Watch our video message of thanks for one good year of The Charlotte Optimist.
Our younger son, 3, enjoys Gatorade.
Our older son, 6, has a kindergarten classmate who told him that Gatorade will make your eyes turn whatever color of Gatorade you drink.
Our older son went to bed last night worried about his brother’s eyes.
This presented a parenting challenge.
The journalist in me wanted to counter with facts, to show that while sports drinks do pose some risks to young children, the iris remains safe. But friendship is a precious thing, and a 6-year-old is more likely to believe his buddy’s version of the truth than a 46-year-old’s.
The columnist in me could reason with him by sharing a theory about what’s really happening. That it’s likely his classmate’s parents want to limit their son’s Gatorade consumption for any number of reasons — health, finances, or simply to preserve their furniture from stains. But I didn’t want him to rush back to school tomorrow and burn down the scaffolding around the white lie they’d built.
So the peacekeeper in me told him it would be OK, that his brother’s eyes are bigger and browner than most (a fact, thanks to his mother’s good).
The storyteller in me decided to relay all of that to you, as a hacky anecdote to help explain what it’s been like to write The Charlotte Optimist for one year.
These are tricky times in the media world. Facts are facts, but they add up to different truths, depending on the person’s own lived experiences. Each week, after we hit send on another edition of the Optimist, I shut my computer and try to turn my phone over, knowing that whatever I’d written will take on different meanings for each of you, based on your own knowledge and views of the world.
We launched last May 4, and literally the next day, the local news turned breathless. A year ago Tuesday, you may recall, city council met behind closed doors and agreed to a $305,000 severance package with CMPD chief Johnny Jennings, setting off a series of leaks and outrage, which bled into a summer of discontent over city leadership, which was followed by a tragedy on the light rail that loomed over the fall.
I approached all this like I would anything: by admitting what I don’t know, by understanding that everybody faces pressures I don’t understand, and by offering them my time if they wanted someone to listen. That’s how we wound up landing our first big story with Chief Jennings. I never requested that interview. I just … offered it.
Right around the time I realized what journalism was, a television show called Family Matters debuted. Most people remember it for being among the first mainstream hits to center a middle-class Black family, and for the nerdy neighbor named Urkel. I remember it mostly for the opening line of its theme song, which played throughout our house every Friday night: “It’s a rare condition / in this day and age / to read any good news / on the newspaper page.”
That was 1989. In 2026, it seems quaint. Still that verse has popped in and out of my mind throughout my 25-year career as a journalist, from my days as a newspaper reporter to my time as a magazine editor and then with Charlotte Agenda and Axios.
We launched the Optimist a year ago tomorrow with a longer essay titled “This is Charlotte.” We’ve sent more than 50 newsletters since then, taking off on the weekends around Easter and Christmas, and we’ve had a few weeks where we published two letters. Altogether we’ve compiled more than 180,000 words about our city. That’s like two books. We now have 6,350 subscribers, a 75.9 percent open rate, and a 10.79 percent click to open rate. They’re above average stats, I’m told.
But stats, frankly, mean less to us than you’d think. I learned this part from the most selfless man I know, Bob Horner. Bob’s a dear family friend and treats our kids like his own grandchildren. He was the founding president of NBC News Channel, a Charlotte-based operation where my mother-in-law was executive producer (and later succeeded Bob as president), creating packages for NBC affiliates across the country. After his retirement, Bob received the Radio Television Digital News Association’s First Amendment award, and delivered a terrific speech. A few years ago, Bob and I were talking about how my generation of journalists spends its time on metrics like pageviews and reach, when he said something that hit home.
Across his four-decade career in television news, he encountered numerous tools that tracked and collected audience data, but the stats always had a flaw: “We could measure how many people watched,” Bob said, “but what was harder to measure was how much or how little those people cared about what they watched.”
The Optimist was born because I saw tensions in the local media landscape — between scoopy news bites and meaningful context, between what people like me care deeply about versus what we assume audiences will click, between serving quality for readers versus quantity for advertisers. And between the sea of headlines that play up commercialism and controversy, and the small pool of values I try to model for my kids. Things like honesty, fairness, curiosity, and striving for excellence.
Now, the question remains whether those values make for anything that resembles a business model. The Optimist started with the help of generous donations from notable community leaders. And we’ve lost money nearly every month since. I’ve spent my time reporting, not fundraising, and I’ll never mix the two. But I believe each week is a step toward something bigger.
We opened with stories about well-known people who are more complicated than the piles of facts surrounding them: folks like Jennings and Hugh McColl and Mayor Vi Lyles and Sheriff Garry McFadden. We’ve spent the first months of 2026 focusing on lesser known subjects: like a group that meets at 7:15 a.m. to stay sober, or a red chair at a cafe that’s a symbol of America’s current relationship with immigration, or a mental health emergency response team that works in the shadows. Over the next stretch, I suspect Charlotte’s news will flare up with controversy again as budgets and politics collide — and we’ll tilt back with a few interviews with people in power.
Charlotte remains an unsolved Rubik’s cube to me. Every time I think I’ve lined up one row, I’ve confused another. So we’ll keep listening.
A few days ago, I had lunch with one of our founding members, who asked me, “Is The Optimist what you thought it would be when you launched?”
Not at all, I said. I didn’t realize how much you all would find meaning in the name. I didn’t realize how starved people were for hope and connections. And I didn’t realize how much you’d come to appreciate a human-written publication.
The New York Timespublished a piece last week about how McClatchy, the parent company for The Charlotte Observer, is rolling out new artificial intelligence tools that help summarize articles and fire off different versions for different platforms. The Times story came on the heels of news that the Observer‘s top two editors are exiting, making for a tough one-two punch for one of our city’s largest newsrooms. Several good and talented souls remain there, and I hate all this for them.
The reason for the tool, according to the Times’ review of a transcript from a McClatchy vice president’s March meeting with staff, is “We need more stories, and we need more inventory.”
Inventory.
When I moved to Charlotte in 2013, I wrote a story that tried to envision the city in 2058. I interviewed urban planners and interior designers and others who see the future through the scope of history. Talking to an interior designer, we got on the subject of hardwood floors. From the 1960s through the 1980s, homeowners laid carpet everywhere. Then, at about the time the internet arrived in every home, we all ripped up that carpet, perhaps subconsciously, as a way to reconnect our feet with something natural.
I believe we’ll see that play out in the media, too. Lots of companies will make fast choices and fast money deploying robots to deliver you inventory. But audiences will still crave stories that are reported out by neighbors and filtered through their imperfect lenses. And if they don’t, then, well, I’ll do something else!
I am hardly a perfect narrator. I’ve screwed up this past year, and I have my own biases. And I’m hardly immune to misplacing optimism in the laundry basket of worldly woes.
But when I do, I simply look for its most essential root: gratitude. And I’m thankful to you for giving me this place I can come back to each week, to help share what we’ve found interesting. Thank you for the emails and texts and calls this year, telling me what our stories mean to you, even when you’re disappointed or pissed about something I’ve written.
No doubt my favorite comment from the past year has come from story subjects who’ve told me we made them feel seen. Not inflated. Not criticized. But seen.
Maybe we’re all still 6 years old again, just wanting someone to listen to our fears about losing the color in our eyes.