He wanted to restore some of what had been lost.

Back in the day, if I reported on a school board story and I heard something that just didn't sound right, then I could take a few days, two or three days, to check that out, and now they're just moving on to the next story and then the next story and then the next story.

There is no time to do investigative reporting.

So I was thinking, how, how can a small community maintain, uh, have this watchdog in their community, their newspaper? Could we start a nonprofit to augment what they're doing in, in, already doing in these small communities, even though it's greatly diminished?

Les tells me many of its articles appear in the region's local newspapers, including his old paper, The News Reporter, but also those bare-bones papers in the neighboring counties, the Bladen Journal, The Robesonian, The Laurinburg Exchange.

Our stories, uh, are published on our website, which is borderbelt.org. We have a weekly newsletter that goes out.

We have social media channels, but one thing I think that's been really important is that we, we essentially are a news service, a free news service for the papers in the community, and the idea was that we would give them extra added value so they could survive.

And, uh, we don't charge, we don't sell advertising because we don't wanna compete with those newspapers.

He wanted to restore some of what had been lost.

Back in the day, if I reported on a school board story and I heard something that just didn't sound right, then I could take a few days, two or three days, to check that out, and now they're just moving on to the next story and then the next story and then the next story.

There is no time to do investigative reporting.

So I was thinking, how, how can a small community maintain, uh, have this watchdog in their community, their newspaper? Could we start a nonprofit to augment what they're doing in, in, already doing in these small communities, even though it's greatly diminished?

Les tells me many of its articles appear in the region's local newspapers, including his old paper, The News Reporter, but also those bare-bones papers in the neighboring counties: The Bladen Journal, The Robesonian, The Laurinburg Exchange.

Our stories, uh, are published on our website, which is borderbelt.org. We have a weekly newsletter that goes out.

We have social media channels.

But one thing I think that's been really important is that we, we essentially are a news service, a free news service for the papers in the community, and the idea was that we would give them extra added value so they could survive.

He now leads an online news site, The Border Belt Independent.

When you had Facebook and people were able to talk about their conservative, um, ideas, and then when you saw Fox News and, and other conservative news organizations begin to become more aligned with commentary, and a lot of that commentary was fear-based.

And fear works.