An item near the end of the agenda for the April 25 Town Council meeting announced the beginning of the selection process for appointing members to various town committees. But a vote earlier in the evening may have left some prospective committee members wondering, Why bother? Midway through the meeting, the council reconsidered its previous […]

At the WCHL community forum on “Local Media Ecosystems – Objectivity, Bias, Access,” aired last Thursday, panelists included two bloggers but only one newspaper editor. Carrboro Citizen editor Kirk Ross was the sole representative of print journalism. (The next day, The Citizen announced that Ross would be succeeded as editor by Susan Dickson, the publisher’s […]

Reesenews, a multimedia news project by UNC journalism students, has put together a package of stories on gentrification of the Northside community. Check it out at http://reesenews.org/2011/04/14/the-struggle-for-a-neighborhood/13888/.

A perfect storm of work, family and personal commitments makes it difficult for me to blog until the end of the month. If anyone would like to submit a guest blog, the Chapel Hill Watch space will be available for the next couple of weeks. Send your post to me in an e-mail, neoates at […]

Chapel Hill taxpayers authorized town manager Roger Stancil to spend money on designing a logo that has a specific color and font for the town to use on street signs and elsewhere. Yet when local stores want to put their logos, in color, on a street sign, some council members waffled or flat out refused. […]

Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt kicked two people out of Monday night’s Town Council meeting. It marked one of the rare occasions I agreed with him. Several people showed up at the meeting to protest town manager Roger Stancil’s decision to uphold the firing of sanitation workers Kerry Bigelow and Clyde Clark. For the most part, they […]

The flawed system exposed during the circus that billed itself as personnel appeals hearings for Kerry Bigelow and Clyde Clark has extended to The Chapel Hill News. In a story in Wednesday’s edition, cub reporter Katelyn Ferral misquoted Mayor Pro Tem Jim Ward as saying he thought the outcome of the hearings “wasn’t wrong.” What […]

Terri Buckner suggests: At last week’s hearing on food trucks, Aaron Nelson said that there are about 280 restaurants within the OWASA service district. The next day the Independent issued its annual “best of” survey. Since then I’ve had several conversations about personal favorites. So how about if we conduct our own mini ‘best of’ […]

It was a quiet night in Town Hall hearing room last Monday night. In part because Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt was “unable to be here,” according to Mayor Pro Tem Jim Ward, but also because council member Donna Bell was AWOL once again. She skipped the council meeting the previous week, too. She may well have […]

I’ve heard tell that the only benefit of UNC sports teams is to get money and that the teams aren’t resourceful otherwise. But what about the intangible benefits to students and student-athletes that don’t show up on the balance sheet? Over the course of a year, UNC athletics earns more than $70 million. This is […]