Some call it the death of irony

By Mark Jamison • Guest Columnist | Some have called it the death of irony, the moment when Kenneth Starr, he of special counsel fame, stood in the well of the Senate and bemoaned the possibility that impeachment had become a partisan political tool. Then again, the gaslighting and Eddie Haskell-like pronouncements of cognitive dissonance by folks like Sen. Mitch McConnell have become normalized to the point where many are no longer horrified, just merely curious at what the scriptwriters of this perverse reality show that stands in for American political culture will come up with next. The emperor may have no clothes, but in the valley of the willfully blind who cares to notice?

‘Mountain Murders’ podcast celebrates one year

There’s just something so mysterious about Southern crime stories. Small towns with big characters and dark family secrets. People taking the law into their own hands and crooked cops turning a blind eye. If there’s one thing mountain folk appreciate, it’s a tall tale woven together through the decades.

WCU student working to translate Cherokee language from native newspaper

Constance Owl’s master’s degree thesis is more than a means to a graduate degree in American history. It’s a portal to understanding, and perhaps saving, a disappearing language.

It’s all about the journey

It’s called Blue Ridge Motorcycling Magazine, and it’s become part of our family. Let me explain.

At almost 60 years old — damn, I can’t believe that’s true — odds are I’m beyond the midpoint of my life. That means I couldn’t realistically blame a mid-life crisis around three years ago when I became obsessed with buying a motorcycle. I had owned dirt bikes as a teenager and so knew how to ride. I wasn’t one of those old guys who was starting from scratch, figuring out the gears and the clutch and braking and starting on a hill and all the nuances of counter-steering and leaning into curves. Once upon a time all that was second-nature.

Can you put a value on what we provide?

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.

Shining Rock fails to properly notice meeting — again

Taxpayer-funded Shining Rock Classical Academy’s attempt to address its long history of public transparency law violations got off to an inauspicious start when the school failed to provide proper public notice of a Sunday afternoon meeting intended to educate its unelected board – about half of whom actually showed up – on public transparency law. 

Ethically speaking, this can be a tough job

Remember those old movies where submarines find themselves navigating through an underwater minefield, sometimes relying on skill to avoid what would be a sure death and other times surviving near misses on luck alone?

That’s what it feels like sometimes in the world of journalism as we try to make the right ethical choices. It seems almost every day we are discussing the right way to cover a story or whether some event should even be reported. Sometimes these issues are discussed at length, other times reporters and editors have to rely on gut instincts and past experience.

We stand by our brand of journalism

It’s rare when one newspaper questions the integrity of another paper and the intentions of a hard-working journalist whose entire career personifies honesty and ethical decision-making. So we were surprised and a bit taken aback after we read Editor Robert Jumper’s column in last week’s Cherokee One Feather in which he referenced an article in The Smoky Mountain News. For that reason, I felt compelled to respond.

Shining Rock suspends board operations pending training session

Shining Rock Classical Academy has a history of transparency problems, but after an Aug. 19 meeting with representatives of local media, it looks like the taxpayer-funded school’s unelected board is finally going to do something about it. 

Shining Rock continues to struggle with transparency

Editor’s note: This is the seventh in a series of stories on Haywood County’s public charter school, Shining Rock Classical Academy, which has been beset by a host of academic and organizational problems since opening in 2015.

Since 2015, Haywood County’s first public charter school, Shining Rock Classical Academy, has used more than $2.75 million in local taxpayer money to educate children to a level far below the county average, and also below the state average.

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