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The Raleigh News & Observer, 1945-1995, Oral History Series
Transcript: Ferrel Guillory Interview Interviewee: Ferrel Guillory Date: October 23, 2007 Location: Chapel Hill, NC Interviewer: Joseph Mosnier Interview length: 1 hour 35 mins Transcribed by/date: Madeleine Baran, October 30, 2008, Minneapolis, MN Edited by/date: Dana Di Maio, November 2008, Chapel Hill, NC
JOSEPH MOSNIER: This is Tuesday, the twenty-third of October 2007. My name is Joe
Mosnier of the Southern Oral History Program. I’m on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus in the
Journalism School with Mr. Ferrel Guillory. And we are here to do a second interview following
up on the first session we had last Friday on the long history of The News & Observer,
particularly since the early ‘70s, when Ferrel joined. Ferrel, thanks very much for sitting down. I
appreciate it.
FERREL GUILLORY: Thanks for having me.
JM: Let me pick up today with--. One of the points--of course we were touching on
many things--one of the points where we left off in the chronology last time was in relation to
your move to D.C. in January of ’77 to reopen the D.C. bureau. I wanted to open today by asking
you to talk about your experience up there and how that went.
FG: Yeah, I joined The News & Observer, as we said last time, in September, the week
of Labor Day of 1972. My title was Chief Capitol Correspondent. My responsibilities were as the
lead reporter on statewide campaigns and as the lead reporter in covering the legislature, and my
beat included the governor’s office and secretary of state and a few related Raleigh-based
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 2 of 34
government entities. Therefore, I covered the governor’s race and the United States Senate race
of 1972. I covered extensively the Senate race of 1974 [in North Carolina] when Robert Morgan
won the Senate seat after Sam Ervin retired. And then I covered the governor’s race and related
races in 1976.
At some point during that period, I don’t recall exactly when, Claude Sitton talked to me
about going to Washington. The News & Observer had a Washington bureau during the ‘60s, as
we talked about, with Roy Parker. I do not know before then. There may have been a
Washington presence before Roy, but I’m not aware of it. So anyway, Claude talked to me about
doing that on the condition that it would not be a long-term appointment, that I would return in a
couple years and join the editorial page staff. So that sounded logical to me. It gave me an
opportunity to get a taste of Washington without full-time commitment. It gave me a way to
come back to The News & Observer in at least a semi-management role of being the editorial
page editor, but also writing and sustaining the column that I had developed. So I went to
Washington right about the time of the Jimmy Carter inaugural. I remember being there in a
huge ice storm and we could hardly move in, but we did--had two young children at the time. We
found a little rental house in northwest Washington on a nice little pleasant street. It was an
altogether satisfactory assignment. It’s a difficult assignment because the bureaucracy is difficult
to penetrate, particularly for reporters on mid-size newspapers. I was often tempted to call up
some folks and say, “I’m from The New York Times.” Just lie. [Laughter]
JM: [Laughter]
FG: Just to get them on the phone, but then I never did. I was tempted, but I never
succumbed. And so reporters as I was--and there are a lot of them in Washington, fairly young,
working for these mid-size newspapers, hoping to get a break or something of that nature--tend
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 3 of 34
to gravitate toward Congress because it’s open. Congressmen are easy to find. So I was there
during the first two years of the Carter administration. There were several really important
stories having to do with North Carolina at the time. Senator Helms emerged as the leading
opponent, I guess it’s fair to say, of the Panama Canal treaties, which was a major foreign policy
goal of the Carter administration. So I do a lot of work on the Panama Canal treaties. The Carter
administration adopted an anti-smoking posture, which led to conflict with tobacco farmers in
1975, 1976, ’77, ’78. Tobacco farming was a much more integral portion of the North Carolina
economy than it is in the early part of the twenty-first century. There was still a federal tobacco
program [which set marketing quotas and offered price-support loans; this program was ended
under terms of the Fair and Equitable Tobacco Reform Act of 2004]. So I did a considerable
amount of reporting on that. And then there was also the dispute that we talked about over the
desegregation of the University system. So there were some ongoing stories. There were other
stories. Congressman Richardson Preyer at the time was appointed to the commission that re-
investigated the Kennedy assassination. Now, I was no expert on that, but I dipped into that story
from time to time. And there were some other political and other day-to-day kind of stories
involved in being in Washington. So I did that from roughly January of 1997 and I came down to
Raleigh in the late summer of 1998. I came back a little--.
JM: 1978.
FG: 1978, pardon me, time flies.
JM: [Laughter]
FG: 1978. I was due to come back in early ’79. Claude called me up in the middle of the
summer and said, “We may need you back earlier than anticipated.” And I said, “What’s going
on?” And he said, “Well, Tom Inman, who was the editorial page editor at the time, and at the
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 4 of 34
time was married to a Daniels--they divorced. That made Tom’s position as editorial page editor
a little less stable than it had been. And so, I can’t--. Tom departed earlier than anticipated and I
came back earlier than anticipated. I joined the editorial page staff in the fall of ’78 and then was
named editorial page editor early 1979.
JM: Tell me a little bit about--one or two more questions about D.C. and then we’ll pick
up on the editorial page work. Did Roy Parker [or] anybody sort of hand off a set of contacts to
you, or did you have to largely sort of go your--. No, you’re shaking your head no.
FG: No, well Roy had already gone to the campaign, the Bowles campaign. So Roy
immediately became one of my sources and that’s how I got to know him. A splendid guy, and
we’ve remained friends and acquaintances in the years since. He went on to be editor of The
Fayetteville Times and had a distinguished--re-entered journalism and had a distinguished career
afterwards. No, when I got here, it was just go do it. Of course, there was Bob Brooks and some
others there who had institutional memory.
JM: Sorry for--. When I was asking about if Roy Parker sort of handed off contacts, I
wonder if he sort of hooked you up with any folks in D.C., given his earlier service up there.
FG: Oh no. No, not that either.
JM: Okay. So it’s sort of as if you had to just find your way once you got to town.
FG: It was just kind of go, just go find an office.
JM: Show your press badge and start talking to people.
FG: Yeah, and go get your credentials and go find a house. No, there was no staff. There
was no assistant. It was just go do it. Live by your wits.
JM: Did you go back and forth to Raleigh much at all or no?
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Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 5 of 34
FG: No, no. Well, a little. There was the Senate race in 1978, as you remember. It was
the first re-election [of Jesse Helms] and he ran against John Ingram. Ingram became the
Democratic nominee. I did come back from time to time to join in the coverage of that campaign,
particularly the run-off campaign. So there was some there, but by then The News & Observer
had hired Al May to be the Capitol correspondent and then Rob Christensen joined the state staff
at the time. I think Rob joined it some time in that period. And then--so there was talent and
capacity for covering state politics and government, and I was an add-on by coming back. So no,
I spent most of my time in Washington.
JM: (0:10:43) to take up this new role on the editorial page, and last time you mentioned
that Frank Daniels, Jr. had asked you to draw up a memo sort of setting up your political views.
FG: I did not find the memo. I’m sure it’s in a drawer somewhere.
JM: Okay. Thank you for looking.
FG: Yeah.
JM: But how’d you think about that new position and what was the scope of your
thinking about what you wanted to do? (0:11:07)
FG: Well, I was relatively young and probably not as well prepared for it as I should
have been. I knew Claude was the person ultimately responsible for the editorial opinions of the
newspaper. So my initial feeling was to go slow, try to make modest amounts of progress, to
bring to bear my experience in reporting on state government and politics and my experience to
the editorial page. So I tried to be a coordinator. David Gillespie, who’s in the North Carolina
journalism hall of fame, was one of the editorial writers. David had a distinguished career at The
Charlotte Observer, and then had been one of the original staff people of the Southern Growth
Policies Board, and had gotten back into journalism by joining The News & Observer. And there
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were others. The editorial staff during my tenure included Michael Skube, who went on to win a
Pulitzer Prize. I helped bring Michael to The News & Observer.
So I was dealing with peers, and it wasn’t a kind of a boss-employee relationship. So I
tried to make sure everybody was writing on substantive issues. There were only three of us
during that time. It was a fairly--not just a fairly small, a really small staff. And we were turning
out twenty editorials or so per week, so everybody had plenty to do and important issues to write
about. So everybody worked hard and we did our own proofreading and all of that. So my job
was to just make sure it all came together in the end, and then to ride herd on letters to the editor
and to open up an op-ed page and that kind of thing. I think there were--. And to work with the
cartoonist, to make sure--you know, Dwane Powell was the cartoonist during this whole period--
and to help him focus.
And then there were important moments about endorsing candidates. The newspaper did
several investigative projects at that time--and how the editorial page would respond and write
about those investigations, ranging from the investigation of Soul City [a controversial
multiracial model town in Warren County, North Carolina, planned by Congress of Racial
Equality director, Floyd McKissick; begun in the late 1960s, Soul City experienced significant
problems by the mid-70s that drew criticism and eventually led to the federal government taking
over in 1980] to John Murphy’s term as school superintendent in Wake County. And there were
always editorials to write about Jesse Helms and some of the issues that arose out of his growing
power in Washington. And then of course there was the 1984 Senate race between Hunt and
Helms that consumed a lot of our energy and editorial attention. So I was editorial page editor
from the beginning of 1979. And then in 1988, Claude asked me to take over supervising the
coverage of the elections in 1988 that at the time wasn’t going very well. It was just some
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 7 of 34
internal weaknesses. And so nobody told me to leave editorial writing or anything. I went off and
filled a gap, and then just kind of worked my way into other jobs after that--didn’t really go back
to editorial writing. Although I continued to write my column that appeared on Fridays on the
editorial board because that had become a pretty--well not just a pretty standard feature, a
standard feature of The News & Observer at the time.
JM: How’d you measure the influence of the paper’s editorial page? Did you have a
sense of--? Talk to me a little bit about your sense of how it reverberated.
FG: Well it’s hard to have a quantitative measure of the influence of an editorial page.
We thought about it in several dimensions without actually articulating it. A lot of this just
happened by osmosis and the day-to-day conversation. One is The News & Observer felt--and I
speak of the institution here: this is Frank Daniels, Claude Sitton, me, and others, you know, the
editorial staff--was imbued with the notion that The News & Observer was an important
institution in the state, and that the readers of The News & Observer deserved to hear how The
News & Observer felt on things. Second, that because The News & Observer was an important
institution, it had a leadership role. And leaders often find that their followers don’t follow, and
it’s true that we often enraged some folks or disturbed them because we didn’t agree with their
predispositions. But we felt that that was part of the role, that a newspaper has a civic
responsibility as an institution, quite apart from any individual within The News & Observer.
And I think we all felt, to some extent--I won’t say it’s a (0:18:06), but we felt that the Daniels
ownership and the Daniels legacy had to be sustained. I mean, I wasn’t an owner. I didn’t have
an ownership stake in the paper, but that the tradition of The News & Observer as a forceful
voice shouldn’t be squandered. So there were all those dimensions.
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 8 of 34
JM: Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the working relationship you had with Claude in
these regards.
FG: Well, Claude and I had an office next door to each other. He clearly was the major
power at the newspaper, both by the position he held and by the forcefulness of his personality.
We all who worked for him, with him, had to learn how to deal with it as everybody does with a
boss. At the time of Claude’s retirement, The News & Observer commissioned a long feature
story by an outside journalist to come in and to document Claude’s long tenure. And during the
interview I said that Claude Sitton was one of the most, the finest practitioners that I knew of
purposeful anger. And afterwards Claude said, “Well, I see that they got you to do the negative
part on me.” [Laughter]
JM: [Laughter]
FG: And I said, “Well, somebody had to kind of give a rounded--.” I said, “That’s what
you used to say, that nobody’s perfect. That you had to--.” Which was one of his things. He
would often throw an editorial back, or something that just endorsed someone without analyzing
their weaknesses or negatives. And I said, “Well, somebody had to do that about you, too.” He
was known for his pounding the desk, or kind of exploding in emotion, but he really cared
deeply about getting the report in the newspaper right, and being a forceful presence both on the
news side in reporting the news and in commenting on it. There were issues and approaches that
he and I disagreed on. I learned after awhile that it was okay to go in there and tell him
something even if you knew it was going to make him explode a little. He would often come into
my office in the afternoon after he’d exploded at me in the morning and he’d say, “You know, I
was thinking about what you raised this morning.” And then we’d talk about it.
JM: That was his way to sort of cover some of the ground back.
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Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 9 of 34
FG: Yeah. And it took me awhile to learn that it was okay to kind of absorb that, that it
was part of the process of working our way through some issues, but he was always pushing us
to be even more forceful and more--not to hedge or not to be on the one hand this or on the one
hand that.
JM: Tell me if you would, give me your assessment of--across these years as well,
Claude obviously, as you’re saying, he’s responsible both for covering the news and commenting
on the news--how you felt broadly about his agenda setting, his allocation of staff resources and
how he deployed the paper’s journalistic resources.
FG: Well it’s an interesting question. Obviously, the deployment of resources begins not
with the editor, not with Claude Sitton, but with Frank Daniels, Jr., the publisher, and the way--.
The budgets of all the departments go to the publisher, advertising department and circulation
and all that. I think it’s clear that there was a steady increase in resources, a steady broadening of
the resources, deepening and broadening of the resources of The News & Observer during
Claude’s tenure at The News & Observer, which was more than twenty years. I mean, that
wouldn’t be surprising. So The News & Observer, when I got there, used to have sort of one page
a day on business news and had a farming page, that as farming declined went away. And so
under Claude, the newspaper developed an entire business section. The feature sections were
expanded. There was more coverage of religion and some other things. I don’t recall a kind of a
major increase over one year, but a steady increase from time to time [i.e. over time].
And I think, as we talked about last time, there was this shift of focus from the east or
being the daily newspaper for about half the state to being more of a Research Triangle area
newspaper. And so there were resources devoted to covering Chapel Hill and Durham and some
of the suburban communities more as--. When I moved to Raleigh, Cary was a town of four or
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 10 of 34
five thousand. Now it’s a city of a hundred and sixty thousand. Well, The News & Observer had
to pay more attention to Cary. Steve Ford, who was my successor as the editorial page editor of
The News & Observer and remains today the editorial page editor, we brought him on the
editorial page. Steve lives in Cary and brought his experience of living there and all that. So I
can’t document, I can’t give you kind of a numerical increase, but I think Claude saw first that
covering the news was the critical thing, that he was very hard news oriented, not opposed to
sports, not opposed to features or any of that, but his view of the newspaper was very much [to]
cover the major public events of our time and place. And that meant covering crime, and it meant
covering the goings-on in schools and that sort of thing, but through the time that Claude was
there, the state government--the state politics staff was seen as the preeminent staff; that that was
the, not the only focus of The News & Observer, but clearly the distinctive focus of The News &
Observer.
JM: Looking back, did you notice or can you recall any broad shift in mood among the
professional journalistic staff at the paper, maybe Claude’s sense of things after either or both
Reagan’s election in ’80 and Jim Martin’s later election [to Governor of North Carolina in
1984]--the more formal ascendancy of the Republican party?
FG: No, newspaper staffs always complain. They always worry about their own
standing, and there’s always some little crisis of emotion or motivation in a newsroom.
Newspapers are kind of chronic for that, and so in any assessment of the morale of the
newspaper, you’ve got to kind of discount a certain level of it. I think what I noticed, particularly
toward the latter years of Claude’s editorship, it wasn’t so much the internal discussion was so
much political as it was cultural. I remember one of the feature editors of The News & Observer
one time at a news meeting complained to Claude that a story got buried on the front page. And
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 11 of 34
Claude just didn’t understand that at all. If it’s on the front page, it can’t be buried. And actually
I think in this dispute, Claude was right and the feature editor was mistaken, but what the dispute
was over was how to think about non-governmental news, how to think of features, how to
incorporate a more modern sensibility about lifestyle. And I think it was part journalistic, but it
was also part cultural and reflecting the change in the atmosphere around The News & Observer.
When Claude became the editor of The News & Observer in the late ‘80s and I joined in the
early ‘70s and through--.
JM: The ‘60s for Claude [Claude Sitton was hired as editor in 1968].
FG: The ‘60s, yeah. State government and the NC State University and the apparatus
around all of that--Raleigh was very much a government town with a lot of people interested in
that; but as the metropolitan area grew, as it grew more suburbanite--as Cary grew and north
Raleigh grew and all of that, all of what has become a major metropolitan area now--you found
younger journalists who were less interested in state government, City Hall, and began to flinch
from this kind of day-to-day coverage and wanted to do more (0:29:16) writing and kind of
(0:29:19) the cultural and civic changes. So a lot of the internal discussion was over to what
extent should The News & Observer have offbeat reader stories on the front page, and how much
to devote to coverage of lifestyle changes. And there was an effort to bring on new columnists
who would write about women and suburbanites. Even the sports coverage changed, to some
extent, in adding dimensions of recreation as distinct from just covering ballgames of organized,
official teams. So, there was that kind of strain in the newsroom.
JM: Let me take you to another sort of question about a process that’s emerging just as
you arrive, and will unfold across the whole span of your years there and ultimately culminate in
the sale. But the question of, gradually beginning in the early 1970s, the pattern of acquisition of
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 12 of 34
other papers across the (0:30:52) region, across North Carolina, South Carolina. By the mid ‘80s,
the need to go out and find some liquidity, basically, inside the paper to begin answering the
demands of the some family members for equity in the form of cash--.
FG: Right.
JM: And ultimately that series of things, the unsolicited offer, the early sale of a few
satellite papers to McClatchy and ultimately the--. So this broad, if you can talk about that whole
arc and how you thought about it as you recall.
FG: I didn’t think about it very much. That wasn’t my responsibility. I was aware of it,
and I was interested in it, but I wasn’t part of regular meetings to think about it or anything. My
responsibility was to oversee, coordinate the editorial page, to write my column, to help
contribute to the planning and the intellectual content of The News & Observer, and I was not on
the business side. But as someone who reads journalism reviews and kept in touch with the
literature and the general notion of American journalism, I was certainly interested. And I was
interested in how the company that I worked for was doing, but it was family held; it wasn’t like
you look up the stock market every morning and that kind of thing. A couple of things that--well,
a couple of just stray observations and anecdotes. I was sitting in my office one morning and
Frank came up to the third floor and put his head in my office and said--.
JM: This is Frank, Jr.?
FG: Frank, Jr. He was publisher at the time. I don’t know the date, would have to look it
up, but I do remember it was the day after the sale of The Baltimore Sun to [The] Times Mirror
[Company] at the time. What was interesting about that sale of an age-old newspaper that had
foreign bureaus and a Washington bureau and all that--what was distinctive about that sale was
that it wasn’t for sale, that Times Mirror walked in and offered the family, the owners of The
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 13 of 34
Baltimore Sun, more money than they could turn down. I think it was the Abell Family, A-B-E-
L-L, I’m almost sure. Frank walks into my office and he said, “While you’re reading the wire
services this morning, give me everything on The Baltimore Sun sale.” He said, “Just while
you’re going through what you normally read, Ferrel, just give me everything.” And I thought,
“Hmm. That’s pretty interesting.” This one got Frank’s notice in a way that some other sale
didn’t. So I made a package for him and brought it down to him, and he thanked me. And that
was the end of it. So there was no--. I mean, I knew it was on his mind, but again, I wasn’t part
of the conversations. Some of us wondered, as you might imagine, as The News & Observer was
purchasing these papers, what it meant for us; but there wasn’t much conversation.
Shortly after--this is a second anecdote--shortly after I was named the editorial page
editor, I was invited--Kat and I, my wife and I, were invited to the annual dinner of the Daniels
family. This was a dinner meeting. The board of directors would come and they’d have a dinner.
And it was the only time we were invited, this one time. Again, I wasn’t part of--. The ownership
family wasn’t part of the business team, but I was nervous. I mean, I was delighted to be invited.
I was very curious. I’d never been to any meeting like that. We were seated at one of the tables. I
think it was at the country club in Raleigh, Carolina Country Club. And I remember as part of the
conversation that a whole bunch of younger folks were at another table. And I knew some of
them. I knew Frank III, and Julie--Frank, Jr. and Julia’s children--because I had seen them
around, but I hadn’t seen some of the others, the Woronoffs, and others at the time that I got to
know later. And at some point--I don’t recall exactly how the thing came up, but Julia, I think,
said, “Well, we’ve got to let the younger folks get to know each other.” And again it was just that
kind of moment of recognition that if this newspaper was going to continue that there had to be
some sense of it being passed on through the family. There was clearly this one little shred of
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 14 of 34
evidence. I don’t want to make it--. I don’t want to blow it up to be proof-positive of anything,
but there was this one little moment of recognition that this ownership thing of The News &
Observer was a more complicated and richly textured enterprise than Frank, Jr.’s showing up
every morning to run the paper. [Laughter]
JM: Right. [Laughter] Do you recall any discussion around the time--I think it was ’85--
when the Louisville Courier-Journal got sold out and the whole Bingham [family who owned the
Courier-Journal] kind of empire came apart?
FG: Oh, we were all fascinated with it, those of us--particularly me and my interest in
the South and Southern politics and government and all that, you know, to have that happen. I
mean, I knew enough about the Binghams and their important role in the politics in Kentucky to
be interested. But I don’t recall any specific conversations involving the Daniels there.
JM: Did some of the leveraging that was happening to support some, to answer some of
the demands of the family--did that show up in budget cutbacks during your tenure?
FG: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Well, you know the The News & Observer, as you rightly pointed
out, went through this period of acquisition, buying Rock Hill [The Herald of Rock Hill, South
Carolina]. Jonathan had already started The Island Packet [of Hilton Head, SC]. And they bought
Beaufort [The Beaufort Gazette of Beaufort, SC], and they bought the newspaper out in western
North Carolina, and there were some others. And then several years later there was the disposal
of some of those newspapers. Again, I wasn’t part of the conversation. I know I keep repeating
that, but--not to cover my rear, but just to say I’m telling you what I know, but I know I don’t
know some things.
The way I described it to myself and to others is The News & Observer went through an
internal leveraged buyout. That it wasn’t a leverage--. There were a lot of leveraged buyouts
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Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 15 of 34
going on at the time in the big economy. Well, what happened at The News & Observer is The
News & Observer took on some debt in order to satisfy some of the women in the family, in
particular. And The News & Observer avoided the crack-up of the sort that the Bingham family
went through, but, yeah, it was felt. Frank was clear that there was--that the banks or the lenders
of the money to do these buyouts, and in a couple cases to turn over newspapers to cousins, had a
clear effect on The News & Observer, that The News & Observer had to hit financial targets. And
during that period--I’d have to go back and look up the dates, but I’m sure you’ve talked to them
about it--there were clear budget stringencies within the newsroom that played out in ways big
and small. You know, travel budgets cut; I think some positions were left vacant. There was
clear--I mean, you could feel it.
JM: Did you have a view at the time that--how significant were the cutbacks’ impacts on
the paper’s quality?
FG: I’m not a good person to judge that. It didn’t have an impact on the quality of what I
was doing because I was writing my column and writing editorials. We had expanded the staff a
little to bring on a copy editor and some others. So it didn’t allow us to expand, but we were able
to do our jobs--.
JM: Did it ever generate--?
FG: On the editorial page.
JM: I’m sorry, excuse me. Did it ever generate any anxiety generally across the staff that
the paper might, they might sell, and “who knows what the future was” kind of thing?
FG: I don’t recall that. I don’t recall that.
JM: Okay. Did you hear at the time--? In ’88, Frank Jr. got a--the paper got an
unsolicited offer that came in and really--. The Baltimore Sun thing had happened. The Bingham
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 16 of 34
thing had happened. They get this unsolicited offer. It’s really forcing these questions squarely
upon them. Did that reach your attention at the time?
FG: No, no. No, I don’t know about that.
JM: And Ferrel, had you departed by 1990 when they made the first sale of some of
these smaller papers to McClatchy?
FG: No, I was there. Let me document the rest of my tenure there.
JM: Yes, please.
FG: I left the editorial page in 1988. I mean, didn’t formally leave it, but I went over--.
Claude said, “We really need to shore up our political coverage. We have statewide elections
going on. Would you go run that?” And I thought that was--. It seemed to me a logical break, in
that I could still write my column and go test my abilities to do that, “to do that” meaning
manage a group of reporters and deploy resources. Actually, I think I did that well. I was a
forceful advocate for our reporters. I offered front-page stories regularly and spent a lot of time
noodling around. You know, the internal lobbying that you have to do in a newsroom. So I think
I built a rather loyal following. I remember--I’ll say this, my little boast here. At one point, Frank
III, when he became the editor, he walked up to me and he says, “Why does your group work
better than the others?” Meaning my little pod. And I said, “Well I don’t know. You’ll have to
discover that.” I said, “But I work hard at helping them, them being loyal to me, fighting for their
stories to be displayed in the paper.” Okay, so I was the--they gave me a title eventually,
Government Affairs Editor or something like that. And then during that period Claude left.
JM: 1990.
FG: Right. And then Frank III became the editor. You’ve probably heard from others
that The News & Observer had some discussions--Frank Jr. had some discussions with Howell
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 17 of 34
Raines at The New York Times, who later became the editor of The New York Times. But Frank
III--it went back to family editorship for a brief time. And Frank III here, his impetus, his
emphasis was on trying to make The News & Observer more consistent with the
metropolitanization of the paper. He was much more interested--. You could see a lot of--it was
kind of the dawning of some of the media, changes that we’re still coping with today: the rise of
email and the rise of internet sites and alternative distribution systems. And Frank kind of liked
to deal with all of that stuff. For my part, it was fine. They gave me a budget to do some of the
political polling that I’d wanted to do and eventually they let me be--they gave me another title,
Southern Correspondent, and I had travel money to go around the South and do stories that The
News & Observer had never done before. So I was treated well during that period. The Charlotte
Observer offered me a job at one point in that early ‘90s period, and The News & Observer not
only matched, but exceeded the offer that The Charlotte Observer made. So I stayed on at The
News & Observer.
And then in 1995, I took a leave of absence. I was offered a position as writer-in-
residence at MDC, the think tank in Chapel Hill, non-profit research firm. MDC--it’s a long
story, but I’ll give you the short version. MDC had gotten a major Ford Foundation grant and
had written into the grant a position as writer-in-residence. And they offered it to me. I took a
leave of absence. Frank, Jr. was very generous in helping arrange this because I stayed--.
JM: Frank, Jr.?
FG: Frank, Jr. I’m sure Frank III, too, but Frank, Jr. was the key person here. Frank, Jr.,
early in MDC’s history, had been a board member, and had a relationship with George Autry
[then-president of MDC]--not that they were fast friends, but knew George and they could talk
on a first-name basis. They were not strangers to each other. So what happened was I became the
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 18 of 34
writer-in-residence at MDC and it paid my basic salary. And The News & Observer kept me on
the--paid me a little money, not full salary, but enough to keep me on as an employee and pay
my health insurance benefits. So the deal was that I would spend my time at MDC. As I traveled
around the South for MDC, I would write articles for The News & Observer. And I kept my
share of the bargain. I contributed articles to The News & Observer on a fairly regular basis.
During that time, during that 1995 period, along with my colleagues at MDC, we came
up with the State of the South report. I wrote the memo suggesting how it could be carried out
for MDC, and so started working on this project that has developed into a regular report. We’ve
issued six State of the South reports now. We didn’t finish the State of the South report by the
beginning of 1996, so I went back to The News & Observer and asked if I could extend the leave
of absence. And that was easily granted. Looking back on it, even at the time I sensed that it was
extended really easily, which meant--which was nice in one respect, but it also told me that my
linkages to The News & Observer were weakening, in the sense that I wasn’t at the center of the
action. I wasn’t mad about it. It just--.
But of course, it was during this period that the paper was sold. Frank III stayed on as
publisher for a while during the transition. Anders Gyllenhaal became the editor of the paper and
Anders’ priorities for editing a paper and my sense of a paper were two different things. I mean,
we didn’t argue on a daily basis about it, but I could tell that the kind of journalism I was doing
and had done for a long time was less and less central to the way The News & Observer was
produced. So The News & Observer extended my leave in 1996, and by then the proposal that I
had done for the University was coming to fruition. That started off as the Program on Southern
Politics, Media, and Public Life and later developed into the Program on Public Life, and more
policy-oriented, North Carolina policy oriented. That came to fruition with the help of a Z. Smith
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Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 19 of 34
Reynolds grant. So I joined the University in March of 1997. So ’95, ’96 was--technically I was
on leave of absence; I was a News & Observer employee on leave of absence, but it was a way to
kind of transition out of the daily newspaper regime and into something else. So that’s the quick-
-.
JM: Sure. Did the news that the paper had been sold to McClatchy--did you know that
was coming?
FG: No.
JM: Or did you read about that in the paper just like everybody else did?
FG: Well, I heard about it before it got in the newspaper, but no. It was out of the blue.
JM: What was your reaction? Do you remember?
FG: Well, I was stunned. I mean I had worked for The News & Observer under Daniels’
ownership. As I said, I’d come to Raleigh not ever having really been in Raleigh for any great
length of time, having answered the phone call by saying, “The News & Observer? Where’s
that?” And over the next two decades and change had come to appreciate and to learn about the
legacy and the history of The News & Observer, and had come to genuinely appreciate what The
News & Observer stands for. Behind you, Joe, are three pages of The News & Observer. During
my time there, The News & Observer caught on fire.
JM: 1980.
FG: The press burned. And it didn’t flame up, but it sent oily soot all over The News &
Observer. So we had to clean our books and clean our desk with solvents and all that. And out of
one old file cabinet came several back issues of The News & Observer. This one here, the two
hanging there, are from 1897, which once I saw them, I saw the historical significance, the story
with all the woodcuts there of all those guys in beards and moustaches. The headline is,
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 20 of 34
“Democracy Defenders.” That’s the minority Democrats of the legislature of the year after
Governor Russell [Daniel Lindsay Russell, Jr., elected governor in 1896] wins the election, the
last Republican governor until [James] Holshouser [elected 1972]. And those were the
Redeemers, those were the political wing of the Red Shirt campaign. And that’s the way
Josephus Daniels tried to boost them. And then one that’s down there that looks like it’s hidden,
but it’s there to protect it from the sunshine that’s fading the old rooster. That’s the front page the
last time the red rooster appears on the front of The News & Observer. Have you been told about
the last rooster?
JM: No, please tell that story.
FG: Okay, I’ve got to tell you. Okay, the rooster, as you know, the red rooster became
the symbol for the Democratic Party in the South during the segregation, during the Jim Crow
times. And it was the way that Southern Democrats could distinguish themselves from the
Northern Democrats that had the donkey as the symbol. And so the Democratic ticket would be
listed on paper ballots and machine ballots with a rooster. And The News & Observer during the
time of both Jonathan Daniels and then earlier Josephus Daniels, whenever the Democrats swept
all the offices in a presidential election year, they ran this red rooster on the front page, the
rooster crowing. Well, the last time that happened was 1964 when Johnson won the presidency
and Dan Moore won the governor’s race. There was not a Senate race that year. And so when I
left The News & Observer, when I finally--when my leave was over and I was clearly coming to
the University, Rob Christensen had a little dinner party at his house with some of our friends
and they found a copy of that paper and framed it, and I’m grateful. Well, your question ought to
be--. I’m going to tell you what your question ought to be.
JM: Please, please do.
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 21 of 34
FG: Well, what about 1976? Didn’t Jimmy Carter win and didn’t Jim Hunt win that
year? And the answer is yes. Well, why wasn’t the red rooster on the front page? Well, I’ll tell
you what happened or at least what I observed happened. The big lead plate, the old technology
with the red rooster, used to hang in Frank, Jr.’s office. It was up on the wall in the publisher’s
office as decoration, just as these are hanging here. So on the day after the election of 1976,
Frank takes the rooster off his wall and comes up to the third floor and hands it to Claude and
says, “We’ve got to run the red rooster on the front page. After all, that’s what Daniels do when
Democrats win.” Well, Claude hits the ceiling. “We can’t do that. That’s the way it used to be.
We’ve been trying to tell people that we’re fair and we’re not a Democratic Party organ,” and all
that. My desk at the time--I was the chief Capitol correspondent, and I was writing the election
stories and all that, the analysis--. And Claude’s office was down the hall. There was this
hallway between where Claude’s office was and the newsroom. And I was at a desk right near
where the hallway ended, and the hallway had the editorial writers and Bob Brooks, the
managing editor, and some others. And while I was working on my stories, I could see this
argument kind of rolling down the hallway. They were going into different offices saying, “What
do you think of this?” You could tell there was this little buzz coming down the hallway. So
they finally get out to me, and they say, “Ferrel, what do you think we ought to do about the red
rooster?” And I’m going, “I don’t know enough about the red rooster. I’m on deadline. I can’t
think about it right now, but I can tell you that if we put the red rooster on the front page, it’s
going to look partisan in a way that you may not mean it, but, you know.” Anyway, what
emerges from these conversations is a compromise, a grand compromise. The rooster appears on
the editorial page of the 1990--.
JM: 1976.
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 22 of 34
FG: Of the 1976 News & Observer. It is decreed that the rooster is an editorial comment.
[Laughter]
JM: [Laughter]
FG: And can’t appear on the editorial--on the news page. So the 1964 front page is the
last time the rooster crows in all his glory. There’s a very weak, mediocre, little, small rooster on
the editorial page in November of 1976, and since Republicans have won the presidential
election, have carried the North Carolina presidential election every presidential year since then
[this interview was conducted prior to Democratic candidate Barack Obama’s presidential win in
North Carolina in 2008], that’s the end of the rooster. I don’t think the McClatchy company will
post the rooster anymore. But my point of telling that story, at probably excruciating length--.
JM: No, no, it’s great.
FG: Is to say that over time I came to appreciate the value of, the rootedness of a family-
owned newspaper that had a deep commitment to--even if quirky every now and then--a deep
commitment to its community, to the commonwealth. Even though we might argue with them
sometimes; that certainly Frank Jr. had contacts, connections to conversations of a political
nature in his role as publisher that we may not have been privy to; but still, when he came into
the office in the mornings, he protected the journalistic integrity. In my career, I got to write
political columns and editorials and dig into issues that--. I was allowed to do professional work
as a journalist without ever being told that I had to write a column favoring one side or another,
or that I had to put my own attitudes and values and beliefs aside to just be a henchman or a hack
for something else. That just didn’t happen. Both Claude Sitton and Frank Daniels, Jr. and the
folks who worked for them allowed me--and others, not just me personally--but allowed me to
do professional journalistic work, and I’m grateful for it.
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 23 of 34
JM: Did you know at the time, in 1990, that Howell Raines had been approached?
FG: No.
JM: Learned of that later.
FG: Well, at some point in there, I heard a rumor about it.
JM: Okay.
FG: I didn’t know about it.
JM: Did you have a view of what--? How’d you gauge the significance one way or the
other, if at all, of the appointment of Frank III?
FG: I think, including--some of us, including me, hoped that we might be seen as
material to be editor of The News & Observer at some point in the future, although it was never--
. I mean, I went to some management training programs and that sort of thing, but there were
never any serious conversations with me about that, about the prospect of it. I think by the time
Frank III was named editor, I had a distinct sense that none of us at The News & Observer at the
time were going to become editor. I mean, I think the signals were pretty clear about that. My
sense of it is that there were some internal family discussions and maneuverings that I can’t
pretend to say that I know the details of, but that Frank III emerged from those discussions as the
editor. I think we all wondered about it a little bit because Frank had not kind of risen through
the editorial and the news side of The News & Observer, although he had done some work there.
I think we all thought sooner or later he was going to be the publisher of the paper and not the
editor of the paper, or [be] distinct from the editor of the paper. But I don’t--. But his tenure as
editor, fairly short, was full of bubbling stuff, bubbling up and bubbling around. And as I say,
from my career standpoint, it worked just fine. I got to do some traveling and I got to do some
work that, frankly, they didn’t fund when Claude was editor. I mean, they were spending--under
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 24 of 34
Frank III, the Daniels spent some money. It was kind of like the spigot opened up a little bit in
terms of investing in some journalism, stuff that we could do with Frank III there that we didn’t
do under Claude, at least under the last few years of Claude.
JM: Well, they’d made a pile of money in 1990, about eighty million in the first sale of
some small papers to McClatchy, so that really recharged the coffers.
FG: Yeah.
JM: Did you remember thinking about the price that McClatchy paid and if that
impressed you one way or the other?
FG: Well, yeah. It was a lot of money. It impressed me a lot. I wish I had had an
ownership stake in it. I mean, we all do. I say “we all,” I mean I was the editorial page editor, but
I was never a part of the management, the business management group. So, yeah. It was a
substantial sum of money in retrospect, that if they had waited three or four more years, it might
have been even more. But I think we all knew--those of us who thought about it knew that the
base of the family had broadened, too, so it wasn’t like one person was getting all the money.
JM: Along the way, one more thing sort of on this question of the big dimensions of the
finance that was in motion here, along your couple decades at the paper, was there ever any
discussion that you remember, [did] people ever lean back and wonder if the paper should move
into radio and/or television--the corporation should, the company should?
FG: Well, the legend, which I assume to be true, was that the Daniels had the
opportunity to get into radio and television back in the ‘50s when the licenses were going out,
and the Fletchers [the family who own Capitol Broadcasting Company, which owns WRAL
television station in Raleigh, NC] responded and the Daniels didn’t. The Daniels were going to
be newspaper people, and so that’s why WRAL has different ownership and another family
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 25 of 34
owned that. I do not recall big discussions. For a good while, the FCC had a rule against
newspapers owning television stations. The Washington Post had to divest and Detroit had to
divest. They traded and there were other instances of newspaper television ownership being
broken apart. I don’t recall any big discussions in my presence about television or radio
ownership. I do recall a lot of discussion toward the end of Claude’s term, but particularly when
Frank III was the editor, about websites. There was a lot of emphasis on developing the new
dissemination function. Frank III was very interested in all of that and trying to figure out the
right way for us News & Observer people to get involved in that. So it was that point that Frank
III and Frank, Jr. invested in what became the Insider [and] got Seth Effron involved--Seth’s
idea of an alternative way of covering the legislature and email, [an] online product. So there was
some investment in those kinds of things and trying to figure what would work.
JM: I’ll ask you a little bit more about that in just a minute, but you also--I’d forgotten
that I wanted to follow-up. You said that you thought that if Frank had maybe waited a couple
more years he could maybe gotten even a substantial bit bigger chunk of money from
McClatchy, but I might have thought you would have said the opposite, that maybe he got out
just in front of the growing appreciation that the dynamics of the industry were shifting so
rapidly.
FG: Well, looking at what McClatchy, at what Knight-Ridder sold for, looking at what
even The Durham Herald Sun sold for, in terms of--in relative terms.
JM: I see.
FG: There were some even bigger sales, relatively speaking, a sale as a share of or based
on circulation and all that.
JM: What did the Durham paper sell for? Do you remember approximately?
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Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 26 of 34
FG: No, I’d have to go back and look for it.
JM: Okay, but it’s sort of scaled differently.
FG: Yeah. I mean, it’s a smaller newspaper, but by circulation, it was a greater amount
per paper sold daily.
JM: Yeah, exactly, right. Gotcha. That’s very helpful.
FG: The Daniels family got a lot of money. So I’m not saying that they were short
changed, but--and at the time, it was a stunning amount of money--but I’m just saying, given
what happened two, three, four years after that, before the beginning of the retrenchment and the
collapse, that they might have even gotten more had it taken place--. I don’t know if they could
have waited, but it might have--they might have fetched more had it taken place another year or
two down the road.
JM: That makes sense. Let me take you now, if you’re holding up okay--final few sort of
broad questions of assessment and all. Let me start with one. Just inside the paper--and then
we’ll move to some wider questions of influence, but inside the paper--how well across your
tenure did The News & Observer take up the challenge of--operationally, in terms of hiring and
promotion and workplace issues, how well did they do integrating African Americans and
women into the paper’s operational structure?
FG: There was a lot of talk about it. I think looking back on it probably through the late
‘70s and ‘80s, probably not as well as we should have. There was a bigger spurt of hiring women
and black folks when Frank III became the editor, when Marion Gregory became the managing
editor. There was a stronger effort. I say a stronger effort, maybe a more effective effort. It is not
that Claude and Bob Brooks neglected it. It’s just that it didn’t jell as well until later. There were
clearly a lot of women at The News & Observer in various positions, although not at the top
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 27 of 34
level. There were women who were department heads and that. And among the women in
particular, there [was] a lot of internal pressure. Lany McDonald [former research director at the
News & Observer] I remember, in particular--became the librarian and went on to be the
librarian at Time, Incorporated--was a forceful advocate for rethinking, and her hire was a
symbol of women emerging. But it wasn’t until Marion [Gregory] was appointed managing
editor that a woman had gotten up to that high management level.
JM: At that would have happened about when?
FG: I think [it] was right as Claude was leaving, because--.
JM: So about 1990.
FG: Yeah, because Bob Brooks was the managing editor until he retired. Then Hunter
George became the managing editor and was the managing editor in Claude’s later years as
editor. And then Marion came afterwards. There were some black folks on the reporting staff and
a couple of black editors. It was not--. I mean, Linda Williams, who is now a top editor at the
paper, was a young reporter there, and then she went off to another newspaper and had a good
career, and then she came back. They made a strong effort to keep Barry Saunders when some
other newspapers were after him. But I think it’s fair to say that the recruitment and the hiring of
blacks, while not absent, became more robust in the ‘90s than it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
JM: How about as you think back, what do you think were the stories or the issues where
the paper had its most profound impacts?
FG: Well, that’s, I’d have to think about--. It’s not that I have to search my memory for
just a few. It’s just that there were many, and sometimes not as obvious as you might think.
Some of the big investigative stories that The News & Observer did, many of them led by Pat
Stith, Soul City, the investigations of the job training programs and the grants and the
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 28 of 34
administration of that by Wilbur Hobby at the AFL-CIO. Those clearly had an impact. The
pressure The News & Observer put on John Murphy as school superintendent in Wake County
clearly led to his premature departure. I say premature--you know, before he intended to depart.
All of those had an impact. And then later on the series on hogs [the Boss Hog series in the
1990s] won the paper a Pulitzer Prize and is justly acclaimed. But I would argue that there were
other ways The News & Observer had an impact simply by being attentive to the day-to-day
march of democracy in the state, being ahead of the pack here, being ahead of the pack there.
One thing that I remember--and I know what I’m about to say may sound a little bit like
sour grapes, but I think it was indicative--. We spent a lot of time--and I say we, that includes me
doing some reporting, and some colleagues in The News & Observer--doing reporting back in
the late ‘70s, part of the time when I was in Washington and in that period, on brown lung
disease, you know, the byssinosis [a disease of the respiratory system related to inhalation of
dust from plant fibers, such as cotton and flax, in poorly ventilated rooms] that affected textile
workers. Well, The Charlotte Observer won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the same thing.
What The Charlotte Observer did is what The News & Observer did on hogs and some other
things. It did a big investigation and it packaged it, gave it a lot of force. Well, we had covered it
on a day-to-day basis, and I remember being a little bit annoyed that they’d won this big prize
and we had done all this work. But that was kind of the way The News & Observer did things. It
was not a paper--. Through much of its life, through the life when I was there, the ‘70s and ‘80s-
-became a little bit more so in the ‘90s--it didn’t just go in for big packaging and special things.
Its emphasis was on covering the news day by day, not perfectly, missed stories and all that, but
there were times when we knew a bill was going to come up in a committee or something and
threw down a little editorial just to say, “Whoa or yay,” whatever.
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Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 29 of 34
And I’ve got to say, too, that the extraordinary--extraordinary’s not quite the right word,
but the intense attention that we gave to Senator Helms, while he continued to win elections--I
am proud of The News & Observer for its not being intimidated by Senator Helms, not shaving
or trying to somehow accommodate his views. The News & Observer, even as it was criticizing
him regularly, and harshly at times editorially, you could learn more about Senator Helms and
what he was doing in The News & Observer than in any other place. Rob Christensen did a
superb story about Senator Helms and his foreign--the Helms foreign policy and his relationship
with dictators and others. All of us did various--. I did a story about what he was doing in the
Panama Canal treaties. We would show up for Helms’ speeches, and at times when we might
have been the only reporter there, just a few. We were on his trail constantly. And while it’s hard
to say that we had this particular effect, the cumulative effect, I think, was to produce a more
informed electorate, even though the electorate continued to vote for Senator--a majority, a slim
majority continued to vote for Senator Helms, and we endorsed his opponents. But nonetheless, I
think that they had a fair report on his activities, a more comprehensive report than they could
have found at any other newspaper, any other news organization.
So while you can document things like the investigation of [North Carolina State
University basketball coach] Jim Valvano, the investigation of John Murphy, the hog series--
there were some spectacular kinds of things out there--I think it would be important not to
overlook the investment by The News & Observer in journalists and in space in the paper for that
kind of day-to-day attention to what I call the march of democracy: what’s going on at the
legislature, what’s going on in the governor’s office, why things change, why things happen, so
that--. I gave, in my own work in my column, I wrote innumerable columns about children’s
issues over time, the status of children in the state and in the South. I can’t say that there’s a one-
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 30 of 34
to-one relationship between what I wrote and the development of Smart Start and More at Four
[two North Carolina early childhood education initiatives enacted by the state legislature in 1993
and 2001, respectively], but we were there documenting things. Even in the early Hunt years
when he had this “raise up a new generation of children” program that ultimately fell apart--but
we were there documenting things, laying the intellectual basis and the public opinion basis for
things like that. And I think North Carolina was ultimately enriched by that kind of journalism, at
least I hope we were.
JM: On that very point, when you think about the truly explosive transformation, growth
and transformation in North Carolina the last thirty, forty years, I mean it’s really a remarkable
pattern of change. So your sense is that it’s fair to think that The N & O’s broad influence across
this time is definitely a part of that story.
FG: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Again, it’s hard to document a one-to-one relationship.
JM: Exactly.
FG: --or what my old Jesuit professors would say is the actual cause and effect, but the
fact that there was a progressive voice in the capitol city of North Carolina that over time stood
on the side of racial reconciliation, stood against the persistence of racial segregation; that there
was an important voice for expanded educational access and excellence; that there was a voice
that not always understood the complexities of economic change, but was raising its voice
against those who would--that only wanted low-skill, low-wage work in this state, that wanted to
preserve that economy; and had a voice for economic diversification, for modernization--all of
that I think is crucial to seeding the civic landscape, making it more congenial to the vast
changes that have taken place over the last thirty years in this area. So it may be a kind of an
indirect influence or an unquantifiable influence, but I think that having a newspaper dedicated
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 31 of 34
to professional journalism, dedicated to strong opinions, a strong voice in the community, is
integral to the life--to what Raleigh has become. Doesn’t mean we did it right every time.
Sometimes The News & Observer threw its weight around. Sometimes it didn’t speak out often
enough, or sometimes we kind of missed the mark. I think the other--. But I think North Carolina
government, while it’s had some rough spots recently in terms of corruption (1:24:47), I think
it’s [The News & Observer] helped keep our government mostly honest. It hasn’t eliminated
special interest influence. Money matters in politics, but I think we helped support good
candidates overall, pushed and prodded our state to do better. So over the long term, I think that
The News & Observer has been an important contributor to the modernization of North Carolina.
JM: Any other issue or thought? I mean, obviously we could profitably talk for days and
days, but any other, sort of as we’ve done the basic, essential part of this story?
FG: Well, let me--. Just one other little piece about the modernization. When I was in
Washington--. Again, I mean I know it because I knew more as I got back. While I was in
Washington, I don’t know if anyone else has told about Mel Finch, who was the business
manager of The News & Observer, [who] became a school board member.
JM: This is with the backing of the paper, essentially, right?
FG: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean he couldn’t have run without Frank, Jr. saying, “Go.” He was
one of Frank’s--one of the two or three most influential of his associates. This must have been
’76 or ’77. It was during the debate in Wake County over--.
JM: About? Go ahead.
FG: About merger between the Wake and Raleigh school systems. And it is clear that
not only did Mel run for the city council, for the school board, but the newspaper threw its
weight around. I mean, it pounced on the opponents. It wrote a lot of stories. It was clear which
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 32 of 34
way the paper was going. But I’m going to tell you, without the merger of those school systems
Raleigh would have been a much weaker, less equitable community than it is now. And now we
have one of biggest school systems in the country by population, a model of dealing with
preserving the sense of a desegregated system of young people of various ethnic and educational
backgrounds and economic backgrounds of their families in the same school. You know,
sometimes it’s those kind of intangibles that really matter. And The News & Observer was
basically on the right side of that. Liquor by the drink, the referendum on liquor by the drink had
a profound affect on the modernization, the development of a restaurant industry, adding to the
amenities of the place and The News & Observer was there. The News & Observer fought and
still fights the lottery, lost that battle, but the lottery money goes to the kind of educational
projects that The News & Observer has long favored. So it may think it lost the battle, but it sort
of won in the long run. And I can--there may be two or three other instances of that. I can’t think
of any other instance in which a News & Observer person has run for office while at The News &
Observer, but anyway.
I would like to address one facet of how The News & Observer operated.
JM: Please.
FG: And it’s coming a little bit out of sequence here, but it’s on my mind. It was often
alleged that under Claude Sitton, The News & Observer blurred the line between church and
state, between editorial and news coverage. And now The News & Observer has an editor for the
news side and an editorial page editor that [each] report independently to the publisher. And it’s
true that Claude was the editor for both editorials and news, as were the Daniels before. Jonathan
and Josephus ran the paper--. And I can understand how some people think--particularly critics
and those who have felt the editorial lash of The News & Observer, said, “Well, Claude would
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 33 of 34
just order up a story about somebody, so that the editorial page could turn around and whip ‘em.”
Well, as I said, I can understand how people think that, but let me tell you how it looked
internally. And this happened all the time; I’m not talking every once in a while, I’m talking
almost daily. We would gather for the editorial conference at about nine thirty in the morning
and I would preside over the meetings, although preside is a fancy word for just saying, “Okay,
what do you think? What do you think?” You know, just kind of somebody to run the meeting.
Claude was there and the editorial writers were there, Dave Gillespie and others as they came
and went. Claude would have a pad in front of him and we would talk about topics that we
wanted to write editorials about. And this happened all the time. Dave Gillespie would say, “You
know, we ought to write about this water pollution issue over here. But you know, I just don’t
know enough about it to write. We really need to know more about what this regulation--.” And
Claude would write it down. And we’d go around the table like that, and we’d say, “You know,
the governor just said this, and we’re not sure--. It would really be interesting to know how
business is affected by this or this.” And Claude would write it down, and we’d leave the
meeting and he would go talk to the managing editor and others.
And so the editorial meetings, it wasn’t so much that the editorial staff was driving the
news side to go do things simply so we would write editorials about them, but the editorial
meetings served for Claude, listening to see where there were holes in stories, see where we
needed to learn more. It was kind of a reality check of interested professional journalists reading
the newspaper, in effect scrutinizing how well the news was being covered, what we needed
follow-up on. So it often informed and enriched the way The News & Observer covered news.
And I say that to go back to an earlier point, is that The News & Observer in the ‘70s and
‘80s was much more devoted than American newspapers now are to following up, to pursuing a
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Transcript of Ferrel Guillory Interview, 10-23-07 p. 34 of 34
story day by day, to going after--. Much more of an American newspaper now is summary
stories, things happen over a time and somebody goes and just kind of summarizes recent
developments. But The News & Observer on the issues it was really interested in, it was day after
day. And sometimes that was pressure on people. “Go back to Senator Helms and ask him the
question that you didn’t ask him yesterday.” Or, “Go back to the governor’s office and sit there
until the governor came out and answered your question.” I mean, Bob Brooks used to tell me
that all the time. “Go to the governor’s office and make sure he answers your question.” And the
editorial meetings helped enrich the news coverage. I don’t doubt that from time to--. When we
were doing a big investigative piece, when we were investigating John Murphy, the editorials
added on, that is true. I don’t want to say that there was never some combination of editorial and
news focus, because it is true Claude was in charge of both, but the day-to-day dynamics was not
what most people think, of Claude Sitton or Frank Daniels, Jr. manipulating the news to serve
The News & Observer’s editorial purposes. It was often that the editorial staff of experienced
thoughtful journalists helping by critiquing the newspaper, by trying to do a serious job of
responsible opinion writing, helping to enrich the news coverage of The News & Observer.
JM: Ferrel, I’m extremely grateful to you for--.
FG: Thank you for letting me say that.
JM: Very, very generous. It’s just a terrific contribution. Thank you so much. I
appreciate it.
FG: Okay. Thank you.
END OF INTERVIEW
Interview number R-0409 from the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.