Whiteville News Reporter: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Paper of Columbus County
The News Reporter — known to generations of readers as the Whiteville News Reporter — is a semi-weekly broadsheet newspaper in Whiteville, North Carolina, serving Columbus County. Founded in 1896, it is one of the most decorated small newspapers in America: in 1953 it shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with the Tabor City Tribune for a campaign against the Ku Klux Klan conducted, as the Pulitzer citation put it, on the papers' own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger. Few papers of its size anywhere can match that legacy.
The paper publishes from 127 West Columbus Street in Whiteville, the Columbus County seat, about an hour west of Wilmington. Its website is nrcolumbus.com, the address given in this profile's listing, and it has also long operated online as whiteville.com. After 83 years of ownership by the Thompson/High family, Les High and Stuart High Rogers sold the paper in 2021 to Justin Smith, its editor — keeping it, unusually for the modern era, in the hands of a working local journalist.
Overview
The News Reporter is a broadsheet semi-weekly — reference listings describe Tuesday and Friday publication in some eras and Monday and Thursday in others, reflecting schedule changes over the years — serving Whiteville and Columbus County in southeastern North Carolina. Circulation has been listed at 8,100. Columbus County is a rural county of tobacco and timber country, small towns including Tabor City, Chadbourn, Lake Waccamaw, and Cerro Gordo, and a county seat, Whiteville, of a little more than 5,000 residents.
Within that county, the News Reporter is the medium of record. It is also a case study studied far beyond North Carolina: journalism schools, the Poynter Institute, and the American Press Institute have all examined how this small paper won a Pulitzer, survived the collapse of print advertising, and reinvented its business model around readers.
History: Founded 1896, Family-Owned from 1938
The News Reporter was founded in 1896 — one archive summary credits founders J.E. and C.C. Davis — and served the young railroad and tobacco town of Whiteville and its county for four decades before the ownership that would define it arrived. In 1938, Leslie S. Thompson bought the paper, beginning the Thompson/High family era. His son took over in 1959, and Les High, the third generation, took over from his father in 1994. Poynter has described the family's roots in the county's journalism reaching back generations, and a fourth generation of the family entered the profession as well.
The paper's headquarters at 127 West Columbus Street and its twice-weekly rhythm made it a fixture of downtown Whiteville life. Through the Depression, World War II, and the postwar tobacco economy, the News Reporter recorded the county's doings — the ordinary record that would make its extraordinary stand in the early 1950s possible, because a paper trusted for the small things had standing when it spoke on the biggest one.
The Klan Campaign and the 1953 Pulitzer Prize
In the early 1950s, the Ku Klux Klan was resurgent in Columbus County and across the South Carolina border in Horry County. Between 1950 and 1952, Klansmen carried out a series of floggings — thirteen attributed cases, in which victims were punished for alleged moral misconduct such as adultery, abuse, neglect, or drinking. At the News Reporter, editor Willard Cole joined the crusade that W. Horace Carter had begun at the Tabor City Tribune in July 1950, and the two small papers reported the Klan's rallies and violence relentlessly for more than two years.
The risks were real. Carter faced death threats against himself, his family, and his business, and the Klan's Grand Dragon, Thomas Hamilton, threatened to order members to stop reading the papers and businesses to stop advertising in them. Cole and the News Reporter pressed on alongside the Tribune. The reporting helped draw in the FBI, the State Bureau of Investigation, and local law enforcement, and it ended in convictions: more than one hundred Klansmen were convicted, Hamilton among them, and the terrorism in the two communities stopped.
In 1953, the Whiteville News Reporter and the Tabor City Tribune shared the Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service, cited for their successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, waged on their own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger, culminating in the conviction of over one hundred Klansmen and an end to terrorism in their communities. It remains one of the most celebrated achievements in American community journalism — proof that a county paper with a brave editor could change its community's future.
Ownership: Thompson/High to Justin Smith
The Thompson/High family's stewardship ran from Leslie S. Thompson's 1938 purchase through his son's tenure beginning in 1959 to Les High's from 1994. Les High became a nationally quoted voice on the reinvention of small newspapers, leading the News Reporter through its digital transformation and speaking openly about the economics of rural journalism. Margaret High's 2018 Poynter essay about a fourth-generation family journalist carrying on the tradition captured the family's singular place in the trade.
In 2021, Les High and Stuart High Rogers sold the News Reporter to Justin Smith, who was the paper's editor. The sale, reported by the brokerage Cribb, Greene & Potts in August 2021, ended one of North Carolina's longest family ownerships on the best possible terms for readers: ownership passed not to a distant chain but to the journalist already running the newsroom, preserving the paper's local ownership and editorial continuity into its second century.
Coverage and Content
The News Reporter's beat is Columbus County whole: Whiteville city government and the county commissioners, the Columbus County and Whiteville City schools, courts and law enforcement, agriculture and business, Lake Waccamaw and the Green Swamp's environment, high school sports, and the community's churches, clubs, and obituaries. Its tradition of watchdog reporting — the quality the Pulitzer recognized — has carried through its history in coverage of government and public affairs that larger regional papers, based in Wilmington or Florence, do not duplicate at county level.
The paper also produces the record of celebration and loss that defines a county weekly's relationship with readers: honor rolls and graduations, weddings and anniversaries, and the deaths of neighbors. That dual identity — crusader when crusading is needed, chronicler the rest of the time — is exactly what the Pulitzer era established and what readers since have expected.
The Digital-First Transformation
The News Reporter's modern fame in the industry rests on a second act. By the mid-2010s, like most small papers, it faced declining readership and advertising revenue. In April 2016, its staff decided on a significant change: with help from the University of North Carolina's Hussman School of Journalism and Media, the twice-weekly print paper began transforming into a digital-first newsroom. In 2017 it joined the first class of the UNC Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative, known as Table Stakes.
Poynter's detailed account of the transformation describes a newsroom that learned to test, experiment, survey readers, and hold focus groups — and then acted on what it learned. Readers, the staff discovered, did not care which day the paper arrived, just that it arrived. The paper slashed 48 confusing subscription plans down to two — digital, and print-plus, priced the same, with print-only grandfathered — and money lost from advertisers was replaced, in Les High's words, almost to the dollar by money from subscribers. The Association of Alternative Newsmedia's Better News project featured the transformation as a model, with marketing director Jenny Clore documenting the strategies for other publishers.
Print and Digital Presence
In print, the News Reporter remains a broadsheet semi-weekly delivered across Columbus County. Online, it publishes at nrcolumbus.com — the website recorded for this profile — and its longstanding whiteville.com presence, with digital subscriptions at the center of its business model. The paper simplified its offerings to digital and print-plus bundles, treating the website not as a free supplement but as a product readers pay for, the core lesson it now teaches the industry.
Its archive, meanwhile, anchors local history research: OldNews indexes more than 2,000 scans of the News Reporter beginning in 1912, and the paper's own files hold the full record of the Klan era and everything since. For a paper that teaches digital strategy to other newsrooms, its stewardship of the analog past is equally deliberate.
Audience and Reach
The News Reporter's core audience is Columbus County — Whiteville's roughly 5,000-plus residents and the county's towns and farming communities. Poynter's profile of the county seat sketched the community it serves: about 40 percent white and 47 percent Black, with about a quarter of adults holding a bachelor's degree and about 35 percent of residents living in poverty — a readership for whom an affordable, trusted local paper is not a luxury but a utility.
Its reach, though, is national in influence. Journalism programs study its Pulitzer campaign; industry initiatives from the American Press Institute to Table Stakes study its subscription turnaround; and its editors are quoted wherever the future of rural news is debated. A circulation of around 8,100 in a small county, paired with that professional reputation, gives the News Reporter an outsized voice for its size.
Notable People
Willard Cole, the editor who led the News Reporter's Klan coverage, stands first: his reporting alongside Horace Carter's earned the 1953 Pulitzer and helped convict more than one hundred Klansmen. Leslie S. Thompson, who bought the paper in 1938, and his son, who succeeded him in 1959, built the family enterprise; Les High, publisher from 1994, became the paper's modern public face and the architect of its reader-revenue transformation; and Jenny Clore, its director of marketing, documented that transformation for the industry. Justin Smith, the editor who bought the paper in 2021, completes the line from Cole to the present: editor-owners, accountable to the county they cover.
Recent Developments
The landmark recent development was the 2021 sale to Justin Smith, ending 83 years of Thompson/High ownership while keeping the paper locally owned — an outcome few American weeklies of its vintage have achieved. The paper entered its new ownership with a business model already rebuilt around digital and print-plus subscriptions, a newsroom trained in audience research, and a national reputation refreshed by its Table Stakes work.
Seventy years after the Pulitzer, the News Reporter remains what it was in 1953 and 1896 alike: Columbus County's own paper, published from West Columbus Street in Whiteville, still setting the standard for what a small newspaper can do — first by facing down the Klan, and in this century by showing small papers everywhere how to survive.
