Observer bought out the Raleigh Times and moved to a building on South McDowell St. in downtown Raleigh, where they stayed until the building was sold in 2015. On September 3, 1934, The News and Observer began a column about state politics called "Under the Dome", which started on the back page, moved to the front and now runs in the local section. In 1968, the Daniels family hired Claude Sitton, who had been a correspondent for The New York Times and later an editor there. Serving as the editorial director of the paper, he promoted The News & Observer as a government watchdog and moved the news of the paper away from the personal and partisan stances it had taken under Josephus Daniels. However, its editorials were still often aligned with the Democratic Party. A year later, the Mini Page children's supplement was created and published. Today, it is one of America's most widely used children's newspaper supplements. In 1971, Sitton became the editor and the paper began buying and publishing smaller local newspapers, starting with The Island Packet in Hilton Head, South Carolina and The Cary News in Cary, North Carolina. On March 16, 1980, a welder's torch started a fire and burned through newsprint threaded through the press, injuring three and causing millions in damage. In 1987, the staffs of The News & Observer and The Raleigh Times merged, and on November 30, 1989, the last edition of The Raleigh Times was published. In 1988, The News & Observer endorsed its first Republican candidate for statewide election, showing, perhaps, a distancing from Democratic partisanship. Throughout the early 1990s, The News & Observer divested itself of various local newspapers in South Carolina and the North Carolina mountains, and by September 1993, Sunday sales of The News & Observer reached 200,000 for every week. However, the newspaper still owns The Cary News, Chapel Hill News, and the Smithfield Herald among other newspapers. In 1994, the paper created Nando.net, becoming an Internet service provider and began publishing the NandO Times online newspaper. In 1999, The News & Observer was named one of America's 100 best newspapers by the Columbia Journalism Review, and one of the 17 best-designed newspapers in the world by the Society for News Design. In 2004, The News & Observer along with three other news publishers filled suit against the Raleigh–Durham International Airport for preventing the company