The News & Observer

Overview

The News & Observer is a daily newspaper based in Raleigh, North Carolina, serving the state's Research Triangle region, including Durham, Cary and Chapel Hill. It is the largest-circulation newspaper in North Carolina and is owned by The McClatchy Company.

History

The News & Observer traces its roots to The Sentinel, founded in Raleigh in 1865 by the Rev. William E. Pell. That paper went bankrupt roughly a decade later and was absorbed by the Raleigh Observer, founded in 1876 by Peter M. Hale and William L. Saunders; the Observer was in turn merged with The News, a separate paper founded in 1872, under the new banner The News and Observer in September 1880, led by historian and politician Samuel A'Court Ashe.

In 1894, the paper was purchased at auction by Josephus Daniels, who went on to serve as U.S. Secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson and as U.S. ambassador to Mexico under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Daniels used the News & Observer as a leading instrument of North Carolina's 1898 white-supremacy political campaign, which culminated that November in the Wilmington massacre and coup d'état, one of the only successful violent overthrows of an elected government in American history. According to the National Endowment for the Humanities, Daniels' paper printed inflammatory headlines and racist cartoons stoking fear of "Negro Rule" over Wilmington's biracial city government; Daniels later acknowledged in his own memoir that the paper's coverage of alleged crimes by Black North Carolinians was "sometimes too lurid." In 1984, the Daniels family commissioned a statue of Josephus Daniels near the paper's former Raleigh building; the family had it removed in June 2020, stating publicly that "Josephus Daniels' legacy of service to North Carolina and our country does not transcend his reprehensible stance on race and his active support of racist activities."

The Daniels family retained ownership of the paper for 101 years, with Daniels' son Jonathan becoming editor in 1933 and Claude Sitton, who became editor in 1968, moving the paper's editorial focus toward in-depth investigative journalism. On May 17, 1995, the News & Observer Publishing Company was sold to the McClatchy Company of Sacramento, California, for $373 million, ending the Daniels family's century of ownership. McClatchy expanded its North Carolina holdings further in 2006, acquiring most of Knight Ridder's newspapers, including The Charlotte Observer, placing the state's two largest papers under common ownership.

McClatchy itself filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February 2020. Following a court-supervised auction, the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management was named the successful bidder that July, agreeing to acquire substantially all of McClatchy's assets for approximately $312 million, comprising a $262.85 million credit bid against McClatchy's first-lien debt and $49.15 million in cash. The sale, structured through a new holding company, SIJ Holdings, LLC, closed on September 4, 2020, and preserved all 30 of McClatchy's local newsrooms, including the News & Observer, as a single company. Nicole Stockdale was named executive editor of the News & Observer, along with its sister paper the Herald-Sun of Durham, in January 2025, effective that February; she succeeded Bill Church, who had left to lead the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Notable works

• 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The News & Observer won journalism's highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, for "Boss Hog: The Power of Pork," a five-part investigative series published in February 1995 by reporters Pat Stith and Joby Warrick with editor Melanie Sill. The series documented the environmental and health risks posed by waste-disposal practices in North Carolina's rapidly growing hog industry and examined the political influence of hog magnate Wendell Murphy on state legislation benefiting his industry.

• 1995–1996. According to a professional biography of reporter Joby Warrick, the "Boss Hog" series also won nine other national and regional awards, including citations from Investigative Reporters and Editors and the White House Correspondents' Association.

Key personnel

• Executive Editor. Nicole Stockdale

• Owner. The McClatchy Company

• Majority Owner, McClatchy. Chatham Asset Management

Audience

The News & Observer is the largest-circulation newspaper in North Carolina, serving readers across the Research Triangle area—including Raleigh, Durham, Cary and Chapel Hill—in print and online.

Location and contact info

Headquarters

421 Fayetteville Street, Suite 104
Raleigh, North Carolina 27601

Owner. The McClatchy Company

Website. https://www.newsobserver.com