With the “Best Of” edition of our newspaper making its debut this year, The News would like to present our opinions of what are the “Best Of” for us this year.

In our classic category with questions ranging from best Murray restaurant, best residential college (it’s always Franklin), best faculty, etc.

All these questions are pretty simple and have been answered before in other articles or in this paper.

For the “Best Of” from the editors, we have some special categories that we judged over.

When talking about events on campus this year, we can not look past the some of the most interesting events, those being the controversies. When talking about the University as a whole, the ‘Best Of’ controversy has to be the power outage. This was by far the biggest controversy on campus this year with students being evacuated from White and Regents residential halls, power being out all over campus and other issues that The News has spent weeks covering.

Besides the power outage, the University has also seen some smaller issues pertaining to turmoil inside one of the (former) largest clubs, the Bluey Club. The great rise and fall of this club should be discussed for years to come. This club came out of nowhere and gained traction very quickly when nearly a 100 students were active in it. However, when it became more official, corruption spread through its ranks until the club eventually fell apart. We believe the fall of the Bluey Club to be the “Best Of” student led controversy this year.

Now when it comes to The News, we have had a fair share of work done this year. With the work we have done, we have decided to choose a few stories that we believe to be some of our best from the year.

Before talking about individual stories, we have to talk about our number one issue… newspaper issue. Our Homecoming paper was 36 pages which was our biggest paper of the year. Creating that paper required many hard nights of editing, writing, teeth grinding and yelling to get it published but we did it.

When it comes to coverage of events and what we did the “Best Of”, that will have to go to our sports editor Zach Simmons and our photo editor Kris Fister and their hard work with women’s basketball.

Zach and Kris went above and beyond for the entirety of women’s basketball this year by traveling to different tournaments across the region, writing interesting summaries, constant social media updates, taking spectacular photos, as well as scoring the first sponsored coverage The News has ever had. Simmons has been working hard throughout the year to help ensure our sports were well covered even outside of women’s basketball so he deserves the “Best Of” our stories this year.

While we discuss “Best Of” our stories and coverage, it’s also worth mentioning the ‘Best Of’ what we did this year. At The News, we have greatly increased our outreach not only across the University, but also through our online presence. Multiple times this year we have received close to a quarter million clicks on our social medias in just a week. For a University that has around 10,000 current students, that’s a substantial amount of clicks.

With our social media, we also have branched out to different forms of social media content, like Instagram, Tik Tok and Facebook. We’ve been working hard creating content for all these platforms and increasing our follower base greatly this year as well as planning on expanding this section in the semesters to come.

One last thing that we have done somewhat well is winning 45 STATE AND FIVE NATIONAL AWARDS for different topics across the board. Some of these awards include our photo editor, Kris Fister, receiving the Journalist of the Year from the Kentucky Press Association, as well as multiple section writers receiving numerous awards like best editorial page, best analytical piece, best video and many more just to name a few.

Here at The News, we are proud of the work we have done this year and the dedication from many writers, contributors, and editors that have spent numerous hours going out of their way to report the very best news and stories to this campus. Shoes up!