What is your current job?
I’m a senior editor at Cardinal & Pine, an online news site in North Carolina. I have bylines all over the place though, at The Atlantic, at The Washington Post, and most recently, at MSNBC. I’m a native of the rural South and the issues that matter there still have my heart.
Cardinal & Pine launched in 2020 to combat online misinformation, with a focus on the state’s news deserts. Since then, we’ve won some press awards and developed an audience of about 200,000 or so through social media and our free newsletter.
Our content, which is all free, is meant to deliver good information, and thrive on social media. It should resonate regardless of your age and where you live, your socioeconomic status, or your education level. I think it’s groundbreaking. We have a growing presence on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and X, in places that some traditional media outlets won’t go.
Our bread and butter is politics, but we frame our work in the context of Southern culture, history, and civics. We don’t spend a lot of time on horse-race politics and polls. We focus on issues, explaining who the candidates are and what they stand for, as well as how to participate. We prefer to put real people in front of the camera as much as we put politicians out there.
I like to say we lean left on point-of-view, but we lean no way on facts.
Some Republicans don’t love us too much, but I don’t have any problem with any politicians, regardless of their affiliation, unless they try to lie to my audience’s face. Democrats will try that sometime too and we’re not afraid to call them on it, but, as far as disinformation goes, there’s no parity there that I can see. MAGA Republicans sustain themselves on disinformation, and I don’t see it as our job to coddle that. Some people, some journalists even, might call that bias, but I disagree.
What was your first byline?
People who read me would be surprised to know this, but my first byline was a very conservative opinion column I wrote in high school for the local paper in Elizabeth City, N.C. Something about the decline of culture because of seedy talk show hosts or something.
Jerry Springer and Maury Povich were big back then in the 90s. I grew up in the church and thought all that talk show stuff was pretty awful. Clearly. It was very wordy if I remember. 100% bombastic. I haven’t seen it in years. I bet it was terrible, but I’m happy I was developing a strong voice so early on.
It was for a senior project. I don’t know if kids do that anymore. You work on one project for months, preferably in the area you want to work, and present a product at the end of the year. I wanted to write books, but I saw it in the back of some author’s book that they started in journalism and that seemed reasonable to me, so for my senior project, I shadowed local reporters and wrote a published column.
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What was your first real job in journalism?
The student paper at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill should count. It’s called the Daily Tar Heel. We took it very seriously. They still do, and they should.
The people who work there are hard-core journalists. I remember they were in the process of moving off campus because we didn’t want to be beholden to the university leadership or the chancellor or some other person-in-charge type. You treated it like a job. The best people at that paper—and so many of them are in editor roles now—had terrible GPAs because they spent all their time in the student newsroom.
That’s still inspiring to me. I think you need to go into this business with a little bit of a chip on your shoulder but you still have to be nice. Everyone tells you that you won’t make money and people will hate you and write you mean letters, and they’re generally right. But people who do journalism love it and wouldn’t trade it in for anything else.
We had that mindset at the Daily Tar Heel and the student-journalists still do there. They scoop adults like me all the damn time and they pull off being independent too. Look at them here taking the conservative leadership of the university system to task for their crusade to end all “diversity” initiatives.
How did you get it?
The Daily Tar Heel was an obvious route once you got into the journalism program at UNC-Chapel Hill.
But once I got out of school, I started out in local newspapers in North Carolina. The first one was at the Monroe Enquirer-Journal, based in conservative Union County outside of Charlotte. They treated the late U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, a Monroe native, like royalty, but people my age (41) or younger tend to think of him as an unrepentant bigot now.
I’m sure I saw an ad on a journalism jobs site. I learned a lot there, writing a couple bylines a day. I wouldn’t say they were great stories, but I learned it was an incredible amount of fun and I learned how to write fast. I think the pay was like $20,000, which, this was the 2000s, so that was a pathetic amount. I liked the job, but that’s how I got a healthy skepticism for some of the for-profit chains that were buying up local newspapers and squeezing every bit of joy out of them. That was Paxton Media Group who owned that paper. They had a reputation for turning good, local papers in the South into wastelands.
You’re seeing a lot of young journalists now pushing back on those chains. They’re coming up with new models, some of them with nonprofits, to make this important job work, not just for your audience but for the people who do the work. I consider what I’m doing at Cardinal & Pine part of that. It’s inspiring. Those young journalists today, they know the value of their work, and it’s much more valuable than many of the corporate chains are treating it.
What advice do you have for people looking to break into journalism?
Be relentless, be tenacious, be independent. Learn about the business of journalism, how the industry makes its money, and find a better way because the one we have right now isn’t working. Too many people don’t have access to good information because they can’t get past the paywalls or the tone or the insider-style of writing.
Be creative. Don’t be afraid to try something new, even if people tell you it’s dumb or not the way the late greats, the Walter Cronkites, would have done it. Those journalists weren’t made for these times. We are.
And don’t listen to people who tell you this is such an awful industry. If you love it, it’s the best thing on the planet, it’s the only thing for you. It will show in your work, in the way you talk to your audience.
We need those bright, ferocious minds more than ever now, those people who have a fine sense of ethics about justice, who don’t play by the failing rules of “performative objectivity” or false equivalencies. We need people who keep their sense of justice on a leash, but they don’t hold that leash too tight. Sometimes you need to let it off the leash.
Don’t be afraid to show your passion. Let them see how hard you’re writing. Let them see you burn on the page.