We can all be proud that the borderlands of Pennsylvania and New York contain some of the friendliest people and loveliest mountain and lake views around.

Add to the list the best small-town weekly newspaper editor in America. That’s what we think, but if you have a name other than thirty-eight-year-old Donald Gilliland,  managing editor of the Potter Leader-Enterprise in Coudersport and proud Potter County native, well, go right ahead and nominate him, neighbor.

Gilliland last month led the Leader-Enterprise to distinction as the most-decorated mid-size weekly newspaper in Pennsylvania in 2007, a distinction the paper has won three times in five years. The Leader-Enterprise won eight prestigious Keystone Awards for journalism excellence from the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association. Gilliland won five of the awards himself. He’s won so many awards we figure he sticks them all over his house, like Boston Celtic great Larry Bird, who had his NBA Most Valuable Player Awards sitting on top of his refrigerator.

We know from experience that Gilliland could be working at a newspaper like The Washington Post,  but he loves it hereabouts too much to even consider such a thing, and who can blame him?  In a few years there may not be a Post or Chicago Tribune except “online,” which in the country is still something you still largely stand on to get a sandwich. Long after city-dwellers are reduced to e-mailing each others’ holographic images even to say the simplest things like “Good morning,” and the most complex, like “I (heart symbol) u,” Don and his neighbors will still be chatting on Main Street, debating his front-page stories.

Now perhaps some people in Potter County would wish Don was indeed working at The Post, but there was a time newspaper reporters wore a feisty love of community as a badge of honor. It used to be an independent newspaper editor was a fixture in the American landscape with the small town and the yeoman farmer, but it’s getting rarer, even in these parts.

Among Gilliland’s contributions, he’s active in Potter County tourism because he wants his home to survive and thrive. Big-city newspaper reporters don’t get involved helping local communities. They say it hurts their “objectivity,” which is a fancy way of saying if you get shot or hit by a car in the middle of the street they’ll be the one on the sidewalk with the video camera waiting for someone to come along and help, proving heroes still exist, or not help, which will prove how selfish humanity is. Gilliland loves his community enough that when a deluded Neo-Nazi racist moved into Potter County aiming to make it a center of the white supremacist movement some years back, the editor realized after a time that covering him “objectively” would make the newspaper a handmaiden to evil.  He decided to help the good people of Potter County throw the bastard out of town, and they succeeded.

Gilliland’s local roots go several generations deep. He’s is the son of Sarah Gilliland of Ellisburg and the late James McMurray of Irish Settlement. You can see those roots tangled in his stories. For instance, the First Place Personality Profile for “Return To Barley Camp,” a story about ninety-eight-year-old Earl Barley returning to the Potter County hunting camp he built more than fifty years ago. And the First Place General News Story for his coverage of spring floods in Genesee and the need for a new bridge to allow emergency vehicles access to the town’s eastern half.

Congratulations, Mr. Gilliand. He will pick this year’s his awards in early May at The Penn State Conference Center Hotel in State College.