There’s an old adage in newspapering that goes something like this: if readers from both sides of a story are upset, then you’ve gotten close to the truth.

For obvious reasons, I’ve never completely bought into that one, but I still deal with a whole range of emotions — nervousness, excitement, relief — every time we send our weekly off to the printer. How will readers react? Will they even care? Are they reading? Did we get anything wrong in a story, leave out some important event in one of our calendars?

As The Smoky Mountain News marks its sixth anniversary since the days it was dreamed up in a smoky pub (see the volume and issue numbers on the front), I find myself dealing with a serious issue that arose because of last week’s cover. Not the cover story, which was about a new development that is now under construction along the shores of the Nantahala River, a development that many are upset about. No, the story didn’t illicit anything but kudos.

It was the cover image that had me fielding calls from those on both sides of the issue.

The headline on the cover read “Colliding Worlds,” and it showed kayakers floating along a stretch of river with a house just a few feet off the water. The image, of course, was altered. The cover wasn’t meant to be taken literally, but was illustrating the collision course between those who want the shores of the Nantahala River to remain undeveloped and those who believe houses can be built near its shores without detracting from the quality of the rafting experience.

Our mistake, in my estimation, was one of oversight. We thought the artistic license taken with the two images via the computer would be obvious. Nowhere in Western North Carolina are new houses that close to a waterway.

The developer, however, didn’t think we were fair. Ami Shinitsky is a former magazine publisher who paid a handsome price for the land and is in the process of trying to build a development he touts as first-class, one he says will be sensitive to what makes the Nantahala Gorge special. His houses, he says, will look nothing like the one we used and will be set back farther from the water. He took issue with our cover, and in retrospect I agree with his contention.

Our friends at the Nantahala Outdoor Center also had issues with our cover. The NOC board of directors has adopted a formal declaration in opposition to the development, which says, in part: “We believe the current development plans are environmentally and aesthetically unsound.”

NOC officials also did not like the fact that one of their photos was used in our cover. Our mistake was in not using one of the dozens of photographs we have taken of river rafters and kayakers, instead using one that came from the NOC. We altered their photo.

The two phone calls questioning the decisions I made about last week’s cover came while I was considering what kind of column to write about SMN’s anniversary. I don’t mind admitting mistakes, and the issues raised about last week’s cover affected the people in our stories. I made an assumption — that people would know we had altered photographs to illustrate a controversy — and it came back to bite me. So in some respects, this column is about eating crow, and I gotta tell you it never tastes good.

So we’ll discuss the issue, implement some policies to try and prevent it from happening again, and keep reporting the news. One of my former bosses used to get us back into our jobs when problems were sidetracking our collective energy by saying the “sun would rise again” tomorrow: that was a gentle reminder that there is work to be done today and a chance to start anew tomorrow. In this business you’ve got to learn while on the move.

A day before those phone calls came, my car was on empty, the dashboard light imploring me to take a few minutes and fill up. As I pulled into one Waynesville’s busy gas stations last Wednesday, a place where traffic simply does not flow well, a guy about my age pulled up in a small truck. He stopped right by the road, jumped out and dodged several vehicles on his way to the Smoky Mountain News blue box that had been filled earlier that day with this week’s edition. He glanced at the cover, stuck it under his arm and headed back to the truck. Then he was gone.

OK, call it ego, but in that moment I felt a sense of satisfaction, a feeling that perhaps we are doing something worthwhile. Someone’s reading.

From the inside looking out, it’s difficult to determine what kind of reputation a newspaper is earning. I can tell you that we will admit when we are wrong, but we will also continue to jump feet first into the important issues facing this region. We’re going to lead the charge for smart land use and for support of important environmental and economic causes. We’ll be out front urging people to support the small, independent businesses that separate Western North Carolina from the Anywhere, U.S.A., towns where big boxes have won the retail war. We won’t back down from any power brokers, be they politicians or our largest advertisers. We will use our resources to encourage support for our natural and cultural resources.

The Smoky Mountain News fills, I think, a void. We aren’t a typical community newspaper, and we don’t want to be. There are plenty of others doing that already, and even larger papers are jumping into that fray. And we’re certainly not one of the niche publications that speak to a very narrow audience. Lord knows that market is getting crowded.

In a sense, we have to survive by our wits. We have to choose which stories to cover, which issues we think our readers will find interesting, and then decide how we will cover it. We try, in at least a couple of stories and opinion pieces each week, to provide some perspective that other media in our region aren’t. Sometimes we push the envelope, like last week, and get reined in.

But I can promise you we’ll be a better newspaper for it. We’ll keep working to get it right. I want people like that guy at the gas station, and a whole lot of others, to keep reading.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com.)