Journalism

The Denver Post is threatening organizations like ColoradoPols.com that make news interesting. Maybe that's not as good a strategy for the Post as actually making its own news more interesting.

When a group of Rocky Mountain News staffers launched IWantMyRocky.com in late 2008 to try to save the newspaper, we did so fully understanding that it was likely a lost cause. There were many good reasons (and some bad ones) to do what we did, and foremost for nearly everyone was to simply not go quietly. But when we launched it, we also considered it a likely launching pad for new projects should the newspaper close.

Each April the past three years, I have been without steady, secure employment, without an office and wondering just how much longer I have health insurance. But in all three years the outlook has been different.

The answer isn't quite as simple as "Woody Paige," because he is only one of many blowhards pretending to be journalists these days. But he's as good a place as any to start an investigation.

Someone, somewhere, now owns the Rocky Mountain News intellectual property. But because all the archives have been donated to the Denver Public Library, what someone owns is really just a name. What could that person, place or thing really accomplish by trying to raise the dead now? You could rehire the entire staff of the Rocky Mountain News and put it to work on a newspaper called the Rocky Mountain News and even that wouldn't be the Rocky Mountain News.

As much as I have been encouraged by the democratization of news the internet has brought about -- anyone can report on anything at anytime -- I believe in paid content. You get what you pay for. If you want your news for free, you're going to get news of little or no monetary value produced by just anyone at anytime. Free news is good news, but news with a monetary value is better news. What I have said a few times during the past year as I was involved in attempts to create paid online news sites -- and even been quoted a couple times saying it -- is that the great myth of this age of journalism is that newspapers' free online content is actually free. It's not; it's subsidized.

We here at America's Fish would like to thank you for your support, but we're going to be moving on over the Rocky Mountain Independent, a daily news magazine started mostly by former Rocky Mountain News staff members.

As in the day the Rocky Mountain Independent will launch.The Rocky Mountain Independent, the daily online news magazine being launched by me and former colleagues from the Rocky Mountain News, is getting close to its early July launch.

Today, Kim Humphreys 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.

There is much more to this story than we have time to tell today. But Rocky Mountain Independent is the start or restart of what friends and fellow journalists have wanted all along: a home for independent journalists to tell the stories that go unreported or underreported.