If the top stories of 2021 sound vaguely familiar, it’s because a lot of them were. COVID-19 continued to dominate every facet of life as the pandemic raged on, but there were a few more added storylines to it and other big stories.

There's big news on the horizon in 2022: the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, midterm elections, a push toward renewable energy and efforts to make schools safer, among other things. Here's a look at what WFAE will be doing in 2022 in Charlotte and across North Carolina and South Carolina.

Mike Collins and the show's team brought in government leaders, community experts, reporters and many more to make sense of the news that was happening. Here are some of this year’s talk show highlights.

Will uptown Charlotte ever be the same? How did COVID-19 impact education for North Carolina’s schoolchildren? Did the pandemic permanently change the way the food and hospitality industry operates? WFAE’s Rebuilding Charlotte series spent 2021 exploring these questions and other big topics as the region tries to recover from the ongoing coronavirus crisis.

Charlotte’s Durag Fest went through during the pandemic. Murals abounded across the city. Artists mixed creativity with entrepreneurial spirit. Charlotte had too many arts and culture stories to compile in one article, but here are a few of our favorite moments.

Charlotte is full of business stories. It’s the biggest city in the Carolinas and is home to several major international corporations, after all. But the stories about small business owners and public projects that have a direct impact on people who live and work in the Queen City matter, too.

The impact of COVID-19 on Charlotte’s Black and Latino communities and a local elementary school. A legacy of asbestos contamination in Davidson. Stories of resilience in the face of the pandemic. A deep dive into the cost of the U.S. health care system and a look at the climate cost of North Carolina’s growing wood pellet industry. These were the topics of WFAE’s special series this year.

At WFAE, we expanded our climate coverage in 2021. That meant launching a new climate newsletter and taking a more focused approach to reporting on this all-important topic. From sea-level rise on the South Carolina coast to the lingering effects of a gas spill in Huntersville to debate over a lithium mine west of Charlotte, these are some of the most important climate and environment stories we told this year.

Radio — and audio in general — is a great medium for storytelling. But it’s also a great format for in-depth interviews. Here are 10 of the best on-air interviews conducted by WFAE’s hosts this year.

On Mondays, WFAE listeners know to tune in for Tommy Tomlinson’s commentaries. Each week, he adds his perspective to some of the biggest stories driving the news cycle. We asked him to think about which of his columns were the most impactful — for him — to write and record in 2021.