In a career that started and ended at UNC, he molded generations of young journalists
Mike Yopp spent most of his life molding generations of journalists. But his legacy as a mentor and leader began when he was just a young journalist himself.
Yopp died from a stroke Thursday at the age of 79, having just wrapped up his final semester of 20 years teaching news writing at his alma mater, in UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
Some 50 years earlier, Yopp began inspiring and shaping the young journalists around him.
Yopp was a student at UNC-Chapel Hill and managing editor for the Daily Tar Heel, where he covered the civil rights movement, state politics and campus life.
In 1964, one of Yopp’s colleagues at the Daily Tar Heel, Jock Lauterer, was assigned to photograph a Ku Klux Klan rally outside Chapel Hill. Yopp went, too.
Lauterer was a “dweeby, geeky kid with a camera” with a flash that would light up half of a football field, he said, and worried the pair might get beat up or kicked out of the event. But Yopp, standing at 6-foot-4, was unfazed.
“He was just this tower of power,” Lauterer said. “Here was this little shrimpy guy hiding in his shadow and taking pictures. I remember feeling safe and protected in his physical presence.”
In Yopp’s more than 30 years of working in newspapers, he remained unflappable, his colleagues said.
At The Raleigh Times, where Yopp worked as a reporter and editor, he continued to influence the journalists around him.
Though Yopp was only in his 30s when Bob Ashley joined the paper, Yopp was known as the “elder statesman” at the newspaper. He was committed to equity and social justice, Ashley said, and he was a hard worker.
When Ashley was a city editor at the Times, Yopp was never afraid to come out of his office and help edit stories in a pinch, Ashley said.
“He inspired a group of reporters right out of school in our early 20s, mid 20s, to really cover Raleigh with tremendous energy,” Ashley said.
When the Times merged with The News & Observer in the late 1980s, Yopp became the managing editor.
Martha Quillin, a staff writer at The N&O, often writes stories that run in the weekend print edition of the paper. Quillin recalled a time when Yopp would come to work on Saturdays and read stories like hers.
“You could be working on a story and it could go through all the editors and be ready to run on a Sunday,” Quillin said, but Yopp would read it on a Saturday afternoon and find a hole in the story, or something that needed to be fixed, and it would get held back another day.
That was called getting “Yopped,” Quillin said.
But Quillin said it wasn’t because Yopp was jerking reporters around. It was because he could pinpoint what was wrong with a story and be specific about how a reporter could fix it, Quillin said.
“Mike was a good newsman,” Quillin said. “You didn’t get the feeling he was in the business because of ego. It was because he felt it was interesting.”
When Yopp retired from The N&O in 2000, he went back to the place his journalism career started: UNC. His wife of 24 years, Jan Yopp, also worked at UNC until she retired last year.
The class Yopp taught for two decades there, news writing, is a “legendary boot camp,” said Lauterer, who also ended up teaching journalism at his alma mater.
Tom Bowers, a former UNC professor and dean, hired Yopp for the job. He described him just as other journalists who worked with Yopp throughout his career had: low-key and gentle, but with high standards.
“I saw what students said about him every semester,” Bowers said. “He cared a lot about them. He wanted to make them better writers, but he did it in a kind and gentle way. They all appreciated that. He played a really key role in that school for many years.”
Yopp, who used a flip phone and never had an ATM card, preferred to write on hard copies of his students’ papers, rather than editing them online. After teaching virtually in 2020, he decided to take a break.
Yopp’s oldest granddaughter, Chloe Yopp, is following in her grandfather’s footsteps. As a junior in UNC’s journalism program, she has veered slightly from Yopp’s path, however, and is pursuing a career in public relations and advertising. She also works at The Daily Tar Heel, in its brand studio.
“All my professors know (Mike and Jan Yopp) and recognize my last name,” Chloe Yopp said.
“Are you related to the J-school Yopps?” Chloe said people ask her.
And so her grandfather’s legacy lives on.
This story was originally published February 2, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
