News & Observer and Herald-Sun have a new leader in the newsroom
Sharif Durhams, who made history as a journalism student at UNC-Chapel Hill and has spent the last dozen years helping produce news for digital audiences in Milwaukee and at CNN and The Washington Post, will now help run the newsroom at The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun.
Durhams, who attended middle and high school in Raleigh and has family here, will serve as managing editor for the newsroom. Robyn Tomlin, the president and editor of both The N&O and Herald-Sun, announced his hiring Thursday afternoon.
Tomlin met Durhams when they both worked for The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at UNC, in the late 1990s.
“I’ve known Sharif Durhams for 25 years, and I am thrilled to welcome him home to North Carolina to be my partner in leading The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun newsroom,” Tomlin said in a written statement. “Sharif’s love for this community and state, combined with his depth of experience in leading innovative efforts at local and national/international media organizations, will serve our readers and staff exceptionally well.”
Durhams, 43, replaces Jane Elizabeth, who left last month to do media consulting work. He will oversee the day-to-day operations of a newsroom with 60 editors, reporters and visual journalists.
Durhams joined The Washington Post in April as night homepage editor. He had been at The Post previously, before going to CNN in Atlanta as senior editor for digital global programming. After several years at large, national news outlets, Durhams says he’s eager to get back to local news.
“I love the idea of being able to help write and report about the place where I live, and to be able to see changes quickly happen because of the reporting that we do,” he said in an interview. “And I think the big challenges are in local news, and there are big opportunities.
“We have some of the biggest audiences in our history, but we haven’t fully developed the business model that was broken by the internet,” he continued. “And so we’re still experimenting with trying to match the key information we’re providing with a business model that can help local newsrooms grow.”
A career born on the high school debate team
Durhams was born in Hartford, Connecticut, but moved with his mother to her hometown of Raleigh when he was 11. He enrolled at Ligon Middle School, in the same building where his mother had attended Raleigh’s segregated high school for Black students. He graduated from Enloe High School.
As a member of the debate team at Enloe, Durhams learned how to study both sides of an issue and understand the nuances to get his point across. When he considered how to make that a career, he figured it came down to being a lawyer or a journalist.
He chose journalism at UNC and joined The Daily Tar Heel staff as a freshman. He worked his way up to editor-in-chief in 1998, becoming the first African-American to lead the student newspaper since its founding in 1893.
The paper’s second Black editor followed the next year. There were several good Black student journalists at UNC at that time who supported and encouraged each other, Durhams said.
“We were able to create a sense of culture that gave all of us a lot of confidence,” he said.
There hasn’t been a Black editor-in-chief at The Daily Tar Heel since then, Durhams says. Two years ago, he and the paper’s general manager, Erica Beshears Perel, worked to create what became the Sharif Durhams Leadership Program to improve diversity in the newsroom and in the journalism it produces.
This year, the program provides mentoring, support and training to 20 students from underrepresented groups who work for The Daily Tar Heel, Perel said. Durhams, who received The Daily Tar Heel’s Distinguished Alumni award in 2019, meets with the group via Zoom and provides advice one-on-one, she said.
“He has really worked his whole career to make newsrooms better and more inclusive and reflective of the communities they serve,” she said.
Durhams said a lack of diversity in newsrooms becomes apparent in their coverage.
“I think part of what social media and the internet have exposed is that while local news organizations all over the country have done great work in their communities, they haven’t focused on their entire communities,” he said. “We can see the division that’s led to nationally, but also the divisions in our communities.”
Coming home to Raleigh
Diversity for Durhams goes beyond race. He became the first Black president of NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists in 2018 and was recently re-elected to serve until 2022.
“We’re journalists who urge our colleagues to consider whether we’re covering LGBTQ communities fairly and accurately and with the same nuance that we would want to cover everyone else,” he wrote in an email. “And we work with newsrooms to help them do it.”
Durhams can’t say yet what steps are needed to improve diversity in staff and coverage at The N&O and Herald-Sun. With newsroom budgets tight, the papers will need to pick their spots and experiment, he says.
“But I think part of it is spending our time listening to different people,” he said. “We have to pay attention to more of the people that policies affect and better understand their lives, particularly when they’re different from lives of journalists and when they live in different neighborhoods.”
Durhams will continue living in Washington until next spring, giving him time to have renovations done on a house he owns near downtown Raleigh. He bought the house in 2002 while he was covering politics for The Charlotte Observer, which was then still a competitor to The N&O before the corporate merger that brought them both under McClatchy.
Durhams left Raleigh to cover Cabarrus County for The Observer, then left North Carolina to work for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as a reporter and eventually its social media editor and digital strategist.
But he held on to the house. Not only was it a good investment, but he figured he might want to live in it someday. Now he will. His mother still lives about a mile away.
This story was originally published December 3, 2020 at 2:59 PM.
