The Post and Courier

What you're reading

The Post and Courier is Charleston, South Carolina's daily newspaper of record and the South's oldest continuously published daily, founded in 1803 (as the Charleston Courier; the modern paper resulted from a 1991 merger). It is privately owned by Evening Post Industries, a Charleston-based holding company controlled by the descendants of the Manigault family.

The paper covers Charleston, the South Carolina Lowcountry, the South Carolina state government in Columbia, the Citadel and College of Charleston, Boeing's South Carolina operations, hurricane response and the coastal environment. It won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for 'Till Death Do Us Part,' a series on South Carolina's high rate of women murdered by male intimate partners — among the most consequential investigative projects from a US regional paper in recent memory. The newsroom runs Uncovered, a long-running statewide accountability project partnering with smaller South Carolina papers.

Ownership & funding

Evening Post Industries (private). Funded primarily through subscription + ads.

Subscription-plus-advertising under continuous private family ownership produces an unusually stable incentive structure for a US regional daily — no chain ownership cycle, no hedge-fund cuts, no public-company quarterly pressure. The family's commitment to keeping a substantial newsroom in Charleston has let the paper sustain a deeper investigative and statewide reporting bench than comparable South Carolina dailies, and the editorial board operates with effective independence from the family on most issues. Trade-off: like any privately-held regional paper, the operation is exposed to whatever the next generation of the family decides to do.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places The Post and Courier at Center with a factuality rating of High.

nwsly places The Post and Courier at Center because the paper's news coverage of South Carolina politics consistently treats both parties as accountability targets — its statewide Uncovered project has exposed corruption and misconduct under Republican governors, Republican-controlled legislatures and Democratic-controlled local governments alike, and the paper's framing on policy issues (the Hugo-era beach-access fights, port expansion, Boeing's labor practices, Confederate-monument debates, hurricane preparedness) reads as Lowcountry civic-interest journalism rather than as predictable partisan reporting. Editorial endorsements have crossed parties depending on the race.

Where lean shows up: the paper's award-winning coverage of domestic violence, criminal-justice reform, the 2015 Mother Emanuel church shooting and Confederate-monument removal carries clear sympathies that progressives largely share, and its coverage of South Carolina's coastal-development politics has been hostile to the most aggressive developer interests. The High factuality rating reflects the Pulitzer track record, the Uncovered project's rigorous documentation standards, careful corrections and the deep beat knowledge of a stable newsroom with long-tenured reporters.

Editorial vs news side

Traditional daily-newspaper split. The news desk covers Charleston, the Lowcountry, the South Carolina statehouse and Boeing as straight beats; the editorial board operates separately and issues endorsements and takes positions on state legislation. The opinion page runs a politically mixed column roster and reader letters. The split here is unusually clean because the news desk's accountability posture cuts across parties — there's no consistent partisan tell in front-page selection — while the editorial page takes positions that often don't sort cleanly by national left-right axes.

Why we include them in nwsly

Charleston SC daily; Pulitzer-winning investigative tradition.

The Post and Courier gives nwsly the South Carolina slot and a Lowcountry vantage point on the South that no national Center outlet covers. South Carolina matters as the early-state in the Republican presidential primary, as the home of Boeing's non-union manufacturing experiment, and as a coastal state with serious climate-impact stories. The Uncovered statewide investigative project regularly surfaces stories that national outlets pick up days or weeks later. It fills the South Carolina gap with depth that AP coverage can't match.

Recent nwsly briefs citing The Post and Courier

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