It was another good year for community journalism in Western North Carolina, and writers from The Smoky Mountain News were a big part of it, taking home more editorial awards — 21 — than any other newspaper in its class. 

As we ring in the New Year, The Smoky Mountain News likes to look back and reflect on the last year of news. 

The headlines that have graced our pages in 2019 have had an important impact on the people of Western North Carolina, and our staff has taken its job of reporting and analyzing those issues seriously.

By Cory Vaillancourt • Fake News Editor | It’s the most wonderful time of the year! That’s right, it’s time for our annual installment of the Fake News Freakout, in which we take stories that sprout from a small grain of truth, harvest them, and then process them into a multi-layered cake of mockery and silliness frosted with fraud. 

Does the information we provide each week — information that we have been producing free for the last 20 years — have a value? I am asking that question of all of our readers.

At our inception in June 1999, we were not so unusual in the newspaper world. We decided to give the paper away, our revenue source being the advertisers who wanted to get their message to our readers. That remains a relatively common model in our business, and you can look around the world and around Western North Carolina and find other print media who do the same.

I can’t, thinking back now, remember what the two floors below us were at 9 Main Street, in 1999 when this adventure known as The Smoky Mountain News took flight. I can, however, testify those five or six of us stuck around in the nooks and crannies of that third floor, all with electric heaters under our desks during the winter of 1999 were not thinking about where or what The Smoky Mountain News would be in 20 years.

Let’s start with some basic mathematics.

For 20 years, I have reviewed books for The Smoky Mountain News. For some of those years, I shared the position of reviewer with that fine storyteller and playwright, Gary Carden. Occasionally, too, others like writer and poet Thomas Rain Crowe have published reviews in this space.

In the beginning, one doesn’t even think about the long run. When you’re fighting every day to survive, there’s no time to look over your shoulder. Slow down long enough to take in what’s in the rearview mirror, and you’re all too likely to get eaten alive by those who would love nothing better than to chew up and spit out the upstart.

Starting this week, The Smoky Mountain News will begin issuing a steady stream of coverage from the nation’s capital as the world awaits the swearing in of the United States’ 45th President, Republican Donald J. Trump.

Although Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have overshadowed nearly every other political campaign in the country, that doesn’t mean that those other campaigns aren’t important.

The Smoky Mountain News won more awards in the large circulation, non-daily newspaper category than all but one newspaper in the state during the recent N.C. Press Association Advertising and Editorial Contest.