Meet Payton Guion, The Charlotte Observer’s newest investigative reporter
When I left Charlotte in the summer of 2014 I had barely cut my teeth as a reporter.
A short, unpaid stint working for a bare-bones newspaper in Santiago, Chile was followed by a couple of years covering development for the Mecklenburg Times, a small bi-weekly paper here in town.
Green as can be, I moved to New York with a good friend, going the opposite way of so many people who now call Charlotte home. Other than my time in South America, I’d never lived outside North Carolina. I was born at Presbyterian Hospital and raised in a neighborhood off Albemarle Road, where the Observer was delivered every morning, before my family moved to Mint Hill.
But I wanted something different, wanted to test myself in the big city
As we drove the moving truck up Interstate 95, we didn’t have jobs. But I’d already found my career. I was a reporter and hadn’t considered another profession since my first journalism class at Appalachian State University. Where better to try and make it as a journalist than in New York?
With an assist from an old friend from Chile, I pretty quickly found a job as a breaking news reporter with VICE News in Brooklyn. During my time at that gig and as a reporter in the U.S. bureau of the British newspaper The Independent, I realized my place in this industry. I was meant to be an investigative reporter, digging deep into issues and institutions to expose where the powerful take advantage of or harm the public.
That fall, I enrolled in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and went about sharpening my investigative reporting tools.
After graduating, and for the last several years, I worked at newspapers in New Jersey, first at the Asbury Park Press — where the Observer’s own Ames Alexander once worked — and later at the Star-Ledger. I investigated rental housing, special education, welfare fraud, criminal justice and railroads, among other things. My work led to reforms in state and federal government agencies, prompted legislation and won national awards.
Now I’m starting work as an investigative reporter at the Observer, part of a nine-person team that includes journalists here and at The News & Observer in Raleigh.
I return to Charlotte with quite a bit more seasoning, but no less curiosity. Charlotte is a different place than the one I left. The population has exploded, the Hornets are interesting and the beer is much, much better. But many problems persist and it is my duty to dig into them in an effort to make Charlotte a better, fairer place.
It was North Carolinian Thomas Wolfe who wrote “You Can’t Go Home Again,” but, for me, this is a homecoming, and I’m honored to report and write for my hometown paper.
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This story was originally published November 17, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
