N&O’s Brian Gordon wins national award for ‘Open Source’ newsletter

Brian Gordon, The News & Observer’s business and technology reporter, has received a national award for his weekly “Open Source” newsletter.

The Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, or SABEW, named Open Source the best business newsletter from a medium-sized media outlet for 2025. Among the competitors in that category are The Guardian, Barron’s, Fortune, Wired, The Seattle Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Miami Herald, The Houston Chronicle and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Open Source is published on Friday mornings by The N&O and focuses on technology, business and labor news in the Triangle.

Brian has been The N&O’s technology reporter for three-and-a-half years. In that time, he has reinvented the newsletter, including giving it a name and using it to regularly break business news in a personal and lively writing style.

“There’s a hometown feel to Brian Gordon’s writing,” the SABEW judges wrote.. “You can sense his love and admiration for his location, and it comes through in his Open Source newsletter, whether he’s talking to diners at a Waffle House in South Durham about AI-driven job displacement or touring the Mounjaro production line at Eli Lilly’s obesity-drug manufacturing plant in Concord.”

Brian also won a 2025 award from the North Carolina Press Association for his reporting on IBM, the parent company of Raleigh-based Red Hat, eliminating mentions of diversity from its annual report.

You can reach Brian at bgordon@newsobserver.com. You can subscribe to Open Source and to other N&O newsletters here.

Open Source newsletters

This story was originally published April 2, 2026 at 11:22 AM.