That's unusual. But the six-day series about worker safety in poultry processing plants represented another step in the growing partnership between The N&O and its sister paper, The Charlotte Observer. They came under the same roof two years ago when McClatchy Newspapers acquired Knight-Ridder Newspapers.

For this collaboration, The Observer did the excellent journalism of uncovering patterns of abuse and neglect of employees of House of Raeford Farms, and The N&O provided the space and eyeballs to spread the story more broadly.

The series ran Sunday through Friday on the front pages of both The Observer and The N&O. It reported that the multi-state company, based in Hoke County, built one of the largest poultry businesses in the nation with a worker safety record that is one of the worst in the country.

The Observer series found that even with that record, many injuries to the company's workers go unreported, enabling House of Raeford to avoid costly government inspection. A large proportion of the workers are Hispanic, many of them illegal immigrants afraid to speak up for fear of being deported.

Why did The N&O run the Observer's series? "Because it's good, and we could," said Steve Riley, N&O senior editor in charge of projects. Turning over space to its one-time competitor, he said, allowed the Raleigh paper, and its readers, to have the benefit of a high-impact examination of a serious North Carolina issue without having to commit its own resources to report the story.

In the next few weeks, The N&O will publish its own series about the failures of North Carolina's transition from institution-based mental health care to community services. The Observer expects to run that series, at least in part.

I've tried to think of downsides to this tag-team investigative journalism, and I come up mostly empty. Yes, it means there's less competition between the state's two largest papers to beat each other on big projects, but as Riley points out, it actually means more such public service journalism for readers.

"What it does is allow us to provide more volume of those kinds of stories," Riley said. "If we know Charlotte is doing a chicken plant story, we're not going to spend a lot of time on that, so we can focus our efforts on something else."

Journalistically, there might be questions about one paper running another paper's work. The N&O has no say over the reporting of the Charlotte series, yet it is as responsible for quality, accuracy and fairness as if The N&O had done the series itself.

Riley said that's just a matter of trusting that The Observer's journalism standards are as high as The N&O's. The N&O did make some changes in the series, including elimination of some material that was based on anonymous sources. The N&O does not use information obtained from unidentified sources, except in unusual circumstances.

Riley also cut the length of the main stories each day and did not use all the sidebars and other material that ran in The Observer. A series running six days is unusual by N&O standards, and, even edited, the length of the stories was a lot to ask of readers.

I was surprised that The N&O did not get much feedback on the series, but what I heard was positive. "The House of Raeford series, in my non-professional opinion, is worthy of the highest awards, and I am so glad The N&O is publishing it," wrote Chapel Hill reader Claire Curran.

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