Looking back and looking ahead.

• Author: Malan, Mekenna

IN OUR OFFICE, a few wooden shelves hold copies of every Utah Business issue published since January 2018. In preparation for writing this editor's letter, I dug through the archive.

I loved what I found, including a January 2019 article about Salt Lake City's "business renaissance," which has since continued. I was inspired by the 2019 feature on the first annual Living Color Gala, an event that will celebrate its fifth iteration this year in partnership with Living Color Utah. I pored over the first of many articles about the Covid pandemic in the April 2020 issue, which highlighted the local biotech companies rallying to fight it and the many ways businesses had begun to adapt in order to move forward.

As companies and individuals, we constantly move from one stepping stone to the next--whether we're aware of it or not. In my young journalism career, I took the leap from editing my college newspaper at Utah State University to accepting an internship at The Standard-Examiner, then moving to New York City to write copy for music artists in the college radio circuit. Since moving back home to Utah, I've written for local publications like SLUG Magazine and Visit Salt Lake, published pieces in Time Out and Business Insider, and accepted a job as an editor of Utah Business.

This year, Utah Business is taking a step...