Will Tar Heel-bred publishers perish?

• Position: News & Observer - Brief Article

If you hear a whirring sound in the vicinity of Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, that would be Josephus Daniels spinning in his grave: The newspaper he bought in 1894 -- and was kept in his family for more than a century -- is now run by a black man.

Though The News & Observer has long been one of the South's most liberal papers and Daniels, secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson and ambassador to Mexico under Franklin Roosevelt, was a progressive on many issues, he played a key role in the Democrats' white-supremacy campaign of the late 1890s, which culminated in the Wilmington race riot and stripped most black Tar Heels of the right to vote at the turn of the century.

Daniels, who died in 1948, was succeeded as publisher by his son, then his grandson, Frank Daniels Jr., who retired in early 1997. In 1995, the family sold the N&O and other properties (including BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA) to the Sacramento, Calif.-based McClatchy Co., which tapped Fred Crisp, the paper's general manager, as the first non-Daniels publisher. Crisp, who grew up in Chatham County, had been with the N&O...