more on the Rocky Mountain News

Back in the day, when i was first writing for Pacific News Service, one of my first PNS clips came from the Rocky Mountain News. The name of the paper always stuck with me, maybe for sentimental reasons, maybe because I always found "Rocky Mountain News" such a colorful name for a newspaper. The name itself said spunk; it said "West", with all that implies. It told the reader the newspaper had a voice all its own.

But. Read this eloquent good-bye to the Rocky Mountain News, writen by Nancy Mitchell and published today in Salon. I especially like the last graf:

"Most of us journalists at the Rocky ignored all the marketing efforts that were meant to save the paper. We shrugged off the "Ford" brand, Convergence and the rest of the gimmicks, even those annoying folding tables. If there is a "brand" that we embraced, it was embodied in the instructions that were once posted in our managing editor's office. Three simple rules, not produced by a focus group: Get the news. Tell the truth. Don't be dull. I'd like to believe we did all three."