In February, I wrote a column on Rob Christensen’s book about the Raleigh News and Observer, “Southern News, Southern Politics: How a Newspaper Defined a State for a Century.” I concentrated on Josephus Daniels, the paper’s founder and long-time owner.
Rob Christensen had tackled the difficult job of explaining how Daniels could be known as both a progressive and a racist while also a newspaper owner and editor.
Christensen then covered how Daniels’ son Jonathan and other members of the family built the N&O into one of the country’s most successful newspapers until changing times and the loss of large advertising revenues doomed it. During World War II and afterwards, Jonathan served directly under presidents Roosevelt and Truman. After the war’s ending he returned to run the paper and supported UNC former president Frank Porter Graham’s 1950 losing U.S. Senate campaign and Kerr Scott’s successful 1954 Senate race.
Christensen writes, “the defeat of Graham, the South’s most visible liberal, marked the end of the era. For the rest of the 1950s, Jonathan and the paper fought a rear-guard action against a rising segregationist tide in the South.”
Both Daniels were successful book authors. Josephus (nine books) and Jonathan (twenty-one).
Jonathan’s brother, Frank Sr. “lacked his brother Jonathan’s flamboyance, national profile, and politics. What he had was a capacity to run a growing business, an even temperament, and enough self-confidence that he could defer to Jonathan’s large ego– although Jonathan never published his own name in the paper’s masthead.
His son, Frank Jr., was, according to one of the paper’s editors, “one of the 15 people who owned and ran the state. It was a role that Josephus or Jonathan could have also claimed.”
In 1968, Claude Sitton succeeded Jonathan and became the first and only non-family member to edit the paper during the Daniels era.
Sitton led a hard-charging group of reporters and won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for his columns.
Christensen writes, “Sitton attempted to make the paper more professional and less partisan, but for Republicans, it seemed like a barely discernible evolution. The paper did not endorse its first Republican candidate–a GOP judge candidate–until 1988.”
According to Christensen, “As the Sitton era neared an end in 1989, the paper underwent a period of introspection about its future.”
Following the recommendations was painful. The Daniels’ afternoon paper, The Raleigh Times, closure saved the company $850,291 (or $2.1 million in 2024 dollars). The withdrawal from much of rural eastern North Carolina was especially traumatic.
Summing up his story, Christensen writes, “Until it was purchased by a California chain in 1995, the News and Observer was dominated by the Daniels family. They not only were proprietors but also edited the paper for most of the 101 years they owned it, setting the editorial direction of the paper. There were few papers in the country where one family played such an all-encompassing, ink-stained role.
In 1996 a group including Frank Jr., Frank III, and his cousin David Woronoff purchased “The Pilot,” a community newspaper in Southern Pines that the owners have transformed into a valuable enterprise with a bookstore, business news publication, and other ventures.
Frank Jr. died June 30, 2022, full of pride for his family’s continuing service to North Carolina.
D.G. Martin, a lawyer, retired as UNC system vice president for public affairs in 1997. He hosted PBC-NC’s “North Carolina Bookwatch,” for more than 20 years.
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