Denver Post

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 I launched InsideTheRockies.com with Tracy Ringolsby and Jack Etkin a little over a year ago after the paper closed, our primary goal was to stay relevant. We hadn't considered the possibility we might actually create the very forum that was lacking in the city: honest, intelligent conversation about baseball.

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.

To quote: "MediaNews Group Inc. late Thursday insisted it is in compliance with all its debt covenants, as it reacted to a credit downgrade by Moody's Investors Services to a rating suggesting "a substantial risk" of default." And this is the guy who's driving us out of business!