State capital news no longer will be delivered via the baritone of Matt Willoughby.

The veteran N.C. News Network reporter bade farewell to the press corps, legislators and lobbyists alike on Tuesday. There was even a cake, which was NOT paid for by any special interests.

Willoughby has covered the legislature full time for nearly a decade and reported on it and other Raleigh happenings for twice that long. He took a company buyout and is headed for ventures yet to be determined.

Radio listeners would recognize the deep intonation with which he delivered authoritative reports, while visitors to the Legislative Building would recognize him as the guy taking all those outdoor cigarette breaks, which helped make that voice possible!

Safe travels, Matt. You'll be missed.

North Carolina's newspapers have pretty good legal protection.

Thanks to the efforts of the N.C. Press Association, our inestimable attorneys and the willingness of a few big papers and TV stations to bankroll legal fights, our state has few bad precedents in state courts for the kinds of judgements that make journalism difficult.

Blogging could change all that. As the saying goes, everyone's a journalist now, but not everyone has the same financial and institutional backing as a daily newspaper reporter.

That could hurt bloggers who get sued, but it could also hurt everyone else who wants to be a journalist (including Dome). A single poorly fought lawsuit can result in a judgement that is wielded against everyone else and eventually becomes precedent.

What should bloggers do about this? Dome recommends they get familiar with this information, which provides some instruction on the state's case law. But more could be done.

Dome has two suggestions: Creating a North Carolina media law wiki site to answer libel questions in plain English and starting a N.C. Bloggers Association parallel to the press association. A third idea — adding bloggers to the press association — might be a tougher sell.

Add your two-cents here or on your own blog and send us a link.

UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communication announced today that it has hired a former executive at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times to help the school focus on the digital media revolution.

Penelope Muse Abernathy, a Laurinburg, N.C. native and former reporter, editor and media executive, has been named the Knight Chair and in Journalism and Digital Media Economics, reports Jane Stancill. Abernathy starts the job July 1.

Abernathy is vice president and executive director of industry programs at the Paley Center for Media in New York.

The Internet revolution has weakened traditional media businesses in recent years, a trend that scholar Phil Meyer, UNC-CH's current Knight Chair, detailed in his 2004 book "The Vanishing Newspaper." Meyer will retire later this year.

Abernathy launched new money-making enterprises at some of the nation's most prominent news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Before her career on the business side of the industry, she worked as a reporter or editor at various newspapers, including The Charlotte Observer, The Greensboro News & Record, The Dallas Times-Herald, The Wichita Eagle-Beacon, The Fayetteville Times and The Laurinburg Exchange.

A news segment from a UNC-Chapel Hill student that John Edwards' campaign tried to have pulled.