On picking up where we left off

Much of the effort to save the Rocky Mountain News started in Longmont and Loveland (the geographic center might have been somewhere near Berthoud). It was at those two Northern Colorado cities' newspapers -- the Longmont Daily Times-Call and the Loveland Reporter-Herald -- where I first encountered two close friends who were standing with me the day we were unceremoniously booted from the Rocky office.

Kim Humphreys, with whom I worked in Longmont, started the effort by suggesting what in retrospect seems simple but at the time seemed as far from most our minds as could be: "Let's do something about it." What Kim started by getting about 30 staffers together on a Saturday at the Denver Press Club resulted in the web site IwantmyRocky.com. Over the next three months, Melissa Pomponio, who I first met when she was the news editor in Loveland, held us all together as the unit chair of the guild. Ultimately, we did not save the newspaper, but thanks to Kim and Mel, many of us saved our sanity and our dignity.

Today, Kim is relaunching the web site IwantmyRocky.com. After the Rocky closed, we temporarily used the site to post news -- primarily from Kevin Flynn, the Rocky's Spotlight staff and a group of copy editors who were dedicated to seeing something emerge from the wreckage. When the group became involved with INDenverTimes, we shut down the site. Now, Kim is picking up where we left off back in March. We may have lost our paper, but we still need to save the news. What happened in Denver, happened in Seattle and Tucson, and it will happen more places before the end of the year. IwantmyRocky.com was always about more than saving our jobs, it was about saving what our jobs meant.

The loss of newspapers is being felt by journalists now more than anyone else for obvious reasons. But it will be felt by the society as a whole, if we do not find a way to save vigorous news coverage and the watchdog role journalism performs in society. As she says in her first post on the site, "Journalism was worth our time last year, and it’s still worth it this year." Read more and help support the cause here.