CBS spotlights Charleston newspaper's award-winning collaborations with smaller papers in South Carolina

Owner Pierre Manigault talks with Ted Koppel. (CBS image)

At a time when the nation is losing two newspapers a week, "Some papers are finding a new way forward," host Jane Pauley said in introducing special correspondent Ted Koppel's report on "CBS Sunday Morning" about The Post and Courier's award-winning collaborations with smaller newspapers in South Carolina.

Fourth-generation owner “Pierre Manigault is bucking the trend, hiring more staff, expanding digitally across the state and investing heavily, of all things in a state-of-the-art printing press,” Koppel reports. Manigault acknowledged that he's no longer publishing to make money, but to serve Charleston -- and the rest of South Carolina, where 10 papers stopped in the pandemic year of 2020: “It’s important to have not just a newspaper, but a very good newspaper.”

When The Post and Courier appealed to readers for donations to support its investigative journalism in 2020, it set a goal to get $100,000 in 100 days, but $500,000 came in. The total so far is $1.7 million. Special Projects Editor Glenn Smith and lead project reporter Tony Bartelme thought some of it could be used “to collaborate to everyone’s mutual benefit” around the state, Koppel reports.

Travis Jenkins speaks with Ted Koppel. (CBS image)

The first paper they approached was the Chester News and Reporter, edited by Travis Jenkins, who told Koppel, "We kind of pride ourselves on doing more deep-dig, heavy-lift investigative pieces that a lot of papers our size aren't able to do anymore: when a county supervisor's indicted for trafficking meth, the sheriff is indicted and removed on corruption charges, a councilman is removed from office by a judge for having a past criminal record he didn't disclose." Asked how he and reporter Brian Garner have time to do that, Jenkins replied, "It's difficult."

Enter The Post and Courier, which shared with Jenkins its investigation that led to the sheriff's indictment. The papers began collaborating, and “The pieces we shared were so much better for the collaboration,” Smith told Koppel. "I don't know some of these towns. I don't know anything about them. But these people do. Then why don't you take the best of both worlds, put 'em together? We all get good content, raise the alarm and hopefully make our state a better place." Bartelme said the project has been "a cululative effort that creates that culture of deterrence that prvents future misconduct."

Barbara Ball edits and delivers her newspaper. (CBS image)

The other example in Koppel's report is The Voice of Blythewood, owned by Barbara Ball. When school officials tried to charge her $300 for the superintendent's spending records, The Post and Courier offered to pay, and "They ended up just giving it to us when we got behind her," Smith said. "And got a really good story out of it." Ball said having a story on the Charleston paper's front page "substantitated that we're a good newspaper, that we turn out good work."

And her readers appreciate it. “I will get checks from people; I’ve gotten a thousand dollars,” Ball told Koppel. “I think most people realize that we don’t make a lot of money.”

The Post and Courier received a National Headliner Award for "Undercover," its collaborative series with 18 other papers that exposed government corruption and misconduct, but not everyone likes aggressive local newspapers. Jenkins recalled a note written by a reader who refused to subscribe, saying the News and Reporter was "the most up-in-everybody’s-bleeping-business bleeping newspaper I've ever seen." Jenkins said, "That's the best compliment anybody's ever paid us."

Manigault told Koppel that with advertising largely gone, “You have to go back to what the roots of journalism are, and that's content and information that people can't get anywhere else. . . . I think there’s a second life for newspapers. I think we'll survive this. It's an evolution. Newspapers just need to evolve to the new digital world and I think we're well on the way to doing that.”