Cheers to 26 years of Smoky Mountain News
My office is cool and our building on Montgomery Street in Waynesville is quiet. Almost everyone who works at The Smoky Mountain News has gone home for a few minutes to tend to kids, dogs, wives and husbands as it’s one hour before the annual first Friday in June birthday bash celebrating another year of putting out this weekly print newspaper (and now a seven-day-per-week news website).
Another trip around the sun for the earth, another year in the books for The Smoky Mountain News. Our very first edition hit the streets on June 6, 1999, which was 26 years ago this week.
This local news company’s entire lifespan has occurred in a transformative and transitional era for journalism, not just in America but around the world. In September 1998, the year prior to our opening, Google was founded. That search platform and its ease of use helped spur the initial transition to online news offerings. Three years earlier, 1996, the venerable New York Times created its first website, posting some of its stories on what then was referred to as the “World Wide Web.” It was a very rudimentary site, but it spoke to the future.
And so here we are today, still providing coverage of events and issues that are important to the people of this region. Almost 100,000 unique visitors read something on our website each month. We print around 16,000 print papers each week, distributing them all over the four-county region that makes up our coverage area (Haywood, Jackson, Macon and Swain counties, along with the Qualla Boundary).
But the number of independent, locally owned news entities keeps shrinking, and there are no locally owned daily newspapers in this state. Local media means the owners are not beholden to billionaires or far-away shareholders; no, we are beholden to you, our local readers, the folks who decide whether we survive to see another day, another edition, another birthday to celebrate next June.
In our region, the locally owned group includes us, The Mountaineer, the Sylva Herald and the Highlands Newspaper. All the others in this far west region are owned by corporations not located in the community they serve (save for a couple over in Asheville). The Cherokee One Feather and its editor Robert Jumper do a great job. It is tribally owned and so isn’t completely independent.
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But it’s not just the media landscape that has changed so drastically over the last 26 years. In this short time, our online habits and the ease of access it provides to almost all necessities have made us all dependent on far-away faceless companies that have re-shaped nearly every transactional decision we make. If you wanted, you could have food, clothes and home care necessities dropped at your doorstep. One can get car and house loans and insurance online. All of us could wrap ourselves in a cocoon of digital outreach and severely reduce interactions with other humans and what I will refer to as the real world.
And now, the AI revolution is launching as we speak. It can write stories, write computer code, write music and poetry, create household budgets, create paintings and … who knows what else in the very near future. Will we all have implants that give us the ability to do all manner to once impossible intellectual feats?
Remember the Luddites? They were English textile workers in the early industrial age who wrecked factories and protested when mechanization started doing the weaving and other work once performed by real people. The term has now come to refer to anyone who spurns technological advances in favor of the old ways of doing things.
Well, I’m no Luddite, but I do still enjoy some of the old things, including a newspaper and a good cup of coffee. I also enjoy a good birthday party, and ours was fantastic. Thanks to all of you who helped us mark one more year covering the news in Western North Carolina. We sincerely appreciate you.
(Scott McLeod can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
