The Carolina Public Press gals are breaking news and getting things rolling.

by Jess McCuan

This spring, we profiled former Asheville Citizen-Times reporter Angie Newsome, whose nonprofit news website Carolina Public Press, debuted in March. It’s taken six month to work out some kinks, she says. For one, Newsome had her second child in April—which meant CPP assistant editor Kathleen Davis (also a former Citizen-Times staffer) took the reigns of the startup site.

But at a Carolina Public Press launch party in Asheville’s River Arts District last month, Newsome and Davis seemed optimistic about both the site’s potential and accomplishments. To get it started, Newsome, the editor, landed a two-year, $70,000 grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and a smaller one from the Community Foundation of WNC. Lately, she’s been polling industry experts like Pulitzer-winning former Miami Herald reporter Tom Fiedler (who spends time in Riceville) and others about how to raise more cash.

Meantime, she and her team have been breaking news. Newsome says Carolina Public Press was the first local news outlet with the story about Asheville Savings Bank going public in October. It was also the only WNC media outlet with a correspondent in Raleigh during state budget debates this spring. That fact made her simultaneously proud and sad. “It’s pretty astounding,” she says, that no other media outlets sent reporters to detail what state budget cuts meant for locals. “It says a lot about what’s happening to the media in Western North Carolina and says a lot about us as well,” she says.

The fact that Carolina Public Press stories have run in Mountain Xpress, the Charlotte Observer and on the nonprofit investigative news website ProPublica have boosted CPP’s traffic to around 6,000 unique visitors per month. In the future, she’ll be looking to boost those numbers through new print, radio and other partnerships.

For more info or to donate or contribute, check out www.carolinapublicpress.org.