Southpoint Access: News from the Block, Not the Bubble
I live, drive, shop, and carpool here - then report what matters across 54, 55, I-40, and 70. Southpoint Access is your map to a fast-changing South Durham.
Subscribe, donate, or sponsor before March 31 to support the Rogers-Herr Middle School Music Boosters!
Hey, neighbor.
I’m Wes Platt, editor, publisher, and neighborhood news guy for Southpoint Access – a local and independently owned information outlet focused on the people, policies, and projects shaping South Durham. I write about our schools, new developments, businesses, and occasionally politics.
Mostly I’m interested in what’s happening in places like Hope Valley, Parkwood, Chancellor’s Ridge, Woodcroft, Fairfield…well, pretty much anywhere in the turf between I-40 and Highway 70, 15-501 and Scott King Road, down 55, and along 54 through Research Triangle Park.
In this readership area, Southpoint Access has a potential audience of more than 120,000 people who deserve to be informed about what’s going on. Right now, we’ve got close to 400 subscribers – including you. Thanks for caring about news in your backyard!
My first journalism job came in seventh grade, when I went to junior high school (the kids call it middle school now) in Florida. A friend of our family ran a weekly community newspaper that I helped deliver from his van on Saturday mornings. Because I was in the marching band and regularly attended our football games, he hired me to write sports articles.
Our team was terrible. I wrote about how bad they were. The football players didn’t like that. I was a puny kid with a bowl haircut and Coke bottle glasses. They didn’t show much mercy.
And yet I kept gravitating back to journalism.
In high school, I spent many hours in the newspaper classroom. At Valencia Community College, I wrote news articles and columns (and sports!) for our newspaper, which was known then as…the paper. That’s about the time I met Nerdspresso columnist Jeff Stanford. We both learned a lot working with our advisor, the late, great Tom Pierce. Then I moved on to the University of South Florida, where I became editor-in-chief of The USF Oracle and the paper won the Society of Professional Journalists award for Best Student Daily in the Nation. I gained a lot of journalistic wisdom by working with Professor Rick Wilber. (We also still share an appreciation for speculative fiction!)
My work at USF put me on the radar for The St. Petersburg Times. They took me on as an intern, and then a correspondent (paying me by the story), before realizing it would be much cheaper to put me on staff.
I covered crime and courts, schools, government and politics, development, human interest stories – basically every beat that a reporter could tackle. Working with editors like Bill Stevens, Mike Konrad, and Mike Moscardini, I honed my reporting and writing skills. In 1994, I spearheaded a new project: The Central Times, a hyperlocal regional edition of the paper focused primarily on the Tampa bedroom communities of Land O’Lakes and Wesley Chapel.
And look at me now, some 30-odd years later, doing the same sort of thing in South Durham. These days, I live with my wife, two kids, and a puggle in Hope Valley Ridge. The children go to Durham Public Schools. My dog goes to Southpoint Animal Hospital for her shots.
I’m not phoning this in from a desk in Raleigh. I sit in school carpool lines with you. Get stuck at Garrett and Hope Valley Road with you. I catch movies and shop at The Streets at Southpoint. I take my kids to Atomic Empire to check out games and comic books.
Community news is in my blood. My wiring. I’ve never quite been able to shake it, no matter how I’ve tried with career diversions into video game design and technical writing. If you’ve been in Durham for 14 years or more, maybe you remember my columns and articles in The Herald-Sun, back when I worked with Hope Valley denizen and Preservation Durham guru Bob Ashley, covering police, K-12 education, higher education, and writing columns about my life and my growing family.
Simply put: Southpoint Access is my way of trying to fill a vacuum that’s been left by the decline of legacy media outlets in our area. But I’m just one journalist assisted by some generous friends. Ultimately, serving 120,000 readers effectively and efficiently requires a team of reporters with dedicated beats, working hard to do them all justice.
That doesn’t happen quickly one $5 monthly subscription at a time. But I welcome each and every subscription.
Clearly, you value knowing what’s going on in South Durham. I hope that you’ll consider donating – or, if you run a small business around here, that you’ll become a sponsor.
As much as I want Southpoint Access to be financially sustainable and primed for growth, I also want to give back to the community that supports me. Subscribe (you can even upgrade your existing subscription), donate, or sponsor Southpoint Access before March 31 and a share of that revenue goes to the Rogers-Herr Music Boosters Club.
Thanks so much for reading. Stay informed. Stay curious. See news? Tell me about it at wes.platt@southpointaccess.news!
This is your neighborhood newsroom. I’m just lucky to run it.
Best,
Wes Platt
Neighborhood News Guy
Get Connected
- Send email to your neighborhood news guy: wes.platt@southpointaccess.news
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