Triangle Blog Blog aims for a sweet spot between local news and progressive politics

When I type “local news Carrboro” into Google in early June, at first glance, there seems to be an abundance of solid resources I can consult about the latest happenings in the small North Carolina town.

At the top, there’s the radio station and website Chapelboro, “one of the only distributors of local news in Chapel Hill and the surrounding area.” The homepage features a textbook small-town groundbreaking, a weekend event list, some sports news…nothing that immediately screams “hard-hitting,” but that’s ok.

My next option is ABC11’s Carrboro news section, which on the day I visited led with a crime story about a shooting, followed by a mix of local government headlines from around the Triangle. (That story, dated May 30, is still leading there today.) Then there’s the Town of Carrboro website; the student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel; news aggregator NewsBreak (hm, maybe not); local NBC affiliate WRAL (same crime story leading); another aggregator called Ground News (guess which story is first); and, in slot number eight, a news site called The Local Reporter.

“Your relentlessly local nonprofit newspaper,” The Local Reporter declares itself on the top-right corner of its site, “serving Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Southern Orange County.” It’s a “member of the North Carolina Press Association,” with an assortment of stories under “government,” “schools,” “growth & development,” and “community.” Per its about page, the outlet’s mission is to provide “an engaging and rigorously-reported local newspaper” for residents of the area. It elaborates, “Taking its cues from issues of concern to local community, The Local Reporter will offer a civil forum of public debate, nurture local business, peer into local mysteries, but above all, build community engagement and enrich local identity through the telling of an ever-evolving public narrative of life in our region of coverage.”

Another green flag: the nonprofit says it subscribes to the Institute for Nonprofit News‘ conflict of interest and editorial independence policies, and states that the organization is “committed to transparency.”

Only because I’m looking for it do I see that all three members of the nonprofit’s board¹ identify themselves as former members of something called the Chapel Hill Alliance for a Livable Town (CHALT) in their bios.

I don’t actually live in Carrboro. But Melody Kramer does. The former NPR staffer (and 2015 Visiting Nieman Fellow)’s journalistic alarm bells first went off when she saw a social media post in February 2020 by another reporter about the news outlet’s connections to CHALT, a local political group with a history and reputation of opposing development. (CHALT formed an affiliated PAC called the Chapel Hill Leadership Political Action Committee in 2017.) On its website, CHALT states that “the rampant growth in the Triangle is threatening Chapel Hill’s good qualities” and claims to support “responsible growth” that mitigates the strain its says unchecked development causes by affecting the environment, traffic, property taxes, and “college town character.” Critics like Kramer, though, say CHALT obstructs the construction of sorely needed affordable housing.

Kramer’s day job is in communications at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But in March 2022, as a volunteer hobby, she decided to start practicing her own kind of local journalism by founding a community blog — Triangle Blog Blog. Her first story took The Local Reporter to task for insufficient disclosures and transparency surrounding its CHALT ties (though she did explicitly distinguish it from “pink slime” local outlets driven by national political operations).² She and the rest of the all-volunteer, unpaid team³ behind the Blog Blog have not let up since. Her ad-hoc experiment has grown into a consequential community resource — a trusted hub of Triangle intel with thousands of regular readers, dozens of contributors, and coverage by turns robust and funny of all things local, from elections, to zoning, to education, to pickleball.

Make no mistake, though: Triangle Blog Blog has an explicit point of view. It’s run through the community nonprofit Shameful Nuisance, a 501(c)(4). Shameful Nuisance’s other projects include the Chapel Hill Inclusion Project and Chapel Hill for All, “a campaign to support progressive candidates and politics that expand equitable access to housing, green space, and economic opportunity in Chapel Hill.” Multiple current and former board members have served, or actively serve, on Chapel Hill’s Planning Commission.

Triangle Blog Blog describes itself to readers as a “civic news cooperative” and “a daily group blog covering civics and news in Chapel Hill and Carrboro that reaches thousands of people across our region.” The site’s about page also shares several statements about what its contributors “believe in,” including “housing for all,” “connected communities,” and “a community that works for all.”

“We are here to give a voice to progressive people in our community who don’t otherwise have that,” Kramer told me. To her, disclosure of that perspective is everything.

Triangle Blog Blog raises some interesting questions about the increasingly motley forms local news takes today. Specifically: To what extent can, and can’t, a well-researched progressive civics blog serve as local news? What local information needs is this project meeting? How does it fit into the broader local news ecosystem?

Kramer and I explored some of these questions in a wide-ranging conversation, below, that touched on everything from bar mitzvahs to antique typewriters. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I worked for NPR for a decade; I wrote a Poynter column for many years about the state of local news; I was watching the Tiny News [Collective] and these one- or two-person nonprofit news organizations spring up through INN. I didn’t want to do that, because I have a full-time job and two little kids. But I noticed people on Twitter were actually live-tweeting town council meetings and doing this on their own. They were doing really good work, and no one was seeing it. Because when you live in a small town, you might have, like, 20 Twitter followers. So I reached out to people who I did not know, and said, what if we just start a WordPress, and we’ll put it all there, and we’ll just see how this goes, and we can play around.

I gave it the name Triangle Blog Blog, in part because the first story I was interested in was The Local Reporter. I wanted to make very, very clear that we had a point of view and that we were not a news organization, so we called it a blog. I think Triangle Blog was taken, so we added an extra one.

1. The Local Reporter is published by a 501(c)(3) called “Friends of Local Journalism.”
2. From Kramer’s April 5, 2022 piece: “I should be clear: The Local Reporter doesn’t resemble any of the pink slime journalism outlets or the advocacy orgs…that sit inside a non-profit but function as a newsroom. It’s a small operation and there aren’t political forces sweeping in from outside Chapel Hill to fund this operation. But The Local Reporter *is* the first example I’ve seen of a hyperlocal news operation that repeatedly claims to be ‘publishing factual, unbiased journalism‘ without disclosing their many connections to a local advocacy group.”
3. Volunteers have an outsized, and growing, role at many news nonprofits; according to the most recent INN Index, more than a third of outlets reported that volunteers play important roles in executive leadership, editorial assistance, and fundraising.
4. Two board positions recently turned over, with EPA researcher Louie Rivers III and rising UNC Chapel Hill senior Julian Taylor replacing IBM application architect John Rees and UNC assistant professor Martin Johnson.
5. Geoff Green and Stephen Whitlow both have planning degrees; Green works as a planner, while Whitlow is a research consultant mostly focused on issues related to housing, Kramer clarified.
6. Recent board member Rees, new board member Rivers, Whitlow, and Green have all served on the Planning Commission. Rivers and Green are current members, while Whitlow and Rees are commission alums.
7. In case you’re interested in a little more context about the financial side of the Blog Blog:

   CULPEPPER: You explained your concern about doxxing and professional consequences (specifically risks to tenure) as the reason that you don’t disclose your donors. Within the community, have you gotten pushback for not disclosing donors?

   KRAMER: We have. We have been called Dark Money. I think that people are trying to equate us to large dark money organizations that are operating at the national level. We have pushed back against that and said we byline our pieces and have bios…we tell you when we spend $100 on stickers. Our expenses are literally our WordPress, our Zapier, our newsletter, we threw a pizza party last year…we’re not paying ourselves — it’s clear, I think, from the operation that there’s nothing unseemly going on.

   We did print out endorsement fliers in the last election, and we filed an independent expenditure: we spent $700. We needed to file with the Orange County Board of Elections because we endorsed in that race. Because our name was on that flier, it was considered political.

   We might fundraise again, because we’d like to print out fliers for the next local election cycle. We have T-shirts [and other merch, including a sweatshirt emblazoned with, it must be said, a fiery and rather funny clapback to the Dark Money label]; you can buy a T-shirt and we get [a little bit] from your T-shirt.

   CULPEPPER: So you have some business-editorial separation.

   KRAMER: We have a firewall between the person who’s managing our money, in the same way that [at] NPR, if you work in the newsroom, you don’t know, unless there’s a donor who is at the end of a broadcast and they say ‘this program was supported by such and such’ — you don’t get a list of the small donors.

   I don’t have a list of the small donors. I don’t know if you’ve donated unless you’ve told me. And that was on purpose.

   [A note from Sophie: Blog Blog’s treasurer is Mychal Weinert. Weinert is married to board member Whitlow, but keeps treasury work completely separate.

   Weinert told me that since its inception, an average Blog Blog donation is $39.05. The Blog Blog receives “$368.11/month in recurring donations as of May 2024,” he said in an email. Among all donations, 62% are $20 or under; 89% are $50 and under; 97% are $100 and under; and 99% are $500 and under.

   “We received one larger, targeted donation to help cover the cost of this initiative,” the printing and mailing of a progressive voter guide to households in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, Weinert noted. “The donor requested their name and amount stay confidential. All other donations have been for general support of the blog.”

   The Blog Blog doesn’t currently have a formal budget, he told me, and makes “spending decisions as needs arise.” Its recurring expenses include web hosting and transcription, and its payments to a couple of students for their projects “should not exceed $2,000.”]