Places can be a lot like family, in that the same familiarity that creates deep, lasting bonds can also lead to a good amount of complaints, nitpicks, and grievances over the years. As Frank Costanza famously said to his family members over Festivus dinner, “I’ve got a lot of problems with you people… now, you’re gonna hear about it!”
Like Frank, I love my family — or for the purposes of this piece, my home (North Carolina). Since the days of Carter and Jamison, I’ve been living within the same seven-mile radius almost nonstop — any remaining influences from the seven years I spent living outside the state are surely buckling under the weight of the nearly 25 years I’ve spent within it.
No, I have no shortage of North Carolina love. But this little essay isn’t about love. This essay is about my grievances. And at the very top of the list, for a while now, has been our media ecosystem.
Frank at the annual Airing of Grievances.
For an area that carries the national influence both politically and culturally that North Carolina (and the Triangle, more specifically) does, it should not be controversial to describe our current media landscape as painfully inadequate.
That isn’t to say we don’t have great journalists (because we do), or a varied stable of outlets (because we do), or citizens eager to know and learn more about where they live (we do). But taken in the aggregate, the picture that emerges is one of a media landscape too poorly presented to be broadly consumed, too under-consumed to be financially healthy, and too financially unhealthy to hire and retain top talent for the long haul. And the virtuous cycle continues on and on until in 2030 when all outlets are dead and the North Carolina gubernatorial debates are presented in the form of a dance showdown on TikTok.
It’s important to acknowledge that we are certainly not alone in this. The dominance of The New York Times (even before they had Wordle!) and a host of other well-funded magazine and digital-first outlets have saturated an already loath-to-pay citizenry with more interesting content than we know what to do with, all while a Facebook- and Google-induced tectonic shift in advertising has pulled the rug out from under publishers’ feet. Long-form, thoroughly reported media, in an age of ever-shortening attention spans, broken financial models, and expanding monopolies, has never been a tougher proposition. But if a state can figure it out, it should be this one.
To date, we have not. Much of our best hard reporting is relegated to wonky outlets that are never going to be read by the common person. Many of our most provocative writers and pieces appear in partisan (or heavily partisan-leaning) publications, where they will win few minds or hearts. And our closest thing to a paper of record, hosted on a clunky, overly paywalled site, has failed to gain the broad consumption that an outlet of its heft should — only a handful of people I know read it regularly, and fewer subscribe to it. All of these outlets have their place in an overall media ecosystem. But the lack of one (or more) unifying institutions that address these collective weaknesses leaves a gaping hole at the center.
This isn’t merely an academic concern. These deficiencies negatively impact our region in a number of ways, from business, to arts and culture, to the nature of our statewide discourse in general.
On the arts front, there is exactly one significant outlet in the Triangle (a very under-resourced outlet, mind you) though which any one of our area’s talented and heralded artists might have their new art show, new album, or new book, critiqued. It has talented, hardworking contributors and editors. But there is only so much bandwidth there, only so much that can be covered. If something isn’t, where does it go? Into the bottomless dustbin of arts updates, that’s where. If you ever hear about struggles in our area for creatives to make a living, don’t wonder why — it’s because the mainstream platforms through which everyday readers could be converted into paying fans, at least on any kind of large scale, simply don’t exist. Smaller arts-focused outlets like Durham Beat and Let’s Talk Durham are making positive and welcome contributions, but still do not fill the gap, nor report at the length or depth, that a flagship publisher could.
In the business sphere, there is not a single outlet currently putting forth a consistently high-quality, good-looking product that you might see at a coffee shop being read by workers, investors, and entrepreneurs alike. For what is supposedly one of America’s hotbeds of innovation and enterprise, the fact that nearly all business stories in North Carolina either reside in scrappy, passion-project newsletters or entrenched, old media outlets that no one under 45 reads (or business-friendly service outlets that only a businessperson would read) says a lot about how far we are from a healthy local discourse about jobs, money, innovation, and more.
And politically and socially speaking, the lack of an authoritative, widely consumed, 21st century news vessel leaves us without ways to bridge gaps between citizens who, in our divided society, may otherwise never connect. Our current state of affairs — one without any media entities broadly respected and heavily consumed by a swath of differently-minded citizens — greases the wheels of a continued descent into anti-democracy, a society in which people don’t just fail to coexist with each other, but increasingly begin to agitate against each other, because they are living in entirely different realities with entirely different facts.
Let’s face it: on the national stage, where these battles often play out over inherently depersonalized and rage-triggering platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the fight is all but lost. On the state and local level, however, where people still bump into each other, talk face to face, go to school together, there’s still hope. We can still turn the tide. But it starts with, at least occasionally, a majority of our citizens being able to read from more or less the same script. We don’t currently have that script in North Carolina.
Last but not least, the outlets we do have are rarely able to compensate contributors at a level that is sustainable for full-time careers. I know because I have contributed to them. Young and happy to be published, I was thrilled with the 10 or 15 cents per word that I got. Had I had a family, a mortgage, a need to be saving money at that time? It wouldn’t have worked. A quality media landscape that exists for the long haul is going to need more dollars running through it than ours currently does, or soon enough, it won’t have anyone in it.
For years, particularly since 2020, I have dreamed about, whenever I was done at Nugget, starting (or helping to start) the kind of publication that would address these issues. Something with the potential to be widely read, widely trusted (seen for the most part as nonpartisan, credible, experienced), with a sense of visual and cultural taste that could pull people not normally considered news junkies into the fold — raising the bar of our collective media literacy, and in doing so, raising the bar for how honestly and forthrightly our businesspeople, policymakers and politicians would need to treat the rest of us as a result.
I was inspired by the inroads I had seen made in the digital-first space by Raleigh Agenda, before it was cynically shut down ahead of schedule by its publisher. I was excited by the presentation and quality of California Sunday Magazine, before it also, unfortunately, was shuttered.
But before I could do it, before my work was done at Nugget, it got started without me, in the form of The Assembly. Widely read, widely trusted by readers and journalists, convincingly nonpartisan, tastefully delivered, with its contributors and staffers meaningfully paid? The Assembly is well on the path to being that outlet, and then some.
It isn’t yet, of course. For all its potential, The Assembly currently publishes just once-weekly, infrequently touches on heavy readership-driving subjects like sports and culture, and scarcely uses social media. There is still, as Founder Kyle Villemain pointed out in his recent update about The Assembly’s upcoming $3 million funding raise, a long way to go. But stories are already being reported and told on the state level before going national (including big scoops in the Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure scandal at UNC, alongside NC Policy Watch and others), journalism experts are taking notice, and contributors, both in writing and in photography, are being very competitively paid.
Last month, I provided additional seed funding to The Assembly for a very small stake in the company that nonetheless represented by far the biggest investment of my life to date. Maybe one day I will see a financial return on those dollars. I hope I do. But mostly, I hope for a social one. Kyle’s earnest belief that a significant readership of North Carolinians will pay for a widely circulated, well-staffed, and thoroughly reported news organ, is refreshing, inspiring, and reassuring, even if all of that doesn’t make it definitively true.
It might still be too naïve, too pie-in-the-sky of a vision. But it feels a little bit better knowing that someone else is having it too.
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Editor’s Note: Today, The Assembly announced two exciting and integral full-time hires — Kate Sheppard as Managing Editor (currently Sr. National Editor at Huffington Post), and Paige Ladisic as Revenue and Growth Director (currently Advertising Director at the Daily Tar Heel).
Editor’s Note 2: A previous version of this story described an existing outlet in broad strokes (specifically, that it lacked “taste and quality”), in a way that was not clear nor helpful to the author’s broader point, which is that the NC media ecosystem needs The Assembly, but not solely The Assembly. The Nikole Hannah-Jones scandal was also inaccurately described as having been broken solely by The Assembly, and did not mention early coverage by NC Policy Watch. Both have been changed, with sincerest apologies.