For writing samples and to see my award-winning work visit davidtravisbland.wordpress.com/writingsamples

In my journalism career, I have written for alt-weeklies, daily newspapers, magazines, legal trade journals and worked with radio and television stations and podcasts. I have covered a variety of topics from hard news to culture. In my work with state-wide and local publications and broadcasters, I have embraced the opportunity to take on new roles and responsibilities as I grew as a journalist, editor and writer.

I began my journalism career in 2012 as a freelancer before becoming a full-time reporter for the alt-weekly, Free Times (Columbia, SC). I wrote long-form cover stories on a variety of topics and shorter articles on arts, music, food and local politics and government. During that time I also freelanced for arts publications, magazines, like South Carolina Living Magazine, newspapers and alternative publications like music zines. In 2018, I earned the South Carolina Press Association’s Judson Chapman Award in community journalism for a Free Times story about a human trafficking victim, the realities of the crime in South Carolina and her effort to expunge her criminal record. 

That same year, I started working for The State, the daily newspaper of Columbia. I was an enterprise reporter who focused on human stories through crime, police accountability reporting, court coverage as well as breaking news.

While I was recognized for my work from 2018 and 2019, the culmination of my emphasis on using objective reporting to tell stories about people and the consequences of social and political issues on their lives came in 2020. That year, stories on a child’s death investigation, workers striking during COVID, the police response to a protest and the pandemic’s effects on renters earned me the South Carolina Journalist of the Year award, the SC Press Association’s highest honor.

In 2022, I became the editorial editor for The State, The Sun News of Myrtle Beach and The Island Packet of Hilton Head, publications owned by McClatchy in South Carolina. I wrote editorials that held state and local officials accountable. My opinion-writing led to a problematic school board member losing his re-election bid and the firing of a jail director who had been investigated for sexual harassment. I also commissioned and edited op-eds and supervised and edited a team of columnists. The South Carolina Press Association awarded me for my column writing.

I moved to North Carolina later that year and began working for WRAL television in Raleigh, where I covered the state judiciary, elections and gathered and analyzed municipal, state and crime data for televised and online stories. Soon after, I took a job as a North Carolina court reporter with the legal trade journal Law360, covering complex civil and criminal cases at the state and federal level. The peak of my Law360 tenure came when I interviewed the chief circuit judge for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and published a story on his vision for the court and the types of cases it would hear in the future. 

In 2024, I returned to McClatchy and joined the combined editorial board for the Raleigh News & Observer, Charlotte Observer and Durham Herald-Sun. I was the opinion editorial editor for those publications, a position in which I commissioned, reviewed, edited and published opinion editorials and other submitted articles. I also worked with a team of columnists to edit and publish their work and wrote my own occasional column. As part of the editorial board, I had a hand in crafting our editorial voice as well as contributing to our endorsements and criticisms. 

Below is some of my journalism that resulted in government changes or other significant outcomes:

Contact dtravisb@gmail.com