One of the certainties of publishing The News & Observer these days is that whenever a story on John Edwards runs, someone complains that the paper gives him too much attention.

So it was during the holidays when Edwards officially launched his second candidacy for president. "With your Dec. 28 front-page story about John Edwards running for president, we see a timely political photo op of Edwards in New Orleans, over a year after Katrina, acting like he's helping the poor rebuild," wrote Pete Vorenkamp of Cary in a People's Forum letter. "Funny how Edwards was not there when it mattered most, right after the hurricane hit, to help out....John Edwards is a phony, pure and simple."

Edwards for some reason draws wells of vitriol from his critics, but the concern about the newspaper coverage comes not just from Republicans and conservatives. Claire Curran is a Democrat who is favorable toward Edwards but says the paper is giving too much ink to the entire Edwards family. There have been stories about daughter Cate and wife Elizabeth, whose recent autobiography was on best-seller lists. During the holidays, the paper wrote about Elizabeth having a fender-bender while Christmas shopping.

"I voted for Edwards and may support him again," Curran wrote me. "I want to use the paper's coverage to make decisions about who I shall support. But at the present, I'm finding a lot of infatuation, and minimal substance."

Edwards does get a lot of coverage in The News & Observer. He should. He's a genuine presidential prospect, the first viable one in North Carolina since the late Gov. Terry Sanford in the 1970s. George W. Bush got a lot of attention from the Texas papers during his long runup to the 2000 campaign. So too, this year, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The question is: Is the Edwards coverage too much, and is it boosterish?

Andrew Taylor, political scientist and presidential politics-watcher at N.C. State University, says he doesn't think so. "The coverage in quantity is justified when you consider where he is from and that he is a genuine top-tier candidate," he said. Readers should look to the nature of the coverage, Taylor said: whether there is "a sober, judicious assessment of his chances, comparing with 2000 and how he may be the same and how he may be different, analysis of his positions on substantive issues."

Rob Christensen, N&O political reporter and columnist, has been the point man for the Edwards coverage. "My goal here is that a reader of The N&O does not wake up one morning in November of 2008 and find out that John Edwards is the president-elect and wonder how in the world did that happen," he said. "This has nothing to do with either promoting or trying to diminish a political candidate. All this has to do with is a remarkable political story."

Some readers, he said, would be happy only if every Edwards story said something bad about him. "This may come as a shock to some of our readers, but the John Edwards campaign does not love The N&O." He said Edwards staffers regularly complained to his editors about coverage, and Christensen once was thrown out of an Edwards campaign manager's office for asking too-pointed questions. (Jennifer Palmieri, Edwards' long-time press spokeswoman, told me she has found The N&O's coverage to be fair and not biased toward Edwards: "It looks at the campaign with healthy skepticism.") One reader wrote last week that the paper is "out to destroy John Edwards."

I looked back over the N&O's coverage of Edwards for the last several years. The paper wrote 62 stories that mentioned Edwards last year, up from 45 in 2005. By comparison, there were 407 stories in 2004, when he was a candidate for president and vice president; and 286 in 2003 and 124 in 2002, when Edwards was in the Senate.

Of the 62 Edwards stories in 2006, five were on the front page. Two were in the last week of the year, when Edwards announced his candidacy from New Orleans.

Was the coverage too easy on the home-town candidate? I don't think so. The announcement stories contained quotes from analysts critical of Edwards' chances. One of the five front-pagers in 2006 was a delicious story about how an Edwards aide invoked the candidate's name to get to the front of the line at Wal-Mart to buy a PlayStation 3 for Edwards' children -- the same day that Edwards was protesting Wal-Mart labor practices.

Still, Curran, the Chapel Hill reader, says she thinks the paper needs to bring more scrutiny to Edwards, such as the arrangement that gave him a perch at UNC's law school between campaigns. I had also wondered about that.

I do think the paper can be criticized for too lavish coverage of Edwards' campaign announcement, which included front-page stories from New Orleans two days in a row, Dec. 28 and 29. One of those stories included a full-page rundown on the Edwards candidacy. Two days later, the paper ran two stories on Page 5B about Edwards' post-announcement campaign swing.

Overall, it was excessive; I'd chalk it up not to conscious Edwards-boosting, but to internal newspaper factors. The two stories about the announcement made the front page, Christensen said, because it was a slow news week (just what Edwards counted on, I'm guessing). The double-barrel follow-up was because the paper chose to run separate stories on his appearances in South Carolina and Chapel Hill -- one from The Charlotte Observer, one from an N&O staff reporter.

As Christensen says, The N&O is never going to satisfy the hard-core anti-Edwards sentiment, which is virulent in a state that voted for Bush-Cheney over Kerry-Edwards in 2004. But you should look for more, not fewer, Edwards stories as the campaign cranks up. And The N&O, as the home-state newspaper, should lead in bringing to bear the scrutiny that this presidential candidate needs to face in a national campaign.