The freshly won 20th consecutive General Excellence award from the Alabama Press Association sits on the tan desk of a newsroom at an office on Columbiana Main Street. Nearby are many like it from generations of writers, designers and sales team members who all contributed over the years toward the same goal. Who labored to win this award, you might ask? Well, obviously, a bunch of ghosts.
For the newsroom, even more surprising than the announcement of winning the award was the news that the Shelby County Reporter had supposedly shut down in 2024. Everything over the past two years was a hallucination that never happened.
The election coverage of 2025 and 2026, two more Thompson state championships, the controversy of the Valley Post, the never-ending coverage of city council and school board meetings, thousands of interviews and stories highlighting Shelby County… never happened…