June 6, 1988, was a D-Day in its own way for me and about 20 reporters, editors, ad reps and circulation folks. It was the day The Chapel Hill Herald first hit the streets. The fact that it’s still coming off the presses every day 20 years later is a miracle, of sorts, considering the current state of newspaper journalism.
Strengthening the Durham Herald Company’s position in Chapel Hill was the goal of the late Rick Kaspar, who was our publisher at the time. To accomplish that goal, he and Executive Editor Bill Hawkins decided the way to go was to create a brand-new, self-contained daily newspaper. I was lucky enough to be entrusted with planning and executing the project.
Money was no object, which was a rare kind of marching order even back then. The success of the CHH was a matter of survival for us. We were battling The News & Observer and Ottaway Newspapers’ Chapel Hill Newspaper in Orange County, where we had only a small bureau at the time. Dramatic measures were called for.
Triangle newspaper competition had been pretty tame for about 70 years. The families that owned The News & Observer and the Durham Morning Herald had for years had a gentleman’s agreement that neither would move into the other’s territory. By tradition, both papers stopped at the Durham-Wake county line.
But in 1985 The N&O created The Durham Observer and The Chapel Hill Observer, weekly sections in their main sheet circulated in Durham and Orange counties. The truce had been broken.
In 1987, the Durham Herald Company hired Kaspar as its new publisher, and he quickly hired Hawkins from The Baltimore Sun. Both were high-energy and fiercely competitive. The culture of the company changed overnight. Putting out the paper and competing against the much larger N&O became fun.
We held the first meeting of the Hill Committee, as we called the task force put together to deal with the challenges in Orange County, in the spring of 1988. I figured Kaspar would suggest we put out a twice-a-week supplement to out-do The N&O’s once-a-week offering.
I can still remember the moment when Kaspar, leaning over with his elbows on his knees peeling an orange, said, “Let’s do it daily. There’s no way they can top that.” And we were off. His feeling was that we already owned the Durham corner of the Triangle, and that The Chapel Hill Herald would give us ownership of a second corner. With the Durham Herald Company dominating two of the three corners, he maintained, our position would be secure.
From that first Hill Committee meeting we had a little more than two months to put everything in place. My first hire was Tim Marema, one of the best editors I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with, who was just finishing his master’s in journalism at UNC.
Over the course of a few weeks we had hired as a reporter Duke Chronicle editor Rocky Rosen, who was about to graduate, copy editors Mark Phialas and Kim Gould, and reporters Tom Moore, Eddie Huffman, Neil Smith and Laura Van Sant. Several of our old Orange Bureau folks — Paul Brown, Myra Knight and Liz Lucas — stayed on for the new endeavor.
We had a last staff meeting at Breadman’s on Friday before our first edition on Monday, June 6. I scared the staff and myself that day when I told them, “Once this starts, it never ends. It’s 365 days a year.”
We had a huge party the night we put our 100th edition to bed. It felt like a huge accomplishment. For the copy editors especially — me, Tim, Mark and Kim — it had been a rough 100 days. Since I was salaried, I had worked 42 straight days without a day off, and most of those were 14- to 16-hour days. We all needed a party.
The success of the paper made the long hours worth it, though. Suddenly, Chapel Hill was in the news as the nation’s most competitive newspaper market, with the CHH being top dog in the market. Soon Ottaway decided the track was too fast and sold The Chapel Hill Newspaper to The N&O.
Lots of things are different now. McClatchy bought The News & Observer in 1995 and Paxton Media bought The Herald-Sun in 2005. The go-go times began their slide with the 1991 recession when advertising lineage fell off the table. Things revived for a year or two, and then came the Internet. Things have never been the same for newspapers.
I went by The Chapel Hill Herald offices yesterday. Where once there was a staff of five or six reporters and several editors, several ad reps and a circulation staff, two people were in the building, editor Neil Offen and police reporter Beth Velliquette.
The comparison to the good old days was bitter-sweet, but The Chapel Hill Herald still came out today with its 7,005th consecutive edition. And that’s no mean feat.
Jon Ham is vice president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of its newspaper, Carolina Journal. He left The Chapel Hill Herald in October 1988 to become managing editor of the Durham Morning Herald.