Letter from the Editor: INDY’s 2024 Primary Election Coverage

Dear INDY readers,

By the time you read this note, North Carolina’s 2024 primary election races will have been decided. Republican and Democratic candidates up and down the ballot will know whether they’re advancing to the general election in November, taking their seats without further challenge, or going back to their day jobs.

And since I’m writing this note pre-primary, I don’t have any takeaways about the election results just yet, but I do have lots of thoughts about the INDY’s primary election coverage that has busied our staff for the past two and a half months. 

Our four writers did a compelling, comprehensive job of covering the Triangle’s local primary races. 

Lena Geller, in collaboration with The Assembly’s Michael Hewlett, wrote the definitive profile of Durham district attorney Satana Deberry, who challenged congressman Jeff Jackson to be the Democrats’ candidate for state attorney general this fall. Justin Laidlaw captured a growing, changing Durham in his story on the board of county commissioners races and in interviews with NC Senate candidates Mike Woodard and Sophia Chitlik. Chase Pellegrini de Paur probed the dynamics of the Orange County Schools board of education races. And Jasmine Gallup, who has since left the INDY to embark on travels in Europe, kept an eye on Wake County where Democratic primaries for district court judges’ seats were on the ballot and two Democrats vied for an open seat on the board of county commissioners. 

We’re proud of this work and we’re already looking ahead to the general election on November 5.

Along with our news reporting, our editorial coverage—our endorsements and online candidate questionnaires—have been as popular as ever, drawing tens of thousands of readers to our website in the last month.  

You may have noticed we’re doing things a little differently now. In keeping with our reenvisioned mission to provide hyperlocal news to the Triangle, including election coverage, we are dedicating our staff resources to reporting on and making endorsements in only the local races—municipal, county-level, school board, state legislative, and judicial races. Unless there is a local connection, such as in Deberry’s AG race, we are no longer covering or making endorsements in statewide, congressional, or national elections. 

Many readers—dozens of you—wrote to us expressing disappointment in that decision, and still more sent notes to INDY editors looking for suggestions of where to find information on those top-of-ballot races to help inform their choices at the polls. 

I don’t see the INDY going back to covering those higher office races. We’re a community paper with a very small staff, and writing about the community at the local level—not about the goings-on in Washington, D.C., or the state legislature—is where we want to maintain our focus, energy, and resources going forward. We’re always happy to point readers to resources on higher-office elections and will try to respond to all emails that come to us to that effect; feel free to reach out any time to [email protected] with any election-related queries. 

I also want to address some other questions that arose about endorsements and candidate questionnaires. Our team of writers and editors collectively decide on and write our endorsements. The endorsements are based on research and reporting from our own staff and other trusted media outlets, public records, conversations with sources, voting records for incumbents, and other sources of information that we vet and have access to. We do not make endorsements based on responses to our or others’ candidate questionnaires. Candidate questionnaires are for readers’ information only. This is why we decided and published our endorsements before we published candidate questionnaires on our website.

Finally, when it comes to making endorsements, our only agenda is to try to recommend to voters the candidates that we think will best serve the residents they’re elected to represent. We hope we made good recommendations this cycle. We hope we’ll all survive the general election in November with our state government, and the U.S. democracy, intact. 

Thank you for reading and supporting the INDY, as always. If you enjoyed our primary election coverage, or relied on our endorsements, or emailed us for recommendations, please join our Press Club. Your financial support makes our work possible and ensures we’ll be able to continue it for many years to come. 

Follow Editor-in-Chief Jane Porter on Twitter or send an email to [email protected].

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