The Observer cut nearly a quarter of its staff the same day it won 34 state press awards

Nearly a quarter of the newsroom at The Charlotte Observer was laid off this month, and on the same day the newsroom collected 34 North Carolina Press Association awards, including second place for general excellence. Axios Charlotte reported the layoffs and the awards together, which is the only sensible way to report them.

Parent company McClatchy fired at least 90 people across the business, according to Poynter. In Charlotte the cuts took an editor, two investigative reporters, a photographer and four reporters covering education, breaking news, growth and transportation, according to current and former Observer employees.

What those beats actually do

Read that list again, because it is not a generic newsroom. Education, growth and transportation are the three subjects that determine what living in Charlotte costs and feels like. Those are the reporters who sit through rezoning hearings, who read the transit capital plan, who file records requests on school construction contracts and who notice when a number in a budget changes between drafts.

Investigative reporting is the part that has no substitute. Nobody else in the market is resourced to spend four months on a single story, and the stories that take four months are usually the ones somebody would prefer went unwritten. Cutting two of those positions removes a specific kind of accountability that does not reappear somewhere else by accident.

This follows two closures

Charlotte magazine and Queen City Nerve both shut within a year of each other. When Queen City Nerve closed, the city lost one of the few outlets covering arts and culture with any consistency. The paper reported a print pick-up rate of 93 percent, which is to say people were reading it right up until it stopped.

Put the three events together and the shape is clear enough. A daily paper contracting, a city magazine gone, an alt-weekly gone. The result is fewer people in the room at public meetings and fewer people who know which questions to ask.

Charlotte is still better off than most

The picture is not uniformly bleak, and it would be dishonest to write it that way. Mecklenburg County has 9.07 local journalists per 100,000 people, according to the Local Journalist Index from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News. The national average is 7.8. Charlotte is above the line.

Twenty local news outlets have formed here since 2000, according to a Columbia Journalism School report, including the donor-supported Charlotte Optimist and the independently owned Charlotte Ledger. WFAE continues to run a full newsroom. Axios Charlotte publishes daily. The market has more independent operators than it did twenty years ago.

What it has fewer of is reporters with the time and the institutional backing to do slow work. Nationally the number of local journalists has fallen 81 percent since 2002, when there were about 40 per 100,000. Charlotte sits above an average that has collapsed.

What this means if you live here

Less coverage of local government is not an abstraction. It shows up as a rezoning that goes through without anyone outside the neighborhood knowing, a school budget line nobody questions, a contract awarded without scrutiny. The absence is invisible by definition, which is what makes it hard to care about until something goes wrong.

It also shifts weight onto the outlets that remain, including small ones. That is a responsibility instead of an opportunity, and it is worth saying plainly that a magazine like this one does not replace an investigative desk. We can cover a restaurant opening and a festival and tell you which mechanic not to use. We cannot spend four months on a public records fight.

What you can do about it

Subscribe to something. The Ledger, the Optimist, WFAE, Axios and the Observer itself all depend on readers instead of on a market that is no longer there. A paid subscription to a local outlet is the most direct action available, and it costs less than most people spend on coffee in a month.

Read past the headline on local stories, because engagement metrics decide what gets commissioned next. And when a reporter asks a public body a hard question at a meeting, that reporter is there because somebody is paying for them to be.

Our read: the awards and the layoffs landing on the same day is the whole story in one image. The work was recognized as among the best in the state, and the business could not carry it. That is not a Charlotte problem and it is not an Observer problem. It is arriving here anyway.

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