With 2024 about to recede into the rearview mirror, Carolina Public Press is once again ranking our top 10 stories of the year.
When we talk about “stories,” we aren’t necessarily thinking of individual articles, but about news topics. That’s important to compiling a worthwhile list, because certain stories took the air out of the room. As far as individual articles go, though, you are reading the 218th of 2024, not counting reposts of old stories or articles about internal CPP announcements.
Some items that wound up near the top of the 2024 list loomed very large and won’t surprise anyone, but some stories that helped round out the top 10 may not be so easy to predict.
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How did we come up with this year’s list? We combined three different considerations:
- How interested were readers in this story? We receive data about the audience for each story on our website, so this is easy to quantify.
- How often did we write about it? This is also easy to quantify, though some stories might touch on more than one news topic.
- How significant do we believe the article is? This one is a judgment call.
Combining these three criteria meant that if a lot of people read a particular article, but it wasn’t quite as important as some other stories and we wrote about it less, it wouldn’t rank as well as another story might. Or if we wrote about a story frequently and thought it was important, but no one was interested, it wouldn’t rank as highly.
This is a qualitative judgment, not an exact science. Even so, some of our findings as we looked back over the last year were clear. Certain items rose to the top and belonged in the group.
Following is our list of our top 10, and what made each of these major 2024 stories rank as they did.
No. 1: Helene’s impact
Helene featured the worst tropical system impact ever in North Carolina. It was the worst in the United States in 19 years. Measured by loss of life, Helene was a major storm that hit North Carolina worse than any other state, despite only being at tropical storm strength when it struck the state. Tropical systems typically are amplified by storm surge along the coast, yet this one hit only the counties farthest from the ocean.
We expected severe floods to strike low-lying areas, but this storm caused massive flooding in the most elevated areas of the state, including the highest counties east of the Mississippi River.
We knew our mountain counties were subject to flash floods. We knew that climate change increased the chances of severe tropical systems and that they would strike some portion of North Carolina. But we did not expect what we got with Helene.
After it hit, the damage was so bad that it took weeks to fully grasp what had happened – sorting out the number of dead and missing by county, the loss of property, the damage to roads, and the loss of rail, electric, water and internet infrastructure. We still don’t really have a full accounting of all of it. Combatting rampant misinformation has also proven to be a constant struggle.
No. 2: Recovery from Helene
Helene was too big of a story for just one spot on this list.
However, many of our articles about the recovery from Helene overlapped with those about its impact. For good reason. In the early days, getting good information out of the disaster zone in many places could be nearly impossible, so we combined whatever information we could scrape together into the same articles at times. Our audience was both the people surviving the storm and the rest of the world, which needed to know what had happened.
We also made an editorial decision to emphasize the recovery as soon as possible. Our first photo essay, Images of Asheville after Helene, by far our most-viewed article of the year, began with an image of rescuers, even if we thought some of the other images were more impactful. Later we led stories with images like people distributing bottled water rather than those of wrecked cars on broken highways. Giving people hope was an important first step in recovery.
As time has gone on, we’ve gone back and revisited some of those images of brokenness because we need to reckon with the immense task of rebuilding and recovering. And we fully expect this 2024 story to be one of the top ones of 2025 as well.
No. 3: Election 2024
North Carolina was in the cross hairs of both political parties in a pivotal election year.
Plenty of other news organizations covered the horse race, so CPP, as we have in the past, focused on voter information and trying to make sense of complicated issues. How did absentee ballots and early voting work? What was up with the constitutional amendment on the ballot to ban something that wasn’t even happening in North Carolina?
Going back earlier in the year, why did we have a second Republican primary for some contests? CPP also produced a major investigative series in June examining the reasons why North Carolina counties were losing experienced elections staff.
In the fall, we looked closely at this year’s early voting process, including talking with voters and election workers at the polls in counties recovering from Helene. We went to the polls in many different counties on election days in March and November, to take the pulse of the electorate. We reported on results and turnout.
Later we looked at canvassing, late-arriving ballots, recounts and protests. And more protests. Also lawsuits about protests.
Was 2024 an important election year for North Carolina? Democrats had hoped to flip the state’s presidential vote this year, which didn’t happen in a year that was disappointing to Democrats at the presidential level nationwide. On the other hand, in 2024 Democratic non-incumbent Josh Stein won the governor’s race by a landslide and had coattails, helping his party capture half of the council of state races and end the Republican veto-proof supermajority in the state House.
Meanwhile, Republicans nationally narrowly held on to their advantage in the U.S. House thanks in large part to the most recent redistricting efforts in North Carolina. Both major parties came away with something to brag about in North Carolina and more battles to fight in what continues to be one of the nation’s most closely contested states.
No. 4: Farm woes
North Carolina farmers in multiple areas of the state first faced the most severe drought they’d seen in a long time, scorching corn and other crops in early summer.
Then came heavy thunderstorms in many of the same places, saving some crops, but often too late or too much. Many fields were more damaged by the extra rain than they had been by the dry weather earlier.
And then Tropical Storm Debby struck much of the state at the beginning of August, with both wind and rain, as well as flashing flooding, which further wrecked farming efforts in many areas.
In mid-September, an unnamed storm system further swamped areas along the state’s southeastern coast, again battering these areas.
Mountain counties were mostly spared all of this. Then on Sept. 27, Tropical Storm Helene struck. Key crops, such as apples, were devastated at a crucial time of the season. Both orchards and Christmas tree farms faced severe wind damage that will affect them long after this season. Floods and landslides inundated many farms with debris and toxic runoff. These lands will need to be cleaned up before they can be productive again.
The state has estimated this is the worst year ever for North Carolina farms. It’s a heart-breaking story, but it’s not over. CPP will continue to report in 2025 and beyond as our farmers seek to recover and bounce back.
No. 5: HCA woes
The dissatisfaction of many consumers and public officials with for-profit hospital company HCA’s management of the Mission Health chain in Western North Carolina is hardly a new story.
It’s been unfolding since before the ink was dry on the 2019 acquisition of the formerly nonprofit chain that operates hospitals in six mountain counties, in addition to other health care offices. As Attorney General Stein filed suit against HCA in December 2023, the stage was set for 2024 to be a pivotal year. That lawsuit and several others involving HCA and Mission Health continue to play out.
Mission Hospital in Asheville came under increased scrutiny in early 2024 as federal regulators identified problems with its emergency room care, among other things.
Mission has also tried to guard its turf in Buncombe County, even as Advent Health seeks to build a new hospital in Weaverville.
Meanwhile, the nurses union threatened to strike, though a belated deal was struck in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Helene.
Mission facilities also faced the extreme brunt of Helene, and had to keep services going even when the power supply, internet and potable water weren’t reliably available. How things play out for HCA, Mission Health, public officials suing them and calling for change, nurses, doctors, regulators and consumers with limited alternative options remains to be seen in 2025.
No. 6: Tropical Storm Debby
Debby was not Helene, not even close. It also wasn’t up there with past severe storms in Eastern North Carolina like Florence, Matthew, Floyd or Fran. But it was very bad in spots and had a broad impact from the coast into areas of the Piedmont.
As mentioned above, it hit many of the state’s major farming counties severely. It caused severe wind damage, especially in Sampson County, and disastrous flooding elsewhere, especially in parts of Robeson and Duplin counties.
No. 7: Mark Robinson campaign woes
Mark Robinson has been called the weakest GOP gubernatorial candidate in any state won by Donald Trump, which explains why he lost the election. But that’s not what places his story on this list.
Robinson’s previous campaign for lieutenant governor featured a series of alleged irregularities that remained under investigation, though mostly clouded in secrecy, until weeks after his failed bid for governor concluded.
CPP reported in January on both this investigation and the arcane state laws that forced investigators to keep a lid on the probe despite the subject’s pursuit of the state’s highest office. Most information came to light about the nature of the allegations against Robinson in September.
However, the biggest headlines nationally came from exposure of Robinson’s extracurricular activities prior to his political career, including frequency porn sites online and boasting that he was a “Black Nazi.” While CPP didn’t break that last story, it reported on how the fallout from it was shaping the political situation.
After the dust from the election settled, the State Board of Elections revealed that it had found Robinson’s campaign at fault for violations and reached a settlement, requiring the payment of fines. All of this took place without voters being any the wiser.
Maybe voters appreciate the legislature shielding them from such information. Maybe voters don’t care one way or the other. Or maybe they think this system fails to pass the smell test. How that plays out will be a question for another year.
No. 8: Hellbenders
Conservation efforts captured and relocated a massive salamander living in North Carolina mountain rivers. The creature, the hellbender, is impressive looking and efforts to protect it as dams were removed in its habitat area were also impressive.
In a year of great challenges for the North Carolina mountains, this was a high-interest feel-good story about people and nature.
It was one of the biggest single-article readership items for CPP this year and when we reposted it again over the holidays, it found another big audience all over again. We hope to share more stories like this whenever the opportunity arises in 2025.
No. 9: Trails Carolina
For a few weeks in early 2024, a tragic story played out in a remote area of Transylvania County and caught the attention of much of the state. A child died at Trails Carolina, a so-called rehab camp with a spotty history. This was not the first fatal incident at this camp.
These rehab camps are controversial and not always regulated effectively. Although local officials didn’t bring criminal charges against those involved, the state shut down Trails Carolina for good.
No. 10: Cherokee County DSS
We had just one article on this issue in 2024. It ranks here because it is the culmination of years of reporting by CPP, going back to 2019.
Cherokee County social services officials concocted a bizarre and unlawful scheme to remove children from their families without getting judicial approval. They operated this scheme for years – exactly when it began is still debated.
One of the people at the center of it was the former DSS director, who was prosecuted for her role in 2021. The county lost major civil cases in the courts and accepted large settlements in others as families and individual children, some now grown, sought some measure of justice for their lost childhood.
But also at the center of this scheme was Scott Lindsay, the former Cherokee County DSS attorney who had helped devise phony paperwork used to trick families into giving up their children. This summer, Lindsay also had his day in court and was convicted for some of his crimes, specifically obstruction of justice, against the people and children of Cherokee County.
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