The Texas Pizza Bankruptcy That Somehow Became “Charlotte Business News”
A Texas pizza franchise’s bankruptcy is now “Charlotte business news.” In a recent Charlotte Observer story, a Crust Pizza operator in Gosling Pines, Texas files for Chapter 11, the parent company keeps expanding, and not a single job, lease, or storefront in Mecklenburg County is affected. Yet it runs under the local business banner as if Texans’ court filings are part of our civic diet.
It feels less like local reporting than like opening your fridge and finding it stocked with leftovers from someone else’s house. Technically it is food; practically it is not for you.
At The Charlotte Mercury, our bet is simple: local coverage should start with the street outside your door, not with a PACER docket in another time zone. The Observer run of this piece is a clean case study in the old model we are trying to replace.
What The Observer Is Actually Serving
If you strip away the celebrity garnish, the Observer piece is very simple.
- One Crust Pizza franchisee in Gosling Pines, Texas filed for Chapter 11.
- The parent company did not.
- There is no reported impact on any restaurant in Charlotte or Mecklenburg County.
To keep the page from feeling like a one paragraph news brief, the story piles on everything except local relevance.
You get the Anthony Bourdain deep dish quote. You get Tony Gemignani on dough and balance. You get global pizza market forecasts, low cost franchise growth projections, and a tour of other national bankruptcies: retail, airline, fashion, sports betting. You get a neat list of “More Bankruptcy” stories at the bottom.
What you do not get is a single Charlotte landlord, line cook, delivery driver, or neighborhood shopping center. There is not even a nod to how a low-cost pizza franchise behaves in our city’s strip malls or labor market.
From the outside, it looks like business journalism. On the inside, it is something else entirely.
The Old Model: Attention Harvest, Not Civic Nutrition
Pieces like this exist to do three jobs that have very little to do with Charlotte.
First, they perform for search. The headline reads like a query: “Pizza chain franchise operator files Chapter 11 bankruptcy.” It is built for someone, somewhere, typing exactly that into a search bar. The goal is to capture a broad national audience that cares more about pizza and bankruptcy as concepts than about where the restaurant actually sits.
Second, they keep the ad machine spinning. The more people who click into one bankruptcy story and then into a second and third, the more impressions roll through an ad tech stack the reader never sees. That “More Bankruptcy” list is not civic minded curation. It is a conveyor belt.
Third, they feed a corporate content quota. Chain owned metros are under constant pressure to look busy. Syndicated explainers from an outlet like TheStreet fill verticals at low cost. The local website stays active without the expense of sending a reporter to a zoning meeting or a corridor that is actually changing.
If that arrangement feels a little abstract, imagine a hospital that is paid not on whether patients get better but on how many times it can bill insurance for taking your temperature. That is roughly where a lot of legacy news economics landed. Volume is rewarded. Depth is costly.
That one pizza story is a neat little X ray of the attention merchant model: national content, local masthead, and your time quietly sold by the slice.
A Different Case Study: When The Story Is Here, Not There
Put a different kind of example on the table.
When Mecklenburg County approved a November vote on the one-cent transit sales tax in Mecklenburg’s One-Cent Transit Tax Heads to November Ballot, we did not run a wire story about “local transit tax trends in American metros.” We sat with the text, the numbers, and the control structure, then built a full breakdown: who governs the money, which projects get funded, and what the fine print does to roads and rail in Mecklenburg.
That approach carried straight into our election work. Our special coverage, Poll Dance 2025, is not a stack of horse race headlines or national talking points. It is a set of guides, profiles, and explainers that walk through real tradeoffs and real power in Charlotte. The goal is simple: when you stand in the voting booth, you should know exactly which levers your vote moves.
Both examples are labor-intensive. They require reading, mapping, and sometimes telling people things they would prefer stay buried in committee packets. They do not travel as generic content. They are too specific to this one place.
The Texas pizza story moves in the opposite direction. It is almost perfectly portable. If you swapped “Charlotte Observer” for the name of any other city, nothing important would change. That is the point. It is built to be everywhere and from nowhere at once.
The Unexpected Analogy: Streaming Playlists Versus A Club Gig
What the Observer is doing here feels a lot like a giant generic playlist on a streaming service. The songs are sorted by mood and topic. Somewhere, an algorithm slides another track into your ear because it sounds just enough like the last one to keep you from closing the app. The location is irrelevant. It does not matter if you are in Charlotte or Chicago.
The Charlotte Mercury is trying to be something closer to a club gig in a room you actually recognize. Fewer songs. More context. You know the players on stage. They can point to the window and say, “That line in the song is about that intersection, right there.” If we are going to ask you to spend your finite attention, the least we can do is make sure the work is anchored in your actual city.
The syndicated bankruptcy explainer is the opposite. It is a respectable track on a playlist that has forgotten where it is being played.
Three Observations From The Local Side Of The Glass
Spending a lot of time watching how this city is covered teaches you a few unflattering truths about the old model.
First, “local” is often just a marketing adjective. Attach it to a homepage, then fill that homepage with whatever content your syndication deals and corporate partners already produce. The masthead says Charlotte. The story could run, unchanged, in Phoenix.
Second, the metric tail wags the editorial dog. When revenue is tied to pageviews and ad impressions, the natural gravitational pull is toward topics that promise quick, national traffic curves. Bankruptcy and fast food are both reliable curve makers. Zoning boards and budget hearings are not. Unless you consciously resist that gravity, your front page drifts toward the former.
Third, the business side quietly shapes the kind of journalism that survives. If your revenue is heavily dependent on programmatic ads, you are incentivized to crank out content that keeps people scrolling. If your revenue depends on trust within a defined community, you are incentivized to explain complex, slow-moving things over time.
The Texas pizza piece is not an accident. It is exactly the sort of story that floats to the surface when the old incentives are in charge.
The New Model We Are Trying To Build
At The Charlotte Mercury and Mercury Local, we are trying to construct something different, with a few basic rules.
- We do not run stories that cannot answer a clear “so what for Charlotte” in a sentence.
- We publish under Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0, so our work can be shared and reused without being locked behind data harvesting subscription funnels.
- We are privacy-first, which means we are not quietly auctioning your reading habits to the highest bidder while you try to understand a ballot measure.
- We accept that being “always last to breaking news” is a fair price for getting the story right and making it legible for people who have day jobs.
In practice, that looks like long explainers on how the House Rules Committee really works, rather than another shallow national horse-race story. It looks like zoning coverage that names the corners and traffic counts, rather than cutting and pasting a developer press release. It looks like investing months in Poll Dance 2025, so a transit tax is not just a slogan in a mailer.
None of that is flashy. It is certainly not optimized around the next pizza bankruptcy filing in a state you might never visit. It is, however, grounded in the stubborn belief that Charlotte deserves better than someone else’s leftover content.
If you want more of that work, start at our home page at The Charlotte Mercury, browse the latest civic reporting in News, and dig into our Politics and Poll Dance 2025 guides before the next ballot.
About the Author
Peter Cellino is the publisher of The Charlotte Mercury, which means he spends a suspicious amount of time reading meeting packets and refilling his coffee mug. If you have thoughts, tips, or a strong opinion about what counts as “local,” send a note on Bluesky at @petercellino.com.
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This article, “Old Pizza, Old Media: Why The Charlotte Mercury Will Not Serve This Slice Of “News”,” by Peter Cellino is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0.
“Old Pizza, Old Media: Why The Charlotte Mercury Will Not Serve This Slice Of “News””
by Peter Cellino, Mercury Local (CC BY-ND 4.0)