Carolina Public Press founder and executive director Angie Newsome. Photo by Will Kazary
By Emma Castleberry
This year marks the tenth anniversary for Carolina Public Press (CPP), an independent nonprofit news organization covering North Carolina issues. CPP was founded by North Carolina native Angie Newsome, who grew up in Davie County and whose family has been living in Mitchell County for generations. “Having those deep connections to the state is a very important defining factor of who I am and how I operate CPP,” she says.
Angie discovered journalism in high school when she worked on her school’s newspaper. “My parents would tell me that I was always going to be a writer, but fiction seemed unknowable and undoable to me,” she says. “The stories I wanted to tell were of the people I knew and loved and who intrigued me.” She went on to work at her college newspaper, but didn’t consider journalism as a career until later in life. She earned a master’s in journalism from UNC Chapel Hill, where her thesis was a series of stories on the closing of Beacon Manufacturing in Swannanoa, once the largest blanket manufacturer in the country. “I spent hours upon hours with the security guards at the mill,” says Angie, “which was closing and shipping off equipment to Iraq and Pakistan. And I spent a lot of time sitting in offices and in people’s living rooms and front porches, talking about their work at the company. It was a defining project for me.”
After grad school, Angie completed a reporting fellowship at The Poynter Institute in Florida, then returned to North Carolina and worked for about four years at the Citizen-Times as a business and investigative reporter, among other beats. After a period of freelance work, she started putting together her business plan for CPP in 2009 and launched the organization in 2011.
In this landmark year, the CPP team has covered a number of high-profile issues including COVID-19 and prison conditions; a contentious election; the law-enforcement related shooting and death of Andrew Brown Jr. in Elizabeth City; and the difficulty of accessing Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANE) nurses in North Carolina, which Angie cites as one of CPP’s most important recent investigative projects, with lead reporting by Kate Martin. “Most news start-ups last about three to five years, so I feel very fortunate that we’ve made it this long,” Angie says. “Our whole reason for existing is to provide independent, in-depth and investigative reporting in the public interest, which was and remains on the decline in legacy news outlets.”
Angie’s husband and two daughters are huge champions of CPP, and the family spends plenty of time together backpacking, baking and swimming. “We also tell lots of dumb inside jokes that are increasingly embarrassing to my 11-year-old,” Angie says. In addition to being an avid fan of barbecue and fried shrimp, Angie says one of her favorite things about North Carolina is the diversity of perspectives one can encounter in the state. “It has a long and rich history and culture, yet is unafraid to be dynamic and change and wrestle with hard questions including about injustice and racism,” she says. “I think we aren’t, as North Carolinians, afraid of having those hard conversations, and I’m grateful for that. I also love saying ‘y’all’, forever and ever.”
Learn more at CarolinaPublicPress.org.
