Ralph Ellis Looks Back 50 Years with ‘The Accident Report’

When Ralph Ellis took a gig at the Thomasville Times for $110 a week, the recent UNC Chapel Hill grad was living amidst what some might call journalism’s finest hour. 

It was 1974, the year that Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward released All the President’s Men, their nonfiction thriller that wrapped up all their reporting on President Nixon’s Watergate scandal. 

“The work that brought down a presidency … perhaps the most influential piece of journalism in history,” wrote Time magazine, citing Nixon’s resignation just two months after the book’s publication.  

At the time, however, Ellis just wanted to write fiction. Inspired by works like The Great Gatsby, he decided as he entered college that he wanted to be a novelist. 

“Of course, I had no idea of how to do it,” he recalled. “So I went to college and for years the idea had been in the back of my mind … I wandered into journalism and I figured, ‘Well, I can learn to write as a journalist and get paid for it,’ which seemed like the most immediate goal: to find a job.” 

Decades later, he’s seen the profession at all stages, working reporting jobs in small, sleepy towns (The Field and Herald in Conway, South Carolina); growing tourist destinations (the Asheville Citizen-Times); and sprawling, urban areas (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

With the internet transforming what it meant to be a reporter, Ellis left AJC in 2011 and worked in digital journalism for CNN and Patch, among other outlets.

This year, he finally accomplished the dream that he had envisioned as a rising college freshman leaving his hometown of Waynesville to attend UNC: he became a published novelist. Of course, he got there with a story about journalism. 

The Accident Report follows Ronald Truluck, a perpetually stoned cub reporter at the Millerton Eagle in the fictional North Carolina town of Millerton who finds himself at the center of his own local “-Gate” investigation in the wake of Nixon’s resignation. It’s an investigation that he naively hopes will land him a gig at The Washington Post … if he can just stay out of his own way. 

We caught up with Ellis over the phone from his home in Decatur, Georgia, following the book’s recent release to discuss how the coming-of-age satire also points to a more serious issue in today’s journalism industry: what small towns lose when they lose their small newsrooms. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Queen City Nerve: How much does your own life experience coincide with that of Ronald Truluck? 

Ralph Ellis: [After graduating from UNC], I had a few interviews and Thomasville Times was the first place to offer me a job, so I took it at $110 a week. There are a few facts and a few situations in the book that are basically the same as my life. Ronald Truluck makes $110 a week, so did I. I had an apartment with a Murphy bed, so does he. I drove a Ford Galaxie 500, so does he. 

It was an eye opener for me as it was for him because, although I grew up in a small town, I was never part of civic life as a kid. I didn’t know anything about police or government or the school system beyond what was happening in my own classroom. So it was a total learning experience every day, even though my editors were not doing much to instruct me. I was mainly learning from my mistakes, which were plentiful.

As you were writing this guy, just how much of his outward character is based on how you approached things during your first job at Thomasville Times? Because I will say, and I want to be careful here because I know he is based on you, but I did find the character frustratingly inept and entitled, almost to a neurotic degree. There’s a lot of very socially awkward behavior and, at times, bad reporting. Was that something where you were being self-deprecating in looking back on your young self when you started your journalism career or was it just meant to create that comic effect? 

I was clueless when I started working as a reporter in 1974, and I’m still shocked that I got hired looking back on it. There must have been a real need to fill a chair. A lot of Ronald Truluck is based on Ralph Ellis — not all of it, but a good bit. I was socially inept and yet I still had a grandiose opinion of myself. It’s very contradictory. I was insecure yet judgmental, if that makes any sense. I think part of that is just being 22 years old. 

And the other part of it is, that was a time in American history when journalists were being elevated to being more than just observers of the world. They were being moved up to world changers. That was always a possibility, that you could write something that would change the world or at least a small piece of the world. And Ronald was deluded into thinking he could do that. So at times I was even more clueless than Ronald, but other times not as clueless. In real life, I was not as ambitious to bust a big corruption story as he was. That’s a fictional thing that I projected onto him. 

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I think most of us can relate to having this idea early in our careers that we’re going to write that one story that will break something wide open, only to then look into it further and find that it’s common knowledge for the most part. For me as an intern reporter in college it was finding out how the schools were resegregating … but everyone already knew. It happened to Ronald in the book, as well. 

There’s so much that is common knowledge that a young reporter says, “Holy shit, I found the real story.” And one of the things I was trying to show is that Ronald encountered a lot of, I guess you’d call it complacency, not just in small-town life but just in real adult life that he wasn’t ready for. When he, in the third chapter, goes into the newsroom and he says, “I found this big story. Somebody had a wreck and the cop let him go,” and then the editor says, “Oh yeah, that was Lamont Moody.” He heard about it at the coffee shop. Everybody knows, nobody cares. An important point, however: Ronald Truluck is in the right to go after this story. It is bad when the city councilman can drive drunk, have a wreck and walk away scot-free. So Ronald was in the right.

What did you learn in those small newsrooms like Thomasville Times that you came up in? 

I’ve worked for some big publications, and I’ve worked at CNN some, and a lot of people have gone straight from college to bigger publications and they have no idea how personal people take news. People who have never worked in a small paper have never had a subject of a story they wrote come to the office the next day and get in your face about how you portrayed something, even if you portrayed it accurately; they didn’t like it. It’s news on a personal level that … I don’t know if it really happens that much anymore. 

What do you remember about being in the old newsroom at Thomasville Times? What memories stick from that style of ’70s newsroom that doesn’t exist anymore? 

Mainly, it was so small and everybody could see everybody and hear everybody, and almost everybody smoked. Another interesting thing that I didn’t quite get to touch on in the novel is how people just walked in and out of the newsroom off the street, just to visit, just to say, “Hey, how about that football game,” or something. There was no security guard or anything and everybody knew where it was. People would show up. Somebody from the school board might drop by to hand off a press release and then they would sit and shoot the shit for a while … It was just such a sociable place compared to what it is now. 

What made you approach this book as a satire? 

In 1999, I got serious enough to really buckle down and complete a manuscript myself. And it was also about a character much like Ronald Truluck. And it was set in a different location in a different time and I got no bites from any editors or publishing companies, so I put it in the drawer. I take it out a couple of years later, tinker with it, change the ending and stuff. Nothing, no reaction, put it back. 

And so after about 10 years, I realized I wasn’t having any luck with that. And so I decided to write a different novel involving the same guy, but basically modeled after my first years as a journalist. The completed manuscript that didn’t sell was more of a hard-boiled crime novel involving a reporter … The Accident Report is more of a small-town comedy and a coming-of-age story.

I wanted to try something different. I love the hard-boiled crime stuff and I read a lot of it, but I realized I wasn’t really bringing anything new to that way of writing. So I started writing The Accident Report in around 2019 and I spent about three or four years on it and then sold it in 2024. I had a number of rejections on it from other editors and agents before I pitched it directly to Black Rose Writing and they took it. 

Did comedy become something that you enjoyed doing? Was that harder for you than your past experience trying to do something more hard-boiled, as you put it?

Truthfully, comedy came more naturally to me than writing dramatic, hard-nosed stuff. A lot of times, newspapering is portrayed as a grim process but actually it’s a very funny process involving humans who work for newspapers and humans who are being covered, and humans are very fallible and a lot of funny stuff happens that doesn’t get written. 

And of course, whenever you get journalists together, mainly they joke about their old stories and about how they screwed up or somebody they were covering screwed up and it’s a big yuck fest. Newsrooms are like comedy clubs in a way, I think. That’s another thing that is being lost. People are not working in newsrooms with each other that much, face to face, so that part of it is gone. 

The newsroom is like a stage to me and you have different characters acting out their personas every day. The tough guy, the joker, the dodger, the flirt, the know-it-all, the guy who pretends, who plays dumb but knows a lot, and it’s just a lot of different characters. It’s very funny. And a lot of times it is a comedy because the endings are happy in some way. 

You’ve spoken a bit already about what is being lost from these small newsrooms, and I do think this book sends a message about what is lost from a journalistic perspective when local newsrooms shut down. Is that a message you wanted readers to take away from this book in terms of why these newsrooms are important for localized oversight or am I just projecting a 2025 moral onto a story that took place half a century ago? 

This is a message that I thought would come through. It’s not something I wanted to hammer. I think it’s pretty obvious. A lot of local papers have failed, not because of the product but it’s just the people, I think, are withdrawing from it. They’re not even that interested in local news as much as they used to be. It is making America dumber to have fewer local newspapers. It’s a subtle message but not something I wanted to put front and center.

Learn more about Ralph Ellis and his new book here. 

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