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Earlier this month, amid the hustle and bustle of our pledge drive, Wilmington City Manager Becky Hawke came to the WHQR studios for an interview with my colleague Kelly Kenoyer and me. She was accompanied by the city’s communication manager and a videographer, who filmed the hour-long conversation.
This was the last piece of reporting Kenoyer needed for a massive, in-depth piece on alleged morale issues at Skyline Center, the city hall building employees call ‘the tower.’ We published two days later.
It was a tough interview: Kenoyer, who took the lead, had spoken to more than a dozen employees, discussing in detail the workplace climate in city hall. Hawke, who I think acquitted herself admirably, answered directly where she could, though she had to be circumspect on some points due to legal concerns.
It was also a tough interview to schedule. We’d been asking for comment about the city’s high-profile departures and terminations for some time, and in early March, when Hawke rolled out the sweeping “One City” reorganization, we asked for an interview. At the time, the city politely declined, directing us to her public comments during a city council meeting.
In mid-May, we again asked for an interview, this time to discuss a recording of an employee ‘town hall,’ during which Hawke had made some comments that upset members of staff who then reached out to us about it. Kenoyer made the interview request in an email that was, I think it’s fair to say, fairly blunt. She ran it past me before sending it, and I approved it; I thought the direct tone was appropriate because, while the city had been cordial, they’d declined or deferred all of our past requests since Hawke became manager. Asking nicely wasn’t getting us anywhere.
The email got their attention. And what followed was a series of negotiations, some terse but civil, with the city’s communication department. While respecting that some of those conversations were off the record, I can broadly say that the city felt Kenoyer would not conduct a fair interview, based on her email. The city said Hawke would be willing to sit down with me, but not Kenoyer. The city’s selection of whom they would agree to an interview with struck everyone in our newsroom as unacceptable and insulting.
We went back and forth several times over a week or two. At one point, it looked like the city was willing to have Hawke speak to both of us — not ideal, but a workable compromise, I thought — but that option was later taken off the table. I appreciated that the comms department was trying to make it work, given the touchy nature of the reporting Kenoyer had been doing. But we felt it was important not to let the city dictate terms.
I also felt, and my colleagues agreed, that the subtext of the negotiations was that the city was offering us an interview with Hawke, an inversion of our perspective, which was that we were offering her a chance to provide her side of the story.
At that point, Hawke had not really spoken to other media outlets, and the comms department framed this as something of an exclusive. I tried to articulate that I wasn’t looking for a scoop and that it would be my strong preference that Hawke speak to any news outlet that asked. I didn’t like the idea that scarcity of access would make talking to the city manager a hot commodity. The implication was that Hawke didn’t have to talk to reporters, so interviews with her could be rationed out, as the city saw fit.
The negotiations fell apart. I’ll take some responsibility for that. Maybe I was being too hardheaded; maybe I should have been pragmatic and done the interview and turned the tape over to Kenoyer. We could have made that work. But I didn’t like the precedent it set.
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Throughout June, Kenoyer kept reporting, speaking with more employees. Meanwhile, Hawke sat down with both Port City Daily and WWAY for interviews, which tackled a host of important issues pegged to the one-year mark of her tenure running city hall. I was glad she’d done those interviews, but they didn’t touch on the kinds of allegations Kenoyer and I had been hearing.
At the end of June, we were getting close to running Kenoyer’s story, but all we had from Hawke was a written statement out of the communications office. Kenoyer was emphatic that an on-the-record interview with Hawke was the best way to round out the reporting to make it as fair as possible. After six months of reporting, it felt like the crucial missing piece.
Frustrated, I went over staff’s head, something I rarely do. I texted Mayor Bill Saffo and expressed my concerns in pretty frank terms. As I’ve said elsewhere, Saffo didn’t say one way or another if he’d take any action — but three days later the city’s comms department reached out, saying they’d “heard you're interested in revisiting the opportunity to interview Becky Hawke.”
This time, there was no quibbling about who would do the interview. The only condition was that the conversation would be recorded and available unedited (the city said they would also record it for ‘archival purposes’). I thought that was fair.
The rest is on-the-record history.
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Now, I’m not saying I think Hawke was a big fan of the article we published. But I hope she doesn’t regret doing the interview. From my point of view, yes, it did make our reporting stronger, but I also think it made it more balanced. It’s an implicitly critical article; it’s about the criticisms current and former staff have of what’s going on, but I hope people found it valuable to hear Hawke’s side.
Whatever you think of the upheaval in city hall, Hawke’s rationale for it, or the process we went through to get her on the record, she still absolutely deserves credit for coming in, sitting down, and having the conversation.
It’s a level of accountability that is increasingly rare these days.
For a case study in this, look no further than my colleague Rachel Keith’s reporting from this week. As Keith discussed with me on this week’s edition of The Newsroom, the story dates back to April, when someone asked her to check up on The Endowment’s $22-million nursing pipeline grant.
The grant funded a collaborative group of partners — New Hanover County Schools, Cape Fear Community College, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and the Greater Wilmington Chamber of Commerce — in an effort to increase the pool of trained nurses in our region. It was, at the time, The Endowment’s most ambitious grant, and it’s understandably complex, with a lot of moving parts: funding is going towards staff, wrap-around services, and ‘simulation labs.’ It also had a challenging two-part mission to not only graduate more nurses but to keep them employed locally.
Through public records requests, Keith was able to get some data — which was promising. UNCW, to its credit, was also willing to provide additional information when we asked.
But no one — from The Endowment, NHCS, CFCC, UNCW, or the Chamber — was willing to sit down for an interview. It was suggested that we refer to a roundtable from last year, or wait for another one slated for September. But for a number of reasons that didn’t quite fit the bill: Keith started asking in April, so waiting four or five months seems inadequate, plus these events can be a bit stage-managed, and even when there’s a free-flowing Q&A, it feels wrong for a reporter to monopolize things, given the community would likely have their own questions.
I’ll note, while Keith had some tough questions — for example, about CFCC’s difficulty keeping instructors for the nursing program, or UNCW’s delays in building its lab — the story was overall positive. This is a good project addressing a serious issue, and I think most people would want to see it succeed. It’s not Iran-Contra. It’s not even ‘the tower.’
In the end, the difficulty in getting anyone to actually sit down and talk about the grant was written into the story — in part because it signals a broader trend.
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The Chamber, which was not thrilled with the article, emailed Keith and me, also including my boss and a former WHQR board member, to voice their “disappointment” in our reporting. And that’s fair: we welcome feedback, for better and worse, especially if it’s constructive.
Interestingly, the Chamber put their finger on the deeper issue when they wrote, “It is unfortunate that our partner institutions chose not to be interviewed by your team. I would encourage you to reflect on why organizations that have worked extensively with the media would make that decision.”
In my response, I assured the Chamber that we do, in fact, reflect on that all the time. I wrote, basically, that I think that’s in part due to the current approach to government comms, which is to say PR, and in part due to frustration with some of our past accountability and watchdog reporting.
As I’ve written elsewhere, I’ve long heard gripes that the media — especially Port City Daily and WHQR — doesn’t ever report on the “good stories.” Those are the fluffy but uplifting employee spotlights and community engagement events, the awards and honors.
There’s often a sense I get from some leaders and many comms teams, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that there’s a quid pro quo, that the media ought to balance hard-hitting investigations with lighter and positive pieces. While I think, yes, journalists ought to cover the ups and the downs, there’s little agreement between us and PR teams about what the balance of that should be (and what, frankly, constitutes ‘news’).
Sometimes, we run into PR for PR’s sake, and I can’t help wondering if this is part of the modern communication major’s mentality: own the narrative, accentuate the positive, downplay or ignore the negative. We’re also increasingly seeing efforts from local government to get information directly to residents, side-stepping the media entirely. Sometimes that’s a healthy effort to engage the community and plug information gaps where the media misses or can’t get to issues, but sometimes I question the motives.
And, of course, sometimes local government administrators stonewall reporters because they’ve asked tough questions. Here I’m not talking about elected officials — who can have their own mercurial and sometimes transactional relationships with journalists — but government employees who aren’t supposed to be playing favorites with the press (but who, of course, do just that).
That said, the defensive avoidance of bad news and compulsive need for positive coverage isn’t always pure PR ghoulery.
I’ve talked about this occasionally, but perhaps not enough: there’s a real fear about recruiting and retaining civil servants. That’s been driven in part by a looming workforce crisis — data shows that more than 50% of local government employees nationwide are Baby Boomers nearing retirement, a pending exodus of workers sometimes called the “Silver Tsunami.” Add to that lagging pay against rising costs of living, and the changing expectations younger employees have for their workplace, and recruiting new talent looks increasingly daunting.
Local governments do what they can to sweeten the deal — leaning on benefits, the arts and cultural scene, and their locale (Wilmington’s beaches, Asheville’s mountains, Charlotte’s … one-way streets?). But obviously, they’re wary of one thing that definitely might sour things: bad publicity.
Scandal is not a good recruitment tool. It can also look bad on grant applications. Over the last ten years, I’ve had officials from the school district, housing authority, police department, elections office, and other institutions tell me I’m making their lives more difficult. And while I sympathize, I still have a job to do — as do my colleagues.
And that’s the point: local governments can do what they want — distracting, gaslighting, ignoring, bargaining — but at the end of the day, real journalists are still gonna report what they need to. Even when the front door gets slammed in our faces, we often find an unlocked window.
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At the same time, many public officials and other administrators continue to meet challenging reporting head-on rather than evade it.
Take Laurie Whalin — not technically a local government official, but a longtime New Hanover Regional Medical Center employee from before the sale to Novant. Now president of NHRMC and Novant's coastal region, Whalin has sat down with me several times and has even solicited interviews with the press when new hospital safety rankings are set to be released.
Like Hawke, she’s had to face tough questions and allegations from employees, on top of scrutiny from federal and nonprofit quality watchdogs — and the stakes are incredibly high, with literal lives on the line. She’s pushed back on my reporting at times, defending the hospital’s management, while also remaining open to criticism. It’s a tightrope, for sure, but her commitment to staying engaged has turned a single critical article into an ongoing discussion.
There’s also New Hanover County Manager Chris Coudriet, who oversaw a remarkably candid after-action review of the county’s response to Hurricane Florence. Coudriet invited the press in to work through the report, which the comms officer called “startling” in its deliberate focus on what went wrong instead of just what went right. At the time, I didn’t have the platform to share my appreciation, but for years after, I cited it in conversation as a key example of local government transparency.
Coudriet and I have certainly disagreed on things since then, but I think he still sees his responsibility for openness the same way. That philosophy, as I’ve noted before, extends to the county’s comms department. I’m not saying the county is perfect, or that we’ve never butted heads, but in general I think we share an understanding that our reporting will always be better and more fair if they talk to us, rather than some more opaque alternative.
Other honorable mentions go to people like Al Sharp, who was board chair of the Wilmington Housing Authority as the mold crisis grew out of control. Sharp sat down for a tough interview with WHQR, as we held his feet to the fire on behalf of tenants and the public. And, ultimately, his candor helped us understand the situation – and I think helped the housing authority get the support it needed to start righting the ship. I’d also include former Wilmington Police Chief Donny Williams. Despite our differences over the years, I respect that near the end of his career, he invited the press in for an intimate and personal conversation about the racial tensions in the department.
So, coming full circle, I’m encouraged by Hawke’s decision to sit down with us, even if there was a rocky path to get there. I’m not going anywhere and, based on city council’s responses to Kenoyer’s reporting, largely supportive of their city manager, neither is Hawke. We might need a cooling-off period, but in the long run, I hope we’ll be sitting down again to talk about whatever challenges the city faces in the future. Because, in my view, that’s what’s best for our reporting, the city’s reputation, and the public’s faith in both of our institutions.
