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.
4 more food journalists.
Aaron Guerrero
Aaron Guerrero is head of the digital department at Miami’s Community Newspapers, where he pairs restaurant coverage with community-facing content. He focuses on how Miami-area restaurants evolve, celebrate, and experiment through new concepts, menus, and neighborhood-focused dining experiences. He reports on restaurant openings, such as an Italian food hall at Plaza Coral Gables, new executive lunch menus, and wood-fired Latin steakhouse brunches, explaining what sets each venue apart. He also covers awards, like a Wine Spectator honor for an Italian chophouse, and events that turn dining rooms into social hubs. His bylines extend to features on sports-themed gatherings, civic renamings, local visits to restaurant programs, sponsored community pieces, and official notices. His work is straightforward and descriptive, helping readers and local businesses connect around specific openings, promotions, and dining experiences.
Aarron Fleming
Aarron Fleming reports on how courts, jails and public safety systems work over time. He is a reporter at The Daily Memphian covering public safety, the local court system, suburban news and business developments in North Mississippi. His work follows trials, sentencing, appeals, plea deals and judicial decisions, including major cases tied to Tyre Nichols and rapper Young Dolph. He also covers jail conditions, inmate deaths, crime data, prosecution units, trafficking, shootings and public-order incidents. His suburban reporting examines cannabis businesses, restaurant openings and how commercial growth affects communities such as Olive Branch. Fleming previously covered education in the same newsroom. He uses clear, unadorned prose to explain legal steps, deadlines, institutional problems and the political, commercial and community effects of public-safety decisions.
Alana Al-Hatlani
Alana Al-Hatlani is a food writer and editor who treats recipes, restaurants, and food features as ways to explore culture, community, and the business of eating. She works on the food team at Southern Living, overseeing and contributing to print recipes and reported features. Her pastry-focused, restaurant-tested perspective comes from time in restaurant and bakery kitchens. She helps plan and write monthly food packages, including “The South’s Most Treasured Desserts,” and wrote “8 Summer Recipes Our Editors Make Every Year.” She also writes recipe tips, ingredient explainers, restaurant guides, and reported stories about workers, owners, and communities. Her subjects include regional specialties, dining scenes, kitchen basics, and food industries. Her work has appeared with OpenTable and Yahoo. She reports on the ground, explains techniques clearly, and connects specific dishes and places to larger stories about food and livelihood.
Alana Edgin
Alana Edgin is a business reporter whose strongest focus is food, restaurants and consumer-facing businesses. She works at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and has also had work syndicated across AOL and Yahoo News. She covers new openings, closings, expansions and franchise growth, along with retail, health, services, corporate news, data incidents, business support programs and sponsorships. Her reporting includes detailed roundups of new restaurants and businesses, coverage of El Pollo Loco’s opening, and stories on burger trucks, dessert shops, Vietnamese sandwich restaurants and gourmet markets. She also contributes to food and drink reviews, including fall coffee and jerky comparisons. Edgin reports with practical “what, when, where” details, structured comparisons and clear explanations of how offers, partnerships and business changes affect consumers and the local economy.