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.