Saturday, February 28, 2009

Competition Lost

Reading the final edition of the Rocky Mountain News was an emotional experience, as I had predicted. All the writers just wrote what was on their hearts. I even read columnist Mike Littwin, who I usually am not able to read from beginning to end, because he invariably resorts to his one-note bashing of conservatives. I figured he might forget to do it this time. Like Littwin, I am a "newspaper junkie." He even admitted that he is not a journalist, but, rather, a "newspaperman." He chose in his final column at the Rocky to write about "the miracle of producing a daily newspaper, day after day."

Here are what I thought were Littwin's best words:
"A newspaper isn't meant to stand the test of time. It's meant to be true to that day, that moment. We talk in terms of stories. The Rocky lived. It breathed. It captured sounds and signs and loud, disturbing, private noises - the noise of the workday world and the world people tried to keep secret from the rest of us."


That last phrase is what I fear the most about losing one of the two newspapers that competed against each other every day to uncover those secrets and share them with readers. The competiton had to make each reporter and photographer work harder to produce the best possible product.

2 comments:

mushroom said...

It is a sad day. We are not far from mere ad sheet papers, or a time when we will have shallow, computer-generated local variants of USA Today.

I have mocked the local papers and been annoyed by the Dallas Morning News, the Kansas City Star, and the Post Dispatch, but they did support real reporters capable of -- though not always providing -- more depth than the soundbites of TV newsreaders.

Terri Wagner said...

In our country's past, one of the most vibrant principles we held to was moving on to the future. We weren't ones to exactly mourn the past. The papers brought it on themselves. That sounds harsh but true. I saw let's give'em a nod and move on to the next best way of presenting news...whatever that may turn out to be.