Announcing a New Partnership with the Border Belt Independent

The Border Belt Independent is officially joining The Assembly’s network of newsrooms across the state. 

BBI covers Bladen, Columbus, Robeson, and Scotland counties in southeastern North Carolina. You can read more about them here, but they are certainly no strangers to our pages. We have worked with editor Sarah Nagem on stories about tribal recognition, a federal corruption probe, and rural voters. And reporter Ben Rappaport has written about race, development, and elections with us. BBI also recently added reporter Heidi Perez-Moreno to the team, who joined them from The Washington Post, where she worked in the features section.

Nagem will continue to edit BBI and Les High will remain its publisher. They will continue to publish at borderbelt.org and send their weekly newsletter, but you will also see more of their work featured in The Assembly. This partnership will allow us to deepen our reporting in the region, magnify the great work they’re doing down there, and strengthen the connection between our local newsrooms.

Our network now includes regional bureaus in Greensboro and Wilmington, as well as INDY Week in the Triangle and CityView in Fayetteville. If you want to help us continue to grow and reinforce our work around the state, consider becoming a subscriber today. 

About The Assembly

Launched in February 2021, The Assembly now has 40 full-time employees working across the state.

The Border Belt Independent joins our growing local reporting network in North Carolina. That includes our regional newsletters, The Dive in Wilmington and The Thread in Greensboro, and two outlets, CityView in Fayetteville and INDY Week in the Triangle.

We’re a subscriber-supported, for-profit outlet focused on great magazine-style journalism at the state-level and timely, prescient regional reporting that serves the needs of local communities. We partner with other outlets in the state and nationally, and our stories are regularly cited in outlets such as Politico, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Axios.