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HUNTERSVILLE A Huntersville town commissioner and the wife of another commissioner are part owners of a free Lake Norman weekly newspaper that debuted this week in Huntersville, Cornelius and Davidson mailboxes.
Commissioners Charles Jeter and Ron Julian said they will be careful to avoid conflicts of interest while leading both a government and the Huntersville-based Lake Norman Citizen, a 44-page tabloid-size paper mailed to 27,462 homes and businesses.
A national expert in journalism ethics calls it “an ethical minefield, from the standpoint of journalism ethics and government ethics.”
“They'll have to be exceptionally transparent,” said Bob Steele of the journalism ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla., and a journalism professor at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind.
“Journalists in small towns should be watchdogs and independent overseers of the government process,” Steele said. “That's really hard to do when you're running a newspaper and the government.”
Citizen representation is diminished each time elected officials recuse themselves from a vote, if residents even know all the times those officials should recuse themselves, Steele added.
Jeter said he's aware of the perception of a conflict but that he has always recused himself from votes in which his businesses were involved. He and Julian, whose wife, Teresa, is part owner of the paper, said they will remain hands-off editorially.
The paper's other part-owner is Irv Hager of the Huntersville realty firm Hager & Associates.
Jeter, who has started six companies, said he saw a business opportunity after the weekly Lake Norman Times folded, the Observer cut its Lake Norman bureau editorial staff to one reporter and the Huntersville-based Lake Norman Herald Weekly became part of a chain of weeklies and began running more national ads. “I saw a real economic opportunity,” Jeter said.
Plans are to expand circulation to at least 50,000 in 12 to 18 months by adding Denver-Sherrills Ford and the Brawley School-Williamson roads area of Mooresville, Jeter said.
“What the readers want is to keep up on events in their community – schools, church events,” Julian said. “It's really the people's paper, to represent the news the people want.”
Jeter said the paper won't have a political agenda or endorse candidates. He said those papers don't last long, citing Charlotte's Rhinoceros Times, a politically conservative free weekly that stopped its presses in 2008 after six years.
Jeter and Julian said deadlines, not politics, were at play when their paper put fellow commissioner Brian Sisson's announcement that he will run for mayor on its front page, with no mention that Mayor Jill Swain announced her re-election bid a day before Sisson did.
Sisson told the Citizen of his intentions last weekend, Jeter said, while Swain's announcement came too late for the paper's deadlines.
Jeter and Julian said they and Sisson aren't political allies, and they often disagree on town board decisions.
Printed at the Salisbury Post, the Citizen has a full-time staff of 10, including publisher Kim Clark, former assistant publisher of the Carolina Weekly Newspaper Group, and editor Andrew Warfield, former editor of the Lake Norman Herald Weekly.
