Rated
Feb 27 2009
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1 review
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news
• rockymountainnews.com
What I love about newspapers is that they're not perfect. I once had an old editor (not as old then as I am now) at the L.A. Times who used to joke each night that we'd finally put out the perfect paper, only to come in the next day and lament that there'd been an error or two - and that we'd try again. We never got there. We never stopped trying either.
People who talk about the importance of newspapers like to cite Thomas Jefferson, who said that if he had to choose between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, he'd choose newspapers. I like this quote better - I don't know who said it - which Jefferson would surely appreciate: "Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge."
Readers routinely complain about bias in newspapers. People are human, including newspaper guys. (That's what we old guys are - not "journalists;" we didn't become journalists until about 1990.) But those who complain about bias never worked in a newsroom. They don't understand about daily newspapers - the miracle of producing one each and every day.
The Rocky has been a daily since Aug. 27, 1860. We come out every day, no matter what. And now we won't, ever again.
Still, the obit should be easy enough to write. The Rocky was 149 years old. And yet, somehow, at 149, the Rocky was close to its prime, at least as close as the city of Denver itself. The guys in suits cut our staff, citing something about the declining economics of newspapers. They cut our resources. On certain days, it seemed they were trying to cut our hearts out.