For this, The Charlotte Observer has published since 1886, which makes it older than the skyscrapers, the banks and the light rail, and older than almost every institution in the city except the churches and the colleges. For most of that time it was the paper of record for the Carolinas’ largest city. It still is, with fewer people to do the work each year.
This week we reported another round of layoffs at the paper. The story of how a 140-year-old newspaper came to that is the story of American newspapers generally, with Charlotte’s particulars.
It started in 1886
The Observer began publishing in 1886, in a city of about 10,000 people that was betting its future on cotton mills and railroads, and it grew with the city through the twentieth century. Under Knight Newspapers and later Knight Ridder, it became one of the strongest regional papers in the country, winning Pulitzer Prizes including a public service prize in 1981 for its coverage of brown lung disease in the textile mills and another in 1988 for exposing the finances of the PTL television ministry, work that reached across the state and the nation.
At its peak the paper had a newsroom of several hundred, bureaus across the region, a Sunday circulation in the hundreds of thousands and a building on South Tryon Street that anchored a block of Uptown.
The Observer’s contraction has been gradual and public. The South Tryon Street headquarters was sold and the staff moved to leased space; the printing moved out of the city; the newsroom shrank through buyouts and layoffs under McClatchy’s debt and then under Chatham’s ownership. Each step was covered by the paper itself, and each left the city with fewer people whose job was to sit through a four-hour school board meeting and report what happened.
The ownership changes
Knight Ridder sold itself to McClatchy in 2006, and McClatchy, based in Sacramento, took on heavy debt to buy a chain of papers at the top of the market just before the market collapsed. The Observer’s circulation and advertising fell through the following decade as readers moved online, and the newsroom shrank with them.
McClatchy filed for bankruptcy in 2020 and emerged owned by Chatham Asset Management, a New Jersey hedge fund, which now controls the Observer along with the chain’s other papers. The Uptown building was sold and the paper moved to leased space. The newsroom that remains is the largest in the region by a wide margin, and it has continued to produce work of consequence, but each round of cuts leaves fewer reporters covering a metro of more than 2.5 million people.
The paper’s Pulitzers tell the story of what a fully staffed regional newsroom could do. The 1981 public service prize recognized a series on brown lung disease among textile workers in the Carolinas, reporting that changed regulation of the mills. The 1988 prize, also for public service, recognized the paper’s exposure of the finances of Jim and Tammy Bakker’s PTL ministry, work that brought down one of the most powerful religious broadcasters in the country. Both were investigations that took months and a team, which is what the newsroom no longer has in the same measure.
What it does now
The Observer publishes daily online and a printed paper on a reduced schedule, with coverage concentrated on local news, government, business, sports and the Panthers, Hornets and Charlotte FC. Its reporters broke pieces of the CMS story we covered this week and have covered the I-77 toll lane fight from the beginning. CharlotteFive, the lifestyle brand Ted Williams launched before leaving to found the Agenda, remains part of the paper.
The newer outlets, WFAE, The Charlotte Ledger, Axios Charlotte and the rest, have grown in part to fill the gaps the paper’s contraction opened, and several of their founders and editors came from its newsroom.
The paper’s coverage this year has included the CMS superintendent’s dispute with his board and the I-77 toll lane fight, and its reporters remain the ones most likely to be in the room when a public body votes. Its website carries a paywall, its print edition arrives on fewer days than it once did, and its newsroom is smaller after this week’s cuts than at any point in its modern history. The reporting that remains is still the city’s baseline.
Why it matters
A city’s newspaper is the record of what happened in it, and Charlotte’s has been kept by the Observer for 140 years. The Pulitzers are in the past. The present is a newsroom owned by a hedge fund, cut again this week, still the only outlet with the staff to cover a school board, a city council and a county commission on the same night.
Every other story in this series is about a business that someone built. This one is about an institution the city inherited, and what it costs to keep. The answer, this week, was more reporters. The question is how many are left to lose.
What the Observer still does that no other outlet in the region can is scale: a business desk, a sports desk that travels with the teams, editorial pages and a reporter at most public meetings that matter. The newer outlets cover their beats well, and this site links to them constantly, but none has the staff to replace a metropolitan daily, and this week’s cuts made that daily smaller again.