Death of a newspaper

Ugh.

I don't necessarily advocate for the death of newspapers — though I do think they have failed to adapt and evolve, and are victims of natural selection and hubris. But it saddens me to see papers slowly dying, especially when I hear a newspaper like the Rocky Mountain News is shutting down.

I haven't kept up with The Rocky for a while, but at one point it was one of the best small newspapers in the nation. Unfortunately, with all the things negatively affecting the industry right now, The Rocky may be one of the first fatal victims of the current newspaper crisis. Worst of all, I don't think they'll be the last.

As I've told other people, I think journalism — vital and necessary — will survive; I have my doubts about newspapers.

It's a hard thing to admit. In a lot of ways, I still think of myself as a journalist, even though it's been years since I've worked at a newspaper. Many of my friends continue to work at a paper, and I'm sincerely worried about them. But do I think papers deserve to survive? That's the hardest question, and my answer is a solid, "I don't know."

Papers can survive, but only if they recreate themselves to the point they're almost not newspapers anymore, not in the traditional sense. Newspapers, essentially, haven't changed much since movable type. It's time for newspapers to reinvent themselves.

You can read more reactions to the death of the Rocky Mountain News at Editor & Publisher, the Washington Post and Poynter, which goes the extra mile by offering the staff of The Rocky a helping hand. As an interesting sidebar, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a story yesterday about the value of newspapers and the idea of Seattle as a "no-newspaper town." It's a painful, but necessary, concept to consider; otherwise, newspapers will just be continuing to bail water out of a ship that's already sunk.

I got nothing

Due to popular demand (ahem), this blog has been roused from it's crusty-eyed slumber and given a kick in the keister. It's a big keister, though, so it's still gonna be kinda slow-moving until it's had some coffee first.

Let's see — so what's been going on? Let's bullet-point this sucker:

• We still support Obama, even though conservative knuckleheads are trying to scare people by hinting that he might be the Anti-Christ. Hell, I might be supporting him even more now. And at least it would probably mean Infernaeon or The Sword would play the Inauguration. Also, people who think so little of the citizens that they would try to convince them some dude's the Anti-Christ would no longer be in charge. So, y'know, there's that.

• Speaking of stupid people — I really thought John Edwards was smarter than that. That'll teach me.

• Was I the only one who had visions of "Red Dawn" when the news first broke that Russia had attacked Georgia?

• I haven't seen the movie yet so I'm trying to hold off on straight-out judgment, but isn't it weird that Robert Downey Jr. is basically doing blackface in "Tropic Thunder"? I get that it's supposed to be satire, but still ... I hope it's used to say something other than, "ain't race funny?!"

• And finally, this:

So ... where's the keg?

From Lopez!:

George Lopez was in El Paso to campaign for Obama. This is a quote from one of UTEP's best and brightest:

"This was fun and more entertaining than Hillary's rally, but I'm not going for either one of them right now," said Jacob Torres, 20, a sophomore education major. "Some of the stuff they're promising is kind of hard to accomplish."

=l