Welcome to The Shelby Independent!
- Chuck Thompson
- Jul 1
- 9 min read
Updated: Aug 2
Here goes everything....
Right now you're reading this because you want to know what The Shelby Independent is about - and that is a great question! The answer, albeit technically simple, is a little complex.
My name is Chuck Thompson and I am an ex-journalist. Yep, just like your ex-husband, ex-wife, ex-in-laws, or whatever the case, I am an ex-journalist.
I divorced myself from the corporate news media world in 2025.
Now, you're probably wondering, "How can he be a former ex-journalist and be working for this new news website.
Well, I don't work here - I don't get a paycheck from The Shelby Independent.
And you're still waiting for me to explain what this website is about and why I am an ex-journalist still doing journalism but not a journalist.
Over the last several years, I watched newspapers shrink and struggle to stay afloat; I watched as papers were purchased by larger media corporations and systematically stripped of their personalities, their old office buildings, their staff, their essence of what they once represented.
A few years ago, I worked for a company that went on a buying spree and bought about a dozen papers. This (shall remain unnamed) company then fired half the staff of every newsroom the had just purchased, implemented strict budget cuts, sold off the building and most of the furniture and consolidated potions to pay back the money they borrowed to buy the newspapers.
My publisher at the time suddenly was publisher of four of those papers for just a tiny little bit extra salary. He didn't really have a choice, they told him he was now the publisher of four more papers or find another job, and one of these newspapers was over several hours away.
Anything to save money and boost profits.
The company, like others scooping up newspapers, spent so much money to buy these local papers that the cuts were implemented to get back on a profitable course, to pay their loans and suck the advertising dollars out of the local papers and send it back to corporate headquarters to pay off the loans they used to buy these newly acquired local papers.
Essentially, they had to layoff half the staff, sell off most of the belongings, reduce the thickness of the newspaper (or the option to just go strictly online to save a lot of money on printing costs), and .... then, six months down the road, the new owners were left confused and aggravated as to why many local businesses stopped advertising and subscribers cancelled their subscriptions once the paper was half what it used to be, was moved to a strip mall in a rented space and suddenly half the staff were unemployed, and 50% less news was being reported, because they had less staff to cover news.
So the company sucked all the money out of it that they could and then turned around and sold it to another company, who.... yep, you guessed it - had to layoff half the staff, sell off most of the belongings, reduce the thickness of the newspaper (or the option to just go strictly online to save a lot of money on printing costs), and .... then the new owners were left confounded as to why local many businesses stopped advertising once the paper was half of half of what it used to be, because 50% less news was being reported on because they had less staff to cover news.
Rinse and repeat.
Before the readers knew what happened, the paper had shrunk from 15 reporters, and a whole office full of people had shrunk to maybe two or three reporters and a few office personnel.
Also, technology played a big hand in certain aspects because a copywriter was no longer needed (the guy who typed up what the reporter told him over the phone when he had breaking news and called it in from a pay phone back in the day) and typesetters were no longer needed when everything went digital, and in-house graphic designers were moved to one region because it was all created on software, online, and the printing pressed merged into one location for a dozen papers, which cost jobs, and the printed paper suddenly was delivered via mail because it was actually cheaper than paying someone to deliver papers (no more gas refunds, healthcare or retirement matching), and then Monday papers and holiday papers were eliminated because the mail doesn't run on Sundays or holidays, so fewer papers were being published, so fewer staff were needed for fewer papers, and so on, and so on, and rinse and repeat until the old respected newspaper in Cleveland County was no more than maybe one person working on their laptop or smartphone, typing up a story in a coffee shop and the closest corporate office was 30 minutes away in a completely different county that had nothing to do with Shelby and Cleveland County.
It's sad, isn't it?
Younger journalists have never known anything than shoestring staff, espically since COVID, barely able to cover some news; it's all they have ever experienced, so they probably don't know how bad it is compared to what it once was. This makes it easier on the corporate owners to keep slowly shrinking these local papers until one person is overworked and the turnover rate becomes so high that not a single reporter stays long enough to get to really know the community they report on everyday.
Also, who wants to have a college degree and make $14 an hour? You go to college to make a better living, but people in journalism do it because they love it; some almost take a vow of poverty just to get to do what they love for a career. But that's not always the case.
With horribly low pay for college educated job requirement, they don't always attract the quality writer with common sense that one would expect - or at least hope to have - writing about a community, as it used to be back in the golden age of journalism.
So, you get activists that have a personal goal of spreading their way of thinking among the local populace when they should be getting to know their readers and respectfully report on what matters to the readers and less time lecturing their subscribers, by inept journalists who believe they are superior to everyone in the community (which a reporter / journalist should never feel that way, but most papers don't have real journalists anymore, just fanatical activists pretending to be journalists).
When subscribers wondered where their local news had disappeared to and complained that the paper got things wrong and never bothered to cover this event or that event, it was because the owners had stripped it of basically everything - except just enough news coverage to be pathetic, but still considered local news so they could sell advertising and put out special "magazines" and hold contests to get the local businesses that "won" the contests to buy an ad in the "best of" special section, which brought in enough money - just enough - to where, if a corporation owns enough of these small town papers could rack in a lot of money when all pooled together.
Then, you bring in the activist reporters (which I mentioned a few paragraphs ago) and journalist from out of town to run and report on local news that has no connection to the community and they suddenly decide this is their chance to publish what they want and lecture you on how you should act and think (which is to act just like them) and, yes, with some things their hands were tied and they had to publish this, or that, but they forgo local stories or even useful news in Charlotte and decide they want to publish news from Asheville because the parent company owns a paper in Asheville, and they like Asheville more than Shelby and with a staff of just one or two, they can't cover enough news to fill a paper, so they use Gaston and Asheville news in their Shelby publication and basically insult anyone with common sense that just wants local news, and regardless of any excuses, it looks like they don't give a damn about Cleveland County.
This is where the idea for The Shelby Independent enters the story....
For a while, I had thought about moving back to the area to start my own online news site focused on local news (as a local news media outlet should). However, things such as a job, money, love and just life in general kept that from happening.
But life has a funny way of letting you know what you're going to do regardless of your dreams and plans.
I quit my job as editor of a newspaper in eastern North Carolina and found myself homesick, lonely and ready to come home.
For the first time in my life I didn't know what I was going to do, but I was ready to leave and go back home to rest. I had absolutely loathed my time at my previous post and felt very alone.
I remember thinking at the time how ironic it was that I had more friends and never felt alone all the way across the country in South Dakota, and now here I was back in North Carolina, completely miserable, lonely and depressed.
One night as I was packing up my belongings in boxes, preparing to move, fate was a few minutes from intervening.
I had laundry in the dryer and wanted to stay up and wait for the dryer to finish, so I could fold it before I went to bed. I was on social media, killing time, waiting on the dryer to buzz, when I started looking at a newspaper's Facebook account. I could barely find any local news, it was ridiculous, so I visited their website and it was very sparse of local news, mostly regional news and national filler. So, I started sharing this on my personal social media accounts, wondering where all the local news had gone - and it spiraled from there. Friends on social media commented, called, texted and I even saw some post that they didn't involve me but wrote their own posts about lack of local news; and it gave me an idea.
I spent the rest for the night as I folded laundry and got ready for bed trying to talk myself out of this idea. After all, I was moving back to the hometown without a plan, just to get out of this place... why not?
When I woke up the next morning I still brushed off the idea, telling myself I'm not ready and thinking how much time it would involve.
But why not? Why not?
"Why not?" became "Why do I care?" and the answer was simply "because I do, it's my hometown," I am a print journalist who has traveled all over the country chasing stories and interviewing people, and now I was moving back home to regroup and figure out what I was going to do next.
"Why not?"
And The Shelby Independent was born.
(continued below)
The reason I named it The Shelby Independent is because this news / media site is just that: INDEPENDENT of all corporate bullshit.
S.I. doesn't have some corporate headquarters in some city, far away, sucking up the advertising dollars and not reinvesting into the community. Hopefully, one day, I'll be able to hire on staff and thus create new jobs for people in Cleveland County, even if it's just one or two, that's a job or two that didn't exist, and I'm all for doing whatever I can to help my hometown.
Be patient
For now, it's just one person doing ALL OF THE WORK, from reporting, editing, website and sales.... ALL OF IT. If you want to sell some ads and you tell me that your friend or neighbor owns a business and you "sell" them on advertising with me then I'll pay you a commission because you made the sale without me involved. (Contact me, let's talk about it).
"I'm just gonna wing it..."
That's what I told myself, knowing that in order for this idea to work I would have to figure out a way to fund this experiment.
I believe news should be free - not specialty things, but general local news should be free, so, in order NOT to charge readers one single cent, to have a completely FREE local news site, I have to learn how to sell advertising on top of doing the reporting myself. I can't afford to hire anyone on a shoestring budget, so in the meantime I will be the editor, reporter, and handle all the advertising sales. In order to save time, if you would like to believe in this great local experiment, you can email me if you would like to sponsor my site by advertising your business on this website. My email is chuck.reporter@gmail.com - if anyone emails you and it's NOT this email (or it might also be ShelbyIndependent@gmil.com ) then it isn't me. Make sure to check all the dots and letters carefully, because some people will purposely try to copy a reporter's email to gain access to places or ask for money or cause other problems, so please check the email carefully.
I need your help
Journalism, when adhered to correctly, comes with a lot of responsibilities. If you are a student, or just like journalism and would like to add a published news article to your portfolio then contact me. i can't pay you but if you're a business owner / manager we can trade some free advertising for news stories written and photographed by you.
As I mentioned a few paragraphs above, if you would like to advertise on this site send me your ad an I'll made sure it links to your website or social media. Anyone that supports me early on will not be forgotten later down the road. I will do all I ethically can as a journalist to repay your kindness for believing in me and basically investing into my experiment.
The site will also have limited FREE classifieds, and if you have news information, please tell me about it.
Send me an email.
Thank you for visiting The Shelby Independent and I hope you become a regular reader and maybe a contributor.
Your support is extremely appreciated!
Chuck Thompson
Editor / Reporter | Shelby Independent
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