them dry, then sell them for parts” …
And fewer journalists means fewer areas covered, and the city already had gaps in coverage. Roughly half of Charlotte’s census tracts are hardly covered in news articles, a Columbia Journalism School paper co-authored by Stonbely found.
When those least-covered tracts were mentioned in stories, more than half of the time, it was about crime.
In another article, Tony Mecia of the Charlotte Ledger acknowledges how journalism has been disrupted, but still takes the hedge funds to task.
When the world changes, executives aren’t powerless to respond. They make decisions that shape the lives of their workers and their communities.
… McClatchy’s executives saw one version of reality.
They got it spectacularly wrong.
Our Take: It’s easy to make McClatchy and the hedge funds the villain of this story, and it’s safe to say at this point that the Charlotte Observer is no longer our local paper of record. WFAE, the Ledger, and our broadcast TV stations are all fighting for that title while local institutions like La Noticia already hold that title in Spanish-speaking communities.
The Charlotte Journalism Collaborative launched the Documenters program earlier this year so that, eventually, there are reporters at every important government meeting - literally creating the record themselves, and making it open source so any journalist can use their notes.
We also have to acknowledge that the economics of journalism have changed. If Charlotte still wants to have good journalism that covers topics other than crime and public safety, it’s going to take our donations, membership drives, private sector support, philanthropy, and even local government to replace advertising, sponsored content, and historic revenue streams like classified ads.
Finally, local journalists have to innovate. More people than ever get their news from vertical video and podcasts. Content creators are breaking stories on TikTok and Instagram. Facebook kicked news off its platform. The environment is constantly shifting, and if you’ve read as far as this sentence in this article, know that your attention span is longer than the average news consumer’s.
The outlets that don’t recognize that likely won’t have a future.
