Scott Mason

Scott Mason is an award-winning feature reporter for WRAL, best known as the Tar Heel Traveler, whose short segments use food, local landmarks and everyday characters to tell layered stories about North Carolina’s culture and traditions. Within that broader feature remit, he returns often to restaurants, diners and food festivals, using the details of a plate or a menu as a way into the history of a place and the people who keep it going. His work on spots like Vic’s Italian shows how he treats an eatery not just as a business but as a stage for memory, family and community.

Tar Heel Traveler food journeys

Mason’s signature Tar Heel Traveler series focuses on “interesting places and memorable people,” and food is one of the most consistent threads running through those journeys. His segments typically run about two and a half minutes, yet they pack in context about how a restaurant or food stand emerged, what makes it distinctive, and why locals are attached to it. Whether he is profiling an Italian restaurant, a classic lunchroom or a seafood spot like Captain Nance, the story is less a review than a small documentary about place, continuity and craft. A recurring emphasis is longevity: he highlights eateries that have endured for decades, survived generational handoffs or remained faithful to a particular cooking style or recipe. The food becomes a way to show how a community has changed, and what it chooses to preserve.

Classic eateries and State Fair favorites

Many of Mason’s recent pieces revolve around iconic, accessible food institutions rather than high-end dining. In segments such as “Tar Heel Traveler: Whole Truth Lunchroom,” he visits cafeteria-style spaces that serve everyday meals yet carry deep emotional weight for regulars. Coverage like “Tar Heel Traveler: Captain Nance” leans into the long history of a Southern seafood staple, combining images of plates and fryers with stories of service and tradition. He also devotes recurring attention to fairground and festival cooking, as in “Tar Heel Traveler: State Fair Food Day,” where he explores the sheer variety of fair foods and the people who create them. His work following a barbeque food truck to the state fair extends that focus to mobile vendors who bring regional specialties into new settings. Across these pieces, he frames food as a social experience—who cooks it, who eats it, and how it anchors gatherings—rather than as a technical exercise in cuisine.

Feature storytelling beyond the plate

Although food is a prominent theme, Mason’s beat is broader feature storytelling, and he often covers non-culinary subjects that share the same human-interest DNA. In “Tar Heel Traveler: Paintslingers,” for example, he profiles a group of artists whose regular meet-ups become a story about friendship and community on a canvas. In another piece on a former station reporter who wrote a book about his career, Mason uses the subject’s long tenure as a lens on institutional memory and the evolution of local journalism. His Tar Heel Traveler specials collect these kinds of stories—restaurants, roadside attractions, artists, longtime professionals—into 30-minute broadcasts that underscore how varied his feature landscape is, even as it remains grounded in personal narratives. This range means that a restaurant or food producer he covers is often situated alongside other kinds of neighborhood fixtures and character-driven vignettes.

Short-form craft and long-form impact

Mason brings nearly four decades of television news experience to these segments, much of it concentrated in features. He is an author as well as a broadcaster, having built books and specials around his Tar Heel Traveler reporting, which extend his short-form TV work into longer arcs. His professional profiles describe a career marked by more than 100 journalism awards, including major national and regional honors for writing and feature storytelling. Behind the breezy tone of his pieces is a deliberately intensive process: each Tar Heel Traveler story takes at least 10 hours to produce, with roughly two hours of shooting, four hours for him to log interviews and write the script, and four hours for editing. That investment shows up in the finished reports, where tight scripting, strong visuals and a clear narrative arc allow him to introduce a place, develop a character and land an emotional beat in just a few minutes. The net effect is that a segment about a deli, a lunchroom, a fairground stand or an Italian restaurant feels complete on its own but also part of a longer-running chronicle of North Carolina’s people and their food.