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Five years ago, leadership and staff at WSOC, the Cox-owned ABC affiliate that serves the Charlotte, N.C., metropolitan area, organized an event to distribute food to homeless locals. Cedric Thomas, whom Cox had hired as the station’s VP and GM a few months earlier, was shocked at the turnout.
The parking lot in which the event was held — one that happened to be located across the street from Thomas’s home — quickly filled to near capacity.
But on that Saturday Thomas wasn’t taken aback by just the sheer numbers of people in need of help. “I went to talk to some of the people in the cars, and I noticed it was families,” Thomas says. “It was nurses, it was teachers.”
They were not the kinds of individuals one would expect to be experiencing homelessness, he thought to himself. Many were professionals who were having a significant impact on the lives of others throughout the community.
Thomas told his news director, Mike Oliveira, an even more-recent WSOC hire than Thomas, about the experience. He then asked him to produce stories about Charlotte’s apparent affordable housing crisis.
“That’s not the most visual [topic] in the world,” Oliveira quips, “but Cedric’s really, really good about challenging us to do the important thing, the hard thing, the thing that’s important to the community.”