Pilot Project

In the summer of 2001, Matt Moriarty took an internship with his hometown newspaper, The Pilot, based in Southern Pines, North Carolina. “It was a small enough operation that, right away, I started getting stories in the paper,” he says. “The first year, I won a couple of awards. In my mind, I’m like, ‘I’m heading to The New York Times! I should be working at The Washington Post right now!’”

Instead, Moriarty stayed in Southern Pines, covering everything from crime to politics to local personalities, for nearly a decade. An early story led him to Taser school, which culminated with Moriarty himself being shocked with a Taser. “I remember thinking, ‘How do I get this to stop?’ The only thought that came into my head was: ‘Oh, I can just die!’ And then it stopped.”

Moriarty also covered the night of the 2004 election with the Kerry-Edwards campaign in Boston, as John Edwards hailed from the same county as The Pilot. “I remember bleary-eyed filing a half-story at about 4 a.m., getting a call at about 7 a.m. that there was going to be a concession speech, running out and covering it, and then driving back to North Carolina on about two-and-a-half hours of sleep,” Moriarty says. “Coming across the Virginia border into North Carolina—I don’t think I’ve ever been that tired in my entire life. The headlights were leaving trails in my eyes.”

Eventually, Moriarty needed a change of scenery, and enrolled at the University of Kansas School of Law in 2011. Now, he works with small businesses on federal government contracts at Schoonover & Moriarty in Olathe, Kansas. “It was the writing that I really liked,” he says of his former career. “And I found a job where I can continue to write for a living.”