Rural weekly in North Carolina reshapes election coverage

Top of the front page of last week's edition; click to enlarge

"As America heads toward Nov. 8 and a midterm election stress test for its democracy, a rural newspaper in one big swing state — North Carolina — is rewriting the books on election coverage in hotly contested local, state and federal races," University of Kentucky journalism professor Buck Ryan writes in the latest installment of his study of the weekly Chatham News+Record in North Carolina.

Publisher Bill Horner's model can be summed up as "Explain your approach in advance, hold community forums, and make endorsements a rarity." Horner took sides in a primary race after he published an article exposing a troublesome slate of Siler City town commissioner candidates, backed by “a mysteriously self-mythologizing millionaire,” who had recently moved to town together, making grandiose promises. He published an editorial asking readers not to vote for them, and "They all finished dead last." he says.

The paper's Oct. 13 edition featured these stories: “DENIERS: Where Chatham candidates stand on the ‘rigged and stolen’ 2020 election” and “Inside the ‘Election Integrity’ efforts undermining elections,” a reprinted article published in partnership with two other publications, The Assembly of North Carolina and The Guardian, with financial support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Horner told Ryan that he conducts or helps with candidate forums because so many he has seen were "so poorly executed." His latest effort is "an example of the craziness of today's election ecosystem," he said. "Chatham County Republican candidates pulled out of two scheduled candidate forums that we're producing because we wouldn't allow their pet videographer — who's denigrated our work since Day 1 and, among other things, encouraged anonymous online attacks on my reporters, all the while being the chief distributor of misinformation and disinformation to his small legion of followers — to record the proceedings. Anyone but him, we told them; it's him or we take our ball and go home, they said."