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Anniversary brings more new technology
Southwestern Community College isn’t the only one with an anniversary this week. With this issue, The Sylva Herald is embarking on its 80th year of bringing you the news.
With this milestone comes a challenge that is becoming commonplace in today’s world – the advent of new technology that changes the way we do things.
As I took a break two weeks ago from my struggle to “get with the program” (InDesign), I happened to see a stack of 8-year-old Sylva Heralds on a window sill. A minimum of investigation revealed that advertising sales rep Sherry Peek, who was in junior high when those papers were published, had been clearing out around her desk and the pile of papers was free to whoever claimed them.
As I relived 1997 through The Herald’s front pages, I was struck by the irony. There, right in front of my eyes was the proof that the newsroom had survived one computer revolution and might make it through this one, too.
It was in May 1997 that we traded our beloved Compugraphic phototypesetters for Macintosh computers and an amazing but mystifying program called PageMaker.
The shift is clear to the trained eye: The type on the May 8 edition, with its top story, “Ensley named emergency services coordinator,” is just a little different from that on the May 1 front page with its lead report (how appropriate this week when SCC is in the news) “Cecil Groves named new SCC president.”
Looking through newspapers we’d prepared eight years ago caused a bit of a disconnect, too. On the one hand, events I read about seemed like eons ago; on the other, front pages I had designed seemed as familiar as the ones from last month.
It’s partly because The Sylva Herald fills a unique niche for Jackson County. We are the only place historians will find a complete record of local news. Events that generated half a dozen stories will be reduced to a few sentences – if that – in future history books.
As an example, let’s look at the stories in this week’s companion issue. Dated April 10, 1997, it was Volume 72, No. 1, just as this March 31, 2005, edition is Volume 80, No. 1.
Leading off is a banner headline that reads “Blanton Branch no longer C&D option, Fowler says.”
How many remember the yearlong struggle to site a C&D landfill before commissioners decided to temporarily use the old Dillsboro landfill and then built a transfer station on Mineral Springs Drive a few years later? Before the Blanton Branch site was nixed, county leaders had set off shock waves of outrage by proposing locations in Webster and Greens Creek for the facility.
And all that uproar was generated by commissioners’ efforts to live up to the terms of the Jackson-Macon solid waste agreement, one that was finally voided some six weeks ago.
Also brought to you in the April 10, 1997, Sylva Herald are pictures of the morning fire that destroyed the Western Sizzlin’ steakhouse. That site sat idle for years, only to be resurrected as a newsmaker this past summer, when it was the choice of a six-member committee as the best site for a new library.
Another story on that week’s front page: “Sylva funds streetscape drawings; postpones decision on construction” reports on a town board meeting that saw Sylva leaders agree to pay for Main Street improvement plans but retie their purse strings before committing to build the proposed streetscape that is now a reality outside our newsroom windows. Eight years later, and we’ve got plans for another streetscape – on Mill Street this time.
The final story on that issue’s front page is another harbinger of present-day news. Sylva’s board wrestled with a sign moratorium, a year ahead of their comprehensive zoning ordinance. And just a week or two ago, we had both a report of an in-town sign conflict and another about county commissioners considering a different type of moratorium.
Whatever The Herald’s news, it’s important to us because it happens in Jackson County. We’ve been your news source for some eight decades and we plan to keep on chronicling the events that shape the lives of Jackson County’s citizens.
Reviewing the old issues at least reassured me that these struggles with the new program, like the prospect of a C&D landfill on Blanton Branch, will turn into old news; we just hope it’s sooner rather than later.
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