Barry Yeoman
Appearances
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
He was excited, but he was afraid that people wouldn't get the joke or they would get the joke and they would be angry at us or some reader reaction would not go as expected.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
Standing in front of the governor's mansion, she's in a red suit, has a red blazer. She's wearing a dogwood boutonniere. She's looking directly at the camera. Her head is tilted, and it said, move over, Jim Hunt. And there's a smaller subhead that said, independent candidate Jolene Strickland takes aim at the governor's mansion.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
And then he was being challenged by Robin Hayes, who was a Republican who was most famous for a sex education bill when he was in the state legislature that required the state to adopt a curriculum that, among other things, suggested that kids wash their genital regions after having sex.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
No, this went on for pages and pages. I mean, this was really like a life story. It was a biography. It went on thousands of words.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
Incredibly positive, but there was no indication that people understood that it wasn't real. So people were really excited about her as a candidate, We began receiving phone calls at The Independent. Remember, this is basically pre-email news. It's 1996, so a few people have internet, but mostly this is entirely non-digital. We got phone calls. We got letters.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
People really wanted to send her campaign contributions, but they didn't know where to send them, so they sent us campaign contributions. We also had an ad for bumper stickers and buttons and T-shirts, and people ordered all of those things. There was this real excitement about having a candidate who people— really believed in her values.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
So we weren't worried about the buttons, but we were very worried about the contributions. The buttons, we thought, meant that people were in on the joke and they wanted to spread the news of this mythical candidate. When we began getting contributions, There was this oh-no light bulb that went off over our head.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
So it was starting to become apparent to us that we didn't lay it on quite as thick as we had hoped to.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
And her response to it was something that we thought all but confirmed that she was not real. She said, She said, She said,
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
And neither of them suggested that they knew that Strickland was a fake. And so we published their comments because we figured if they're not doing their due diligence, we'll bet on them.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
She was a scholar of Southern accents. So she had been studying Southern accents, and she was an actor. And so she knew how to perform Southern accents, and in fact had done some of her studying in North Carolina.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
By all accounts, it went well in the beginning. She was very good on the policy talking points. And there were a bunch of reporters there. There are photos from that day, so we can see that there were a bunch of reporters. And she delivered her talking points really well. And the guy we hired as her press secretary stood by her.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
But then the journalists began asking her questions, and they were all questions that were designed to ferret out if she was real.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
Why is there no record of her as having graduated from the University of North Carolina? What highways run through Pine Hill? And she began panicking. And she knew she was going to panic. She had told us the day before that she was not prepared for this. And my editors reassured her that she'd be fine. And she was not fine. She looked to the guy who had been hired as her press secretary.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
After the press conference, we had this real reckoning. And we tried to figure out, what do we do? Because this felt like It was worth doing. It was a great idea. And so what we decided that we would do is that we would issue a mea culpa that in the next issue we would come clean very clearly.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
It would be signed by Bob Moser, the editor, because at our fundamental core we were deeply, painfully earnest.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
And then we urged them to believe in Jolene the idea, if not Jolene the person. And we ran about a dozen more stories that had a disclaimer at the bottom.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
They... They spoke to other newspapers, and they accused us of deception. The other campaigns definitely put on a show of righteous anger. When other reporters from other newspapers reported on the press conference, they called both the Hunt campaign and the Hayes campaign. And for example, Hunt's spokesman said, there are better ways to discuss substantive issues than to mislead your readers.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
And we were having a staff meeting, figuring out how would we cover... the elections in a way that other newspapers didn't. And Bob said, I'm going to walk out of the room and you all figure it out. And I'm not coming back until you have an idea.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
I think there was a little bit of embarrassment that earlier on they had not picked up that it was a fake. And so they were definitely putting on the righteous anger.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
But we also got praise, and it took a while after that press conference before we got praise. The first time that we saw some vindication was— a couple of weeks later from the Greensboro News and Record that said that a specialized newspaper like The Independent is freer to experiment and that, in fact, what we were doing was well in the tradition of literary journalism, which is true.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
Newspapers in the late 18th century and the early 19th century used parody, used satire much more frequently. And it wasn't until the Greensboro News and Record wrote its column that anybody acknowledged that there was real value to what we were doing.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
There may have been more ideas, but I only remember one because it's the one we chose, which was if we had two candidates who we were not crazy about, that we would make up one of our own.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
Yes. Yes. In North Carolina, you can't be a write-in candidate unless you register as a write-in candidate. And so we don't know for sure how many people wrote her in. But here's what we know. After the election, somebody who was involved in the vote counting in Wake County, which is the county seat of Raleigh,
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
the state capitol, said that as they were counting the votes, there was one name that came up over and over, which is Jolene Strickland. And by our calculations, in that one county, she probably got dozens of votes.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
I think by and large, we were glad that we did it. We did it wrong, clearly. We didn't drop enough hints. We panicked when we were exposed. We didn't prepare our actress well enough. There were a lot of things that we made mistakes on. But I think that, by and large, that all of us feel glad that we did it.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
There was a place for alternative weeklies to challenge the kind of stenographic reporting that the press did to help readers see the possibilities. And so for us, having this vehicle of this likable, relatable character felt like the right thing, even if we did parts of the operation wrong.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
Having Jolene Strickland as this upbeat candidate allowed us to tackle these issues without saying, Jim Hunt, you are a tool of big corporations who include polluters who are funding your campaign. We never had to say that. We never had to say, Robin Hayes, you are bringing your own personal morality into a sphere where personal sexual morality has no place.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
And one of the things she told me was that she was finally moving her residence. from Illinois to North Carolina so she could vote for governor of North Carolina in 2024. She was 86 years old. She voted for governor of North Carolina. And then on election day, she was diagnosed with cancer and she passed away right before Thanksgiving. There was
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
Standing on her desk in Illinois, there was a picture of her as Jolene from that period, a 28-year-old photo.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
I am so nostalgic for Alt Weeklys. You know, Alt Weeklys were killed by Craigslist and the internet because what funded us were classified ads and personal ads. And those moved off of print online as soon as there was a Craigslist. And we lost our base of advertising, we meaning all Alt Weeklys around the country. In the gap, What we've seen are much less credible online sources.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
People are turning to Reddit. People are turning to truly fake news journalism that pretends that it's real news. And that era that ran really from the 1970s until the 90s It feels really precious, and I am deeply sad that it's gone.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
He was both excited and nervous. He was excited because it was bolder than what we normally do. And it would be fun. And he was nervous because it wasn't what we normally did. And we were striving every week for credibility. As an alternative weekly, we had one strike against us automatically, which was that we were viewed as biased.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
This was the end of the golden era of alt-weeklies, alternative weeklies, which were weekly newspapers that very intentionally tried to zig left as the rest of the media zig right. We were always looking for the way that we can fill the gap in the mainstream press and
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
We were viewed as not neutral. And people called our journalism in to question as a result of that. And we were doing great journalism. We were doing really strong investigative reporting. And the way that we got our word out, because we were a small paper, was we relied on other publications to who would serve as amplifiers.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
And Bob was afraid that if we had something that they perceived as a stunt, as fake news, that we would lose their credibility, we would lose their respect, and that that careful relationship that we had built would be threatened.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
So her name was Jolene Strickland, and she was the mayor of Pine Hill, North Carolina, which, according to our very first article, is so small that there's no trace of it on the state's own maps. And she was the daughter of a tobacco farmer who had gotten lung cancer. She was a retired educator who She was active in her community.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
She was a lapsed evangelical Christian who had become an active Methodist. She represented rural North Carolina at its most progressive. She was outspoken. She was funny. She also had all the problems that every working class person in North Carolina had. Money was tight. She clipped coupons. She knew the cost of bread because She budgeted her household budget that closely.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
And she was somebody who articulated the values that we wanted to articulate, but in very homespun ways.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
And then she crafted and crafted and crafted the story until we thought we had the balance right, that readers would love this character, but they would know she was a character.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
Well, for example, she lived on Big Bluffs Road. And her campaign slogan was, too good to be true. And the phrase, too good to be true, was littered throughout the story.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
So in 1996, there were two candidates for governor. One was Jim Hunt, who was the incumbent. He was a Democrat. He was well-respected, well-loved. He was a champion of kids. He was also somebody who was very mainstream establishment.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
And she really looked the part. Back then, one of the real political stars in the country was Ann Richards, the governor of Texas, who was this charismatic, populist public speaker. And... Dr. McClay looked a lot like Ann Richards. She was in her middle age. She had silver hair. She was tall, and she looked very rural. And so she was willing to be the face of Jolene Strickland.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
We set up many photo shoots. We basically sent our photographer, MJ Sharp, out with her, She posed in front of the governor's mansion. She went to a Durham Bulls baseball game. She went to a popular restaurant in Raleigh where a lot of politicians and lobbyists hang out.
Criminal
The Pride of Pine Hill
Oh, we were all really excited. Our editor, Bob Moser, he told me much later that right before the story ran, He was driving to work and he pulled over his car and just started crying because he was so scared that something would go wrong.