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• Position: Brief Article - Editorial

In 1929, newspaper reporter Joe Mitchell left North Carolina for New York City. He'd grown up on a tobacco and cotton farm in the swampy, black-soil flatlands near Fairmont in Robeson County. He had left UNC Chapel Hill without a degree because of what he called "a preternatural inaptitude with mathematics." An article he had written on a tobacco auction caught the attention of an editor at The Herald Tribune in New York. A job offer followed. Mitchell headed north, arriving in the city within weeks of the Great Crash of '29. He became "a district man," covering Brooklyn and, later, Harlem.

At the Herald Tribune and later at the World-Telegram, Mitchell carved out the beat that would be his for the next 35 years: Bowery bums, street preachers, strippers, rivermen and, famously, a clutch of lonely old men at a saloon named McSorley's. In 1938, he joined the staff of The New Yorker and, over the next 26 years, wrote a series of articles that are among the best ever published by the magazine that many people consider the finest in magazine journalism.

As I begin editing Business North Carolina, Mitchell is my lodestar. His example is what we'll aspire to. If you've read the collection of his New Yorker stories, Up in the Old Hotel, you know why.

"It's not enough to get the facts. You've got to get the true facts." Mitchell said that. I read it somewhere, though I can't remember where. A journalism teacher of mine put it another way. He said, "Don't just give me every detail in your notebook. Give me the telling details." My aim for BNC is that we'll always know our subjects well enough to see the difference.

If you've read Mitchell, you may think him a strange model for this magazine. He seldom wrote about business. When he did, his subjects were oddballs like a gent who sold racing cockroaches and rented monkeys to lonely people looking for...