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It was a front page that forever changed Wilmington: “Toxin Taints Tapwater,” splashed in fat, black font.
Little-known likely carcinogenic contaminants had been found in the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people. The local utility knew about it, hadn’t alerted the public, and couldn’t filter the chemicals out.
Residents later learned Chemours, a spinoff of the chemical giant DuPont, had been dumping GenX into the Cape Fear River for decades.
Vaughn Hagerty, a former StarNews city editor then working as a freelancer, gave his old paper the story of a lifetime with his 2017 scoop on GenX. The story about how a type of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as forever chemicals, got into Wilmington’s water supply prompted hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure investments and several ongoing lawsuits.
Hagerty couldn’t have written that story as an overburdened staff reporter, he said at a 2022 conference. “It isn’t because I’m special,” he said. “It really is because I had time.”
The StarNews, the state’s oldest continuous daily newspaper, covered the complicated topic aggressively in the months that followed. But that vigor has since waned—for PFAS and a number of other serious issues facing the region.
Case in point: A Biden administration press conference held in Fayetteville on April 10 announced the nation’s first-ever limits on PFAS in public drinking water.
It was a momentous affair, live-streamed and sited just upstream from Chemours. The Raleigh News & Observer and the Fayetteville Observer each gave the historic announcement above-the-fold front-page treatment the next day.
But the StarNews didn’t print anything about it until two days later, when it re-ran the Fayetteville Observer’s story below the fold and only briefly featured it on its homepage online (below the leading story on a local Greek restaurant closure).
What’s happened in Wilmington isn’t unique—it’s taking place across the nation amid news’ painful digital transformation. Newspapers were slow to adapt to the internet, bought by out-of-town corporate parents as the industry consolidated, and battered as tech titans hoovered up advertising dollars. Local papers have been left with skeleton crews, giving readers fewer reasons to keep subscribing and fueling their struggles.
But the PFAS story has highlighted the way local coverage has changed at the StarNews. Mike McGill, a communications consultant partly motivated to follow coverage of the issue because of his business, first observed the lack of coverage in a post on LinkedIn: “Our local paper has melted away.”
Emily Donovan, co-founder of the advocacy group Clean Cape Fear, traveled to Fayetteville with her family to speak at the event. Considering its role in breaking the first big story on PFAS in North Carolina, the recent coverage by the StarNews has been “depressing,” she said.
StarNews Executive Editor Sherry Jones, who also oversees The Fayetteville Observer, said Gannett, which owns both papers, routinely shares content across sites. She referred further inquiries to Gannett. A spokesperson for Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper conglomerate, said the paper has doggedly pursued PFAS coverage and published more than 100 articles on the topic: “We remain committed to being at the forefront of this story.”
The Assembly spoke with 11 former StarNews staffers spanning more than four decades who spoke with glowing nostalgia for the glory days. But many of them are disillusioned with what has become of their old paper. It’s lighter, softer. The PFAS story is just the latest sign.
Scott Nunn, who worked at the paper for nearly 30 years, remembers the then-executive editor saying of the PFAS story, “‘We’re gonna cover this forever.’”
“And we didn’t,” said Nunn. “It faded out, too.”
An Institutional Loss
The Gannett spokesperson said it would be incorrect to say the paper didn’t cover the PFAS news, since it ran The Fayetteville Observer piece. (On Tuesday, the StarNews finally published its own coverage of the topic.)
“I think that’s a cop-out,” Nunn said.
There’s barely anyone left at the StarNews who would know the nuances the story requires, Nunn said, because there are new “faces flowing through there every month it seems. So you lose that institutional knowledge and memory for your coverage.” Many reporters with experience on this topic have since moved on to more stable and better-paying industries, including Hagerty, who now works for the water utility he first reported on.
The StarNews’ print circulation has plummeted 72 percent since 2016, down to about 8,980 as of last September, according to data from the Alliance for Audited Media.
Newspapers across the U.S. lost more than half of jobs between 2008 and 2020, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a continued but more gradual 3 percent decline in reporter jobs over the next decade.
Researchers have repeatedly found that newspapers across the country are producing less original and local content, and pooling regional-, state-, and national-level topics for local distribution is one way to maximize limited resources.
While some of the reporters partially blame the StarNews for its decision-making, most are hardest on Gannett. They and other company critics say it has milked what it can out of its media properties while transforming legacy papers into flimsy, zombie versions of their former selves in a quest to become mildly profitable.
Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at Poynter, said the shift is happening in mid-sized Gannett papers across the U.S., though the changes aren’t unique to the chain.
Tasked with beefing up online page views and unique visitors, papers are prioritizing high-traffic features over hard news, Edmonds said. “While I think it makes for a crappy editorial product to go too far with chasing clicks, I think those soft topics are a logical part of the mix,” he said.
Former staffers say the consequences of StarNews’ waning relevancy are tangible, citing examples like the 2021 sale of New Hanover Regional Medical Center, sex abuse allegations in the public school system, and recent hiccups with the New Hanover Community Endowment as issues that would have gotten far more scrutiny if the old Morning Star, as the paper was known years ago, was still around.
To be clear, the Wilmington region is not a news desert. It still has two dedicated television stations, a radio station, a digital-only outlet, a business publication, a beach paper, a college paper, a newsletter, and of course the StarNews.
Still, “there is so much news happening that is going undetected, it is insane,” said Cory Reiss, who covered courts for the Morning Star from 1996 through 2000 before making a mid-career pivot to become an attorney.
The region today lacks a dedicated courts reporter, from the StarNews—or any local outlet. “Some choices have to be made,” Reiss said. “Are the choices being made to cover the food beat and what restaurants opened yesterday, instead of who got convicted and why?”
The old paper was like a buffet in your driveway. But now, the kitchen knows exactly which stories readers want to eat, and you end up with a lot more fast food.
The StarNews does still produce fresh, in-depth news. But it’s hard to imagine the paper of yesteryear leading its morning roundup on April 17 with “Downtown Wilmington sandwich shop has closed.”
It was a Subway.
The Old News
Since 2012, the StarNews has been shuffled between four different corporate ownership structures.
Its prime years were under the umbrella of The New York Times Co., which owned it from 1975 through 2012. In the ‘70s, the Morning Star had more than 150 employees. Gannett declined to share current headcount numbers, but the StarNews website lists 14 editorial staffers, tasked with covering a growing region of nearly half a million people.
The Morning Star was a cash magnet, so the New York Times Co. largely left the paper alone. (Hagerty once described the corporate relationship as “benign neglect.”) The newsroom had a long leash, access to firepower attorneys, and expense budgets.
Its pages were stuffed with local stories and ads—so many ads—sold for a premium. Local coverage was thorough and lively. Lawmakers picked up the phone seemingly daily to be interviewed—how else could they tell voters what they were up to? And if they didn’t, the paper gave them hell.
John Meyer started as a reporter there in 1976, was the city editor from ‘82 to ‘85, and was managing editor through the end of 2000. The Morning Star was generating a whopping 40 percent profit for the mothership in the ‘90s, he said, but executives set aside zilch to establish an online presence. Meyer said he created one himself in 1996, without corporate support.
“It’s been hard to watch what I helped build over a quarter century get torn down,” he said. “It’s even harder to see how the collapse of serious journalism has directly harmed the community that’s still my home.”
Meyer said the StarNews’ downfall started when the New York Times Co. began committing a “slow suicide” in failing to see the digital revolution ahead.
‘Quality Doom Loop’
Shannan Bowen is the executive director of the NC Local News Workshop, which was established in 2020 in response to concerns like the declining number of reporters, thinning newspapers, and the loss of resources.
“At the end of the day, everyone is still doing their best,” said Bowen, who worked at the StarNews from 2007 to 2012, but spoke in her capacity with the workshop, not as one of the 11 aforementioned former reporters.
While the workshop looks to help fill those gaps, Bowen said, readers who care about local journalism can also play a part by supporting institutions they value. When the workshop hosts listening sessions around the state, many tell them they have seen the dwindling amount of local content, but don’t always have insight on the business dynamics that caused the shift.
“If they’re not seeing the amount of local content and content that represents their communities and reflects their needs for information, they’re less likely to turn to that source of information,” she said.
The change Bowen references has been called the “death spiral” or “quality doom loop”: Dropping revenues lead to newsroom cuts, which lead to a watered-down product, which makes it less attractive to readers and advertisers.
Corporate ownership isn’t necessarily a negative, Bowen says, and the ease of content sharing can be a perk. But it can often also lead to cultural shifts.
After Halifax Media Holdings bought the StarNews and 15 other papers from the New York Times Co. in 2012, the newsroom had to assimilate to its new owner’s policies. No jeans. Spouses couldn’t work together. For one married couple, Bowen remembers, “They had to decide which one would remain employed.”
And perhaps the biggest change: No more free news. Like many other legacy papers, the StarNews had committed digital journalism’s “original sin.” It put up a paywall in 2013, charging $10 per month for digital-only access.
Two years later, GateHouse Media’s parent company bought Halifax and its portfolio of 24 mostly Southeastern dailies. Layoffs followed soon after. Then Executive Editor Pam Sander told Editor & Publisher that the StarNews was “giddy” about the GateHouse acquisition: Halifax was a print-minded company whereas GateHouse was focused on digital, and the sale would allow the newspaper “to become a bona fide digital-first publication.” (Sander, who retired in 2022, declined to comment for this article.)
In 2019, GateHouse acquired Gannett and took on its name in a $1.1 billion deal, becoming the nation’s largest media company with 260 daily papers. (It’s since closed or sold at least 42, according to public financial filings.) Meyer, the former managing editor, said GateHouse “hijacked the good name of Gannett, which used to be a respectable company.”
After the merger, Gannett was burning cash. It slashed headcounts company-wide by more than half, down to 10,000 as of last year.
While cost-cutting helped slow the bleeding, the business remains unprofitable. Gannett reported a net loss of nearly $23 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 but told investors it expects to turn a profit by 2025 or 2026. (In late 2022, Gannett required every staffer to take five days of unpaid leave, suspended the 401(k) match, and encouraged reporters to take reduced hours or buyouts.)
Finances usually weren’t shared with the editorial team, but Nunn said he remembers before the merger, leaders told them they wanted to “show y’all how serious things are and the hole we’re digging ourselves into.”
There was a sense of desperation growing, he and other reporters said. They were told to track their page views, social media engagement, and other metrics, and were judged by story performance rather than the quality of the work. The team shrunk as people left but weren’t replaced. Stories got less editing, and new beats were added to the remaining reporters’ already full plates.
Nunn recalls a meeting around 2019 where he mentioned that they barely covered education anymore and was told education stories didn’t get views. “If you just want page views,” he told his bosses, “why don’t we just do porn?”
There is no definitive model for how to save local news, said Edmonds, the business media analyst. Nonprofit news has been billed as a savior, but Edmonds has pointed out issues with this thinking. And while some independent for-profits have found success, many—including The Assembly—also rely on grants and partnerships.
There are growing calls to put public funding and incentives behind local news. States like California, New Jersey, New Mexico, Illinois, Wisconsin, and New York are already testing this solution.
Meanwhile, Gannett’s attempt to achieve solvency remains unproven. The company has six papers in North Carolina, each with limited remaining staff. The Gaston Gazette has a staff of five, according to its website. The Shelby Star in Cleveland County lists only one employee. The Times-News, which covers Henderson County, lists two.
Gannett doesn’t appear too attached to its remaining papers. In an earnings call last year, CEO Mike Reed told investors they’d “entertain bids on any of our markets.”
Johanna F. Still is The Assembly‘s Wilmington editor. She previously covered economic development for Greater Wilmington Business Journal and was the assistant editor at Port City Daily.