With less than 24 hours to go in 2025, Carolina Public Press is once again ranking our top 10 stories of the year.
When we say “stories,” we don’t necessarily mean individual headlines, but 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 our 252nd of 2025, not counting reposts of old stories or articles about internal CPP announcements.
Some items that wound up near the top of the 2025 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 means that if a lot of people read a particular article, but it isn’t quite as important as some other stories and we write about it less, it doesn’t rank as well as another story might. Or if we write about a story frequently and think it is important, but no one is interested, it wouldn’t rank as highly.
This is a subjective 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 2025 stories rank as they did.
Colby Rabon / Carolina Public Press
1. Recovery from Helene continues through 2025
Helene was easily the top story of 2024, and the long recovery also dominated the news in 2025 with many different narratives unfolding. Government relief aid was badly needed, coming in slowly, being wrangled by political considerations at the federal and state levels and not necessarily having as big of an impact as some charitable efforts. The economy in areas affected by Helene was in turmoil, with unique conditions in some communities. Agriculture, the food supply, affordable housing, schools and sources of clean water were all affected and remain so to varying extents as the recovery continues. We also featured questions about how rivers and human infrastructure interact in our June investigative series, Restraining Rivers. While we can’t predict where this ongoing story will rank in 2026, we know it’s not going away.
2. Social services accountability
Covering issues with local social services agencies and the effectiveness of state and federal oversight has long been a key area for CPP and its readers. In 2025, we focused on problems in multiple counties, including Bertie, McDowell and Surry, as well as changes in state law that, on paper, should give state officials more authority to intervene when local agencies go rogue, something we’ve reported on extensively over the years. That new authority doesn’t equate to the will to use it or the wisdom to use it well, and it’s already facing pushback from local officials, so our eyes will remain open.
3. Politicization of colleges
Social conservatives in the federal government and North Carolina legislature flexed their muscles this year with aggressive moves to clamp down on things they didn’t like at state colleges, though the effects were sometimes felt at private colleges as well. We saw fringe right-wing videos used as an excuse to fire personnel at several universities for favoring policies to blunt the systemic effects of racism. We heard from faculty at colleges saying they are in an atmosphere where they are afraid to speak out. We saw one case where a private college perceived as progressive was blocked from Helene relief funds while a nearby conservative college received aid. There have been rumblings over this sort of thing for years, but it seemed like the gloves came off in North Carolina in 2025. With a major election cycle in 2026, we’ll expect to see even more use of wedge issues to polarize voters and target institutions of higher learning.
4. Access to hospital services
Our award-winning March investigative series, Deserting Women, showed that deserts for women’s health services, such as labor and delivery units, have been growing and exist in strands across several parts of rural North Carolina. We also looked at the lack of hospitals on the Outer Banks, the challenges to keep a hospital open in some small communities and issues around competition to build new hospitals related to the state’s Certificate of Need law, which a panel of superior court judges upheld late this year. A challenge to the CON law could be headed back to the state Supreme Court. We also looked at the woes of Mission Health, the troubled mountain hospital chain owned by HCA, which has repeatedly been found in noncompliance with regulations and faces multiple ongoing lawsuits from state and local governments. This one has been in our top stories for a long time, and we expect to see it again.
5. Changes in elections control take effect in 2025
In late 2024, the lame duck legislature that was about to lose its Republican supermajority waited until after the election to change the law governing who would control appointment of election boards. After their changes survived a court challenge, we saw how they played out in 2025, with major changes in top personnel at the State Board of Elections, the leadership and makeup of the board itself, changes in the leadership of every county board of elections and additional changes in staffing and policies across the state. With the 2026 election ahead, we’ll continue watching how these changes affect actual elections, including early voting sites, by-mail voting and other issues where one party or the other thinks it can gain an edge or blunt an advantage for the other side.
6. Economic development tiers
In October, our investigative series Trapped by Tiers examined the state’s county economic distress tiers that are used for economic development, among other things, and explored issues with their effectiveness. We showed many problems, perhaps the most severe being that the counties labeled as most-distressed never make progress despite a system that’s entire purpose was for them to make progress. We also saw a few weeks ago how Helene caused significant changes in the tier rankings for some counties, even those not struck by the storm, because of the musical chairs nature of the system.
7. Courts decided results of key 2024 elections in 2025
This was a key 2024 story that lingered into the middle of 2025. Multiple elections were decided by court challenges, though none actually reversed the original results. Even so, it was a close question on the state Supreme Court, with potentially thousands of voters being disenfranchised after the votes had been counted.
8. Chantal
Tropical Depression Chantal, which hit Sandhills and Piedmont counties, wasn’t Helene or even Debbie. But it did an amazing amount of damage with water – too much at once in the wrong places. We saw major flooding affecting homes, businesses and public infrastructure in multiple areas. Shopping centers and housing complexes in Chapel Hill, an arts center and charter school in Hillsborough, the water treatment center in Burlington, farms in several counties, roads across the region, many public parks and many individual residential and business properties faced unexpected and devastating flooding. We don’t know what to expect in 2026 for certain, but there’s a good chance that extreme weather somewhere will play a part.
9. Swain Co. sheriff
The longtime sheriff of Swain County resigned under pressure as he faced prosecution from both the district attorney and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians for multiple allegations of sex-related crimes. This is a really important story in Swain County, but it justifiably drew attention statewide. Long-serving sheriffs being held accountable in this way isn’t something we’ve often seen. And never before has the legal authority of a tribe like the EBCI been imposed against a powerful local official in North Carolina successfully.
10. Civics education
Our August investigative series Civics Unlearned examined the disconnect between the teaching of civics in North Carolina schools and the disengagement of North Carolina voters. We looked at statistics suggesting this is one of the most politically disengaged states. We explored how the civics instruction in our schools has evolved. And we looked at what other states are doing differently that might make a difference. It would take time and legislative will to move the needle on these issues. But we expect to see their effects playing out in some way in 2026 as we go into a major midterm election year.
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