"North Carolina Bookwatch"
From the blog of Ben Steelman, book editor at the Wilmington Star News

D.G. Martin, the host of North Carolina Bookwatch on UNC-TV, the statewide public television network, has been in Wrightsville Beach this week vacationing with family. He took a break, though, on Thursday (July 31) to drop by the Star-News newsroom to talk about the program and its future.

The son of a former president of Davidson College and a ex-Green Beret, Martin practiced law in Charlotte before holding a long list of executive posts in North Carolina's state university system. In the 1980s, he lost two close races for Congress in North Carolina's 9th District (essentially, the Charlotte metro area) and in 1998 he made a strong bid for U.S. Senate in the Democrat primary. (Somebody named John Edwards ended up winning that one.)

Jack Betts of The Charlotte Observer once described him as a sort of Mister Fix-It of North Carolina public administration; in 2007, for example, he stepped in as interim director of the N.C. Clean Water Management Trust Fund.

These days, however, Martin is grinning ear to ear about his TV show, now in its 11th season. Martin, who's been the host and moderator since Season 3, has lots of reasons to be pleased: UNC-TV programmers have put Bookwatch in prime time, at 9:30 p.m. Friday nights, with a repeat at 5 p.m. Sundays. Bookwatch's season has just been extended to 26 weeks.

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