About Courier Newsroom

Cardinal & Pine is owned and operated by Courier Newsroom, a civic media company with eight state-based newsrooms. Our mission is to protect and strengthen our democracy through credible, fact-based journalism that seeks to create a more informed, engaged, and representative America.

We reach audiences who are not regularly engaging with civic information, and who are unlikely to subscribe to paywalled journalism. As part of that effort, we deliver much of our reporting on the social platforms our readers use most frequently.

Courier’s newsrooms practice independent, point-of-view journalism. You can read about Cardinal & Pine’s values in the statement below. The managing editor of each site, in addition to Courier Newsroom’s VP of Content, has sole discretion and control over the editorial process.

Courier Newsroom is a public benefit corporation owned by Good Information Inc., and is supported by reader contributions, sponsors, philanthropic donations, and corporate underwriting. We maintain an editorial firewall between our newsrooms and underwriters, sponsors, and donors. We do not accept funding from any national or state political party, party committee, candidate, or campaign.

See Courier’s website for additional information about our national team and our funding model.

Contributions or gifts in support of Cardinal & Pine’s journalism are not tax deductible as charitable contributions.
Cardinal & Pine is part of the Courier Newsroom network. All payments will be made to Courier Newsroom.

Cardinal & Pine: Here’s Where We’re Coming From

Cardinal & Pine, created in 2020, is a North Carolina news outlet that believes at its core in facts first.

We are a team of North Carolina journalists who have witnessed firsthand the decline of local journalism and the proliferation of right-wing misinformation. And we’re not content to watch it happen. We want to do something about it.

Rather than focusing on insider politics out of DC or Raleigh, our team strives to put local voices and faces at the center of our stories, emphasizing the real-life impacts of state and national policies, particularly in North Carolina’s rural communities and communities of color.

We believe the key to a strong democracy is an informed and involved electorate that participates, and not just on Election Day. That’s why our fact-based reporting puts journalists on the ground in parts of the state hit the hardest by the erosion of local journalism and pernicious, anti-democratic disinformation from the far right.

We produce local journalism and storytelling that is thoughtful, informative, and relevant to all North Carolinians.

Because whether you live in North Carolina’s mountains or the Coastal Plain or in the Piedmont or the Outer Banks, we all want reliable information about the things that matter most. To us, that means public education, access to health care, economic inequality, poverty, voting access, and the state and national policies that affect our families directly.

We go deeper on these critical issues to find the faces and the places behind every story, to find the families most impacted by the global pandemic and a wounded economy, to explore the ways income inequality impacts North Carolina families, and to address the systemic injustices that have plagued North Carolina’s Black and brown families for generations.
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