On trying to save my dying newspaper
Saturday night, I found myself at the dining room table in an apartment that in a few weeks we might not be able to afford, with my wife, who I never would have met without the existence of a Rocky Mountain News, and my friend Joe, the closest friend I've made in the newspaper business, a co-worker at two newspapers and the best man at my wedding. We were gathered, clicking away furiously on three laptops, writing mission statements, press releases, building a web site and making plans, as were dozens of our friends and co-workers in their own homes all along the Front Range, trying to save the Rocky.
Maybe it's a lost cause, or a futile gesture. I keep thinking of the book The Brothers K by David James Duncan. In it, one son in a family of four sons and two daughters, is committed to a military mental institution after a breakdown in Vietnam. He is religious, and to ground himself in the reality he knows, he recites childish verses from the Bible, which his doctors mistake for further mental illness. The family knows he is only trying to be himself, and after weeks of stumbling around in a daze trying to find someone to blame for this mistake, they are collectively snapped from their stupor by a futile gesture of the family's oldest son. One night they gather in the family's home to plan their strategy, and the first thing they realize is that they have none, not a single idea, and for a time their quest seems more hopeless than ever. But it was the coming together that mattered, in the beginning. Rather than stumbling around separately, they stumbled together, which in the course of the book was the first step to standing up.
A few people have asked me how I feel about what's happening now because I came back here after being laid off at the Chicago Sun-Times a year ago, only to find my chosen future near death. Maybe I would feel different if I had left an actual paying job to come back, and until yesterday that might have been the case. But I wanted to come back to the Rocky not because it was my only hope, but because it is and always will be my newspaper home, the place I come back to in hard times, the place where I found myself as a journalist and, most importantly, the place where I met Alex.
All that makes my situation different from anyone else at the Rocky is that I will likely get little or no severance should the worst happen. But gathered with Joe, who was working in Longmont when I arrived there out of college and then joined the flood from that staff to Rocky, and Alex, who never would have found her way to Colorado without this newspaper, together with these people whose connection to each other and to Colorado history is an accident of timing and place, minor details about how much money or how much time we'll have were all secondary to fact that a newspaper older than the state it's located in, a still breathing piece of Western history, a newspaper that reaches hundreds of thousands of people each day and matters to people who have no idea who I am, is in danger of simply fading away. What matters now is that there were people like the three of us and dozens more across the city, people who had gathered that morning with no plan, only a desire to stop stumbling separately, were trying to save our home.
If my return to Colorado ends in nothing more than what I'm doing now, being among the last to stand up for this newspaper, then whatever pain I feel from the outcome will be worth it. Nothing this valuable should be allowed to fade quietly away.
