Help The Ledger keep pressing for answers

We don’t always get thrown out of courtrooms. But when we do, it’s because we’re trying to provide readers like you with important local information.

Dear Ledger reader,

I’ve been a reporter in Charlotte for 25 years. But I had never been kicked out of a courtroom by a judge — until last Wednesday.

As I wrote in our newsletter on Friday, I was trying to develop a better understanding of the status of the sexual assault lawsuit brought by a former Myers Park High student against Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. I had seen a meeting on the case’s docket listed at 10 a.m. Wednesday in Courtroom 8 of the federal courthouse.

Courthouses are open to the public, so I walked into Courtroom 8 just before 10 a.m. and took a seat. No other reporters were there. As the meeting started, a lawyer for the plaintiff objected to my presence. I quickly made a case to the judge, Senior Federal District Court Judge Graham Mullen. But he wasn’t buying it: “You’re going to gum up the wheels of what we’re trying to do,” he told me. He said I would need to leave.

“Now?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mullen replied.

A gloomy mist settles over Charlotte’s federal courthouse, after a judge ordered The Ledger out of a courtroom last week.

(As it turned out, this was a settlement conference, which are not typically open to the public.)

Driving home, I called our managing editor, Cristina Bolling, who, like me, has worked as a reporter in Charlotte for more than two decades. “You’ve never been kicked out of court before?” she asked. (She was ordered out of a Lincoln County courtroom 20 years ago while covering a high-profile child welfare case.)

Pressing for answers: I’m sharing this anecdote to let you know how we at The Ledger view our jobs, and how we spend our time. We go out into the community and press for answers and information. We have three full-time employees — me, Cristina and our new reporter, Lindsey Banks — and all three of us are out regularly at events in Charlotte.

We attend neighborhood meetings, often to learn the scoop on developers’ plans before they’re publicly announced, or to hear residents’ concerns.

We attend school meetings. In the last couple weeks, Cristina has attended five parent meetings at schools, to understand the upcoming reshuffling of student assignment boundaries in south Charlotte.

And yes, last week I entered — and very quickly was forced to leave — a courtroom where an important court case was being discussed.

A different path: There are typically no other reporters at the gatherings we attend. We don’t follow the pack. Instead, we go a different direction. We show up and share what we discover with our readers. Not everyone is always happy when we pass along information they would prefer to keep quiet or air facts that are unhelpful to them. But we are not the PR arm of large institutions. Our job is to keep our community informed. We don’t apologize for that.

In building this locally owned small business over the last four years, I have learned that there are a lot of important and interesting things going on in Charlotte — things you wouldn’t know about or hear about were it not for the work of The Ledger.

In the last few months, we have told our readers about big South End land deals, lawsuits against Charlotte Latin and CMS and local journalists, school enrollment trends, innovative small businesses, real estate slowdowns, a creative way developers are preserving historic mansions and the possibility of a new bridge over the Catawba River.

Our readers have learned about plans for a retractable dome over a YMCA pool in Ballantyne. We’ve taken them inside High Point’s furniture market. And they’ve been exposed to slices of life in Charlotte they might not know about, including a philanthropic group of beer enthusiasts, a community of sketch artists, a geek club and a field day by a liquor store to distribute rare bottles of bourbon.

Original and responsible: The Ledger is helping enhance people’s understanding of our city with responsible, original news and insights. Our newsletters cut through the chaos of the internet and deliver information readers need to make sense of Charlotte.

But delivering original, thoughtful local journalism is more difficult and costly than rewriting press releases or rehashing articles written by others. In a time when other media are shrinking, The Ledger is growing and proving that there’s a viable path forward for smart and independent local reporting — the kind that isn’t afraid to ask hard questions, deliver uncomfortable truths and delve into complex topics (or get ejected from courtrooms).

To work, our approach requires support from readers. Won’t you join us and the 2,300+ others in Charlotte who are paying Ledger members?

Reader support has allowed us to add newsletters on different local topics, launch a local podcast and hire a reporter who focuses on health care in Mecklenburg County. We’re working to build something great for Charlotte and for those of us who live here.

Local focus: The vast majority of our revenue from subscriptions goes to pay reporters and writers to unearth stories you haven’t heard about. So that’s money that stays in our community. (It’s not siphoned off to an out-of-state media conglomerate.)

We’re going to keep pushing and keep pressing — respectfully, of course. We might get thrown out of more meetings. But that’s OK: We don’t work for the powers-that-be. We work for our readers.

And our readers seem to like it that way.

Tony Mecia

Executive editor, The Charlotte Ledger