What if all the news ‘that’s fit to print’ were positive?

What makes Our State magazine unique as a publication is that each and every article and photograph is a positive statement about North Carolina’s “people, places, heritage, folklore, food and atmosphere.”

That’s exactly what you see and what you get each month on the pages of Our State, said Bernie Mann, the magazine’s 84-year-old president and publisher.

Mann explains: “I am not in the content or information business. I am in the beauty business. We produce something that is so beautiful that people keep it, put it on their coffee table and save it.”

These are Down East Carteret County crab pot Christmas trees.

Dr. Samir Husni of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, who is a well-known consultant in the magazine publishing industry, said Mann believes Our State can “be an oasis” – where you pick up the magazine “and have 2.5 to 3 hours of unadulterated pleasure.”

Dr. Husni commented that Our State “is one of the most successful state and regional magazines in the country today. It is a thriving, living and captivating magazine that can teach lessons on how an ink-on-paper magazine can thrive in today’s digital age.”

“Mann practices what he preaches, and he preaches what he practices,” Dr. Husni wrote. “Mann is fond of saying: ‘If you like North Carolina, you will love Our State magazine.’ Yes indeed.”

Mann said: “We never have a negative word. That’s why we don’t review restaurants. We review five books a month, but if we don’t like the book, we don’t run the review.”

“North Carolinians are very proud of where they live. What we try to do is let them see their own state in the most positive light.”

Our State was born as The State: A Weekly Survey of North Carolina in Raleigh in 1933, during Great Depression, by Carl Goerch of Tarrytown, N.Y. He had moved to eastern North Carolina in 1916 and was employed as an editor at various newspapers, located in Washington, New Bern and Wilson.

In 1951, Goerch sold the magazine to Bill Sharpe, an esteemed journalist who was the State of North Carolina’s first director of advertising, marketing and tourism promotion. He was appointed in 1937 by Gov. Clyde Roark Hoey and retained by the three governors who followed – J. Melville Broughton, R. Gregg Cherry and W. Kerr Scott.

News media historian Jack Hilliard of Greensboro said Sharpe believed “North Carolina people live in the most fascinating places, do the most ingenious things, have the most incredible experiences, catch the most outlandish fish and invent the most fantastic instruments.”

Sharpe changed the magazine’s name in December 1952 to The State: Down Home in North Carolina. He moved the publication to an “every other week” production schedule in 1954 and hired W. B. (Bill) Wright as his advertising manager. Upon Sharpe’s death in 1970, Wright assumed control. The State became a monthly magazine in January 1973.

In 1984, Wright noted that “the magazine hadn’t changed a great deal over the years, and therein might lie an explanation to its success.”

The first three publishers – Goerch, Sharpe and Wright – were also smart enough to publish photographs by Grandfather Mountain’s Hugh Morton about as fast as Morton could shoot and process film.

Things began to change when Wright sold The State in 1987 to Shaw Publishing Company of Charlotte.

Bernie Mann would enter into the picture in 1996, buying the magazine and moving his new “family business” to Greensboro.