As Jon Ham noted at Right Angles, WRAL is reporting that The N&O‘s award-winning investigative reporter Pat Stith has taken the McClatchy buyout. This is quite a development as all throughout the McClatchy/N&O/Charlotte Observer hemorrhaging the editors have continually fallen back on the “we’ve got the best state political coverage/we’ve still got Pat” excuses to put a happy face on their dying newsrooms. Here’s one such comment by Stith himself in public editor Ted Vaden’s (wonder how much longer he’ll last) column in June:
You’d expect (N&O executive editor John) Drescher and (publisher Orage) Quarles to put the best face on the
changes, so I asked one of the paper’s most respected reporters, Pat
Stith, for his thoughts. Stith agreed that smaller is less, but he
recognized the financial realities.“On balance, it’s bad,” he
said. “We’ve got to find the solution to this revenue problem. But it’s
not all bad.” He agreed that the Charlotte synergies would benefit
readers, and he noted that The N&O continues to employ an
investigative staff and a politics staff to keep doing the public
service reporting that the paper is known for. “I don’t think the
readers are going to suffer,” he said. “We ought to continue to give
them the best paper that we can.”
So much for that. Not exactly what I would call a “solution to the revenue problem.”
