Sin of omission.

• Position: UPFRONT

Needless to say," Charles Flowers e-mailed me, "this is a troubling letter." He was referring to one that Will Sears, a Boone real-estate broker, had written about the cover story in our August issue on Bobby Ginn and Laurelmor, the mammoth residential and golf resort in Wilkes and Watauga counties. Sears had called to complain about the piece, so we invited him to put his thoughts down in a letter to the editor.

"As someone who has grown to respect your publication," he wrote,"I was disheartened by the lack of 'investigation' that went into this story. My concern is not with The Ginn Co., as they have been very successful in the real-estate business and a model in the industry at marketing their products. My concern is with the lack of reporting that went into this story, which looks as if it could have been written by a public-relations firm rather than a journalist.

"Just a few days before I received your August issue, several media outlets published articles on the financial troubles The Ginn Co. was experiencing, and this information had been in circulation for several months. For Mr. Flowers to overlook such an important aspect of The Ginn Co. story does a disservice to us, your readers, and business people all over North Carolina." He went on to say: "Shame on your editors for not doing better fact checking before publishing the story."

Troubling, indeed. But painful as his criticism is, it pales before what we felt when newspapers in Winston-Salem and Boone reported that Ginn-affiliated companies were fighting off foreclosure after failing to make payments on a $675 million loan for Laurelmor and three other projects. That was six days after we finally let go of the story. We had already blown deadline by more than a...