So I’m looking through the sports page in this morning’s paper and I get to a section called Carolina Outdoors, obsensibly about life in the great outdoors of our great state of North Carolina. As I am flipping through the pages, I notice the bylines of the stories.
Kansas City Star
Dallas Morning News
The Washington Post
Los Angeles Times
It turns out not one article in the whole section is filed from anywhere in North Carolina. Oh sure, there’s a “special correspondent” listed for one article, but there’s no way of knowing where this correspondent lives, either. At the very least, by nature of being a “correspondent” it is surely not an N&O reporter.
In other words, “Carolina Outdoors” is a sham, one that’s pretty typical of the paper nowadays. Where once there was a real local flavor to its reporting, the McClatchy era has turned it into a bland corporate rag.
The Triangle area will never be considered world-class until it has a world-class newspaper. Sadly, the N&O will never measure up.
(On the other hand, sometimes they really nail a story.)