The Newsroom has moved

We're taking our act to our own servers, where The Newsroom will appear in a blog platform that is a much closer relative to gazette.com. You can find The Newsroom at this location.

The Newsroom is the first Gazette blog to make the move. The rest will make the move soon.

OnStar for everybody?

If you think Colorado highways are in bad shape, you'll be glad to know that yet another blue-ribbon transportation committee has been studying the matter. But on Monday, Ed Sealover reports that the real news may be what they're considering: satellite-based vehicle tracking. The more you drive, as measured by the satellite linkup in your car, the more highway taxes you pay.

Setting aside the technical challenge of wiring up every last Pinto with a transceiver, my question is: Would this be on top of the current 22-cent state sales tax on every gallon of gas? Or would it be instead of the gas tax?

On Sunday, Wayne Heilman reports that it has taken awhile for the UCCS business school to start doing what every other self-respecting institution of higher learning in America already does: Hit up alumni for money. About half the school's 6,000 grads live in these parts. Let the networking begin.

Changes to Sunday comics

We've reduced the size of our Sunday comics section from six pages to four. Yes, it's a move meant to save money. We pay for the newsprint needed to print the comics, and a 33 percent reduction in comics newsprint adds up to significant savings. The hunt for savings has only become more intense as overall advertising spending shifts away from print and toward online services such as gazette.com.

We've removed exactly one comic strip from our Sunday lineup to accommodate the smaller section: "Rose is Rose." Life editor Dena Rosenberry is a believer that comics are for kids, and young kids at that. And though "Rose" features young Pasquale at the center of the story, it's consistently been a low scorer among our readers. "Rose" remains in our Monday-Saturday comics lineup.

All the rest of the Sunday comics remain, though they have been reduced in size to shoehorn them into the four-page format.

"I work for the Gazette, man"

Humor can be difficult to deliver with the blunt instrument of a daily newspaper. It's kinda like trying to tie your shoes with oven mitts on. Or something.

But you gotta check out today's PopWednesday page. Life reporter/editor Bill Reed "confesses" that he's the object of a new Toby Keith song, "The Critic." Once upon a time, Bill wrote a not-so-favorable review of Keith's performance at the Colorado State Fair. Now, in his song, Keith returns the favor with a swipe at the know-nothings who couldn't hack it as musicians. At one point, he sarcastically quotes a critic: "I work at the Gazette, man. I have a real job."

The joke is that Bill's supposed soul-bearing is a bit of self-flattery disguised as confessional -- which is all fake anyway, like those faux columnists in the Onion who are just a shade too earnest with pedantic installments such as "I Must Take Issue With The Wikipedia Entry For 'Weird Al' Yankovic."

It's one of those too-rare gems that you stumble across in a newspaper.

Art beat strong in Springs

One of the knocks a place like Colorado Springs gets is the lack of an arts scene. If you labor under that misconception, take a look at our Sunday edition, which uses -- count 'em -- three different sections to survey the arts in this region: the front page, the Life section, and the inaugural "State of the Arts" special section. All of the weekend's coverage is collected at this page.

The coverage is pegged to the Aug. 2 opening of the dramatically expanded Fine Arts Center, and there will be plenty to read about that event later this week, in the Gazette, in Go!, and at gazette.com.

The coverage drives home the point that, like the sprawled-out city itself, the arts community is spread all over the region. Without an obvious arts district, it can seem like there's not much activity. There is; you just need to know where to look.

Sunday's coverage is your guide, and your docents are the crack entertainment team and their friends: Mark Arnest, Andrew Wineke, Linda Navarro, Bill Reed, Jen Mulson, Emily Voigt, Christopher Short, and Warren Epstein; and photographers Jerilee Bennett, Carol Lawrence, Bryan Oller, Kirk Speer, David Bitton, Keven Kreck, and Mike Terry.

With their help, you'll meet some of the people who give life to the arts in our town.

Some oomph for the homepage

If you're here, you've probably already seen the gazette.com homepage and the changes to the "Top Stories" area. We can display images much larger, and scroll through up to four of them. We also can revert to the standard display, and a couple modified arrangements in between the basic and the bold.




Some improvements we'd still like to make:

1. Slow down the pace of the switching from one story/photo to the next just a tad
2. Buttons or thumbnails that let you advance/rewind through the scroll at your own speed
3. A little softer transition between photos
4. A more obvious display of top news stories so you can skip the pretty pictures and get right to the news if you want

We intend to switch up the "top stories" display throughout the day and week. We'll go big and visual when a big and visual news story breaks, or when we want to show off strong photography. We'll use the standard display, or something very close to it, when the news situation warrants.

Feel free to let us know what you think.

Newsroom additions, cont.

We're happy to welcome Kim Nguyen to our newsroom. If her byline looks familiar, it's because she was our legislative intern in 2005, covering everything from beer-keg identification to bicycle road rules during the Colorado General Assembly.

Nguyen, a Denver native, got her journalism degree from Metro State University and, after her internship with us, spent some time with the Associated Press' Denver bureau. She flirted briefly with public relations, but now she's back on the news side. You'll see her name mostly on stories about crime and public safety.

A staff addition

They say life is all about timing, or something like that. Ask Tess Ahern, our newest copy editor, who joined us this week on our night news desk. She's part of the team that writes our headlines and photo captions and edits our stories to make sure they're grammatical, logical, as complete as possible and free of preventable errors.

A few weeks ago, Tess was on the news desk of one of our sister papers, the East Valley Tribune, near Phoenix. Then she moved to Colorado Springs with her fiance. As it happened, an opening on our news desk became available shortly after her arrival. Lucky for her? Sure. Also lucky for us.

We have a winner

David Philipps has one of the coolest jobs in journalism -- heck, one of the coolest jobs, period. He gets to ski, mountain bike, camp, hike and other outdoor stuff on an expense account. He writes about his experiences for the Gazette and for the Out There blog. Last week, his outdoor writing was recognized by the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors as among the best feature writing in the country among newspapers of our size -- generally mid-sized dailies.

David's work earned first place in the "feature specialty" category. Former Gazette reporter Paul Asay earned third place in the same category, for a collection of his work on religion.

And I'll give a shout out to G.D. Gearino of the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer, who was my first editor when I got started in this business. He earned second place in the "general feature" category of the same AASFE contest.

Update: Gearino is no longer with the N&O, and has started his own prose factory, and blogs daily on the Harry Potter scourge and other matters.

Do not adjust your set

Our budding partnership with KOAA-TV ramps up today, at 4:13 p.m., to be exact. That's the moment you'll see the Gazette's military reporter, Tom Roeder, appear on KOAA's "News First Now" broadcast, on Comcast Channel 9.

Each weekday afternoon at about that same time, NFN will switch on a camera located in the Gazette newsroom. A Gazette reporter will give NFN viewers a first look at some of the news being covered at gazette.com or in the printed version of the Gazette.

For KOAA, the tie-in is a way for the station to provide its viewers with some news content the station might not otherwise have available. For the Gazette, the air time is a way to get our name out -- or, as publishers like to say, "extend our reach."

Tom will be a regular on the Monday NFN 4 p.m. newscast. The rest of the week:
Tuesdays: Food writer Teresa Farney
Wednesdays: sports columnist and fitness guru Milo Bryant
Thursdays: Entertainment editor Warren Epstein
Fridays: Outdoors reporter David Philipps

On days when big news is breaking, the slot might be occupied by the reporter covering the story. You might see business reporter Wayne Heilman, for example. Or metro reporter Pam Zubeck. Or deputy news editor Carmen Boles.

As both partners get more familiar and comfortable with the routine of sharing information, we'll expand the collaboration into new areas.

A change of venue

Online interactivity between newspapers and readers may have entered new territory, at least locally, with a judge's decision to move the upcoming trial of Deborah Nicholls to another location.

Fourth Judicial District Judge G. David Miller ruled Friday that Deborah Nicholls, accused of felony theft, witness intimidation and drug possession arising out of a March 2003 house fire that killed her three children, can't get a fair trial in this town partly because of the bile spewed by some readers who posted comments at gazette.com during the earlier trial of her husband. The Gazette devoted heavy coverage to the seven-week trial of Timothy Nicholls, which resulted in a life sentence.

During that trial, Deborah Nicholls was called to the stand. She invoked her constitutional right not to provide self-incriminating testimony.

Even before the days of the Internet, such a courtroom drama would have generated considerable community interest and comment, and that alone might have been enough to warrant a change in venue for Deborah Nicholls' trial. The advent of community-comment forums -- found at many newspaper Web sites -- has simply given defense attorneys one more bit of evidence to place before the judge that a portion of the community has some strong opinions.

And in this case, some of that evidence was a doozy. One online "contributor" allowed as how Deborah Nicholls should be “lynched.”

So much for reasoned contemplation of the evidence. But really, human nature has always been thus. Are even the more unhinged comments posted online any different from the stuff two people would say -- already say -- over a beer at the bar, or at a backyard barbecue, or at the gym? Does the judge think the people who posted their vengeful thoughts online were incapable of forming those ideas in their minds until the Internet came along?

Probably not. I'll give the judge more credit than that.

And to be sure, the Web makes it possible for dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of other people to read those vengeful thoughts, and possibly be influenced by them. The potential for prospective jurors to have already formed an opinion probably is greater than ever.

But then, that's what voir dire is for, and it's been around a lot longer than the Internet. Every potential juror is screened for any relevant biases they might bring into the courtroom. Lawyers on both sides can banish a certain number of potential jurors they don't want. Every juror takes an oath pledging to keep an open mind. The Internet hasn't changed any of that.

Without some kind of supporting evidence, it's hard to buy the conclusion that the ability for citizens to share their thoughts more easily than ever before makes it more difficult to convene a fair-minded jury in a county of more than half a million people. To argue otherwise is to argue that justice for Deborah Nicholls would be best served had Timothy Nicholls been accused, tried and possibly convicted in secret, with no public viewing whatsoever. After all, if Internet-enabled comment is too much comment to permit a fair trial, how much comment is the right amount? None?

Is a change of venue for Deborah Nicholls warranted? The judge says yes, and respect for the bench demands respect for that decision. But should Web comments -- any more than letters to the editor or casual bar banter -- be part of the measure of a community's ability to be impartial? I'm dubious.

We deliver, for everyone

The last real newspaper war in Colorado Springs ended 21 years ago when Freedom Communications Inc., parent of The Gazette, purchased the Colorado Springs Sun. Since then, The Gazette's main competition in the daily newspaper market has been the two Denver papers, each of which has several thousand subscribers in El Paso County. And for the past 15 years, the Colorado Springs Independent has been a weekly alternative.

It's a sign of just how much the media business is changing that The Gazette's publisher, Scott McKibben, announced Monday that The Gazette will, using independent contractors, provide home-delivery services for the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News in this region. The deal also means our company will deliver The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today -- papers that had been delivered by the Denver Newspaper Agency, which runs the business operations of the two Denver papers under a joint operating agreement. Their newsrooms remain separate.

Delivery, after all, is very expensive, and low-cost competition from the Internet is forcing newspaper operators to trim any overhead they can. In a day when some papers have even tried to farm out their local city-hall coverage to overseas outfits, outsourcing delivery seems mild by comparison.

The DNA saves money; The Gazette gets paid. The business case is easy enough to see.

Journalistically, however, it will feel a bit strange. Should the Post or Rocky ever beat us to a story, we'll be in the business of literally handing you the other paper's scoop.

Subscribers to the Denver Post's Sunday edition also receive the Independent at their homes on Thursdays. That means the Indy, which occasionally jabs us in the ribs over our news coverage, will rely upon The Gazette to get their criticisms delivered.

Newspaper wars ain't what they used to be.

The funnies no more

An anonymous letter from a reader:

"Attached are four of the most stupid, idiotic, unfunny comic strips running in any newspaper in the country. The Mark Tatulli strip [Lio] is so way out -- it is unbelievable.

"You must have a first-class moron as a comic strip editor!"

Two things:

1. The vitriol! It always astounds me how downright nasty and personal people can get about the funnies, of all things. Really, now: we publish 34 comic strips Monday-Saturday, a generous helping. If four of them -- 12 percent -- don't tickle your fancy, the editor is a "first-class moron"? At my favorite restaurants, way more than 12 percent of the items on the menu are dishes I don't care for. Does that make it a lousy restaurant? Of course not.

2. The anonymity. The founders signed their names to the Declaration of Independence, essentially confessing to treason. Today we're unwilling to have our name associated with a complaint about a comic strip. One has to wonder what sort of retribution the reader feared.

Anonymity has its place. Whistleblowers need it. Sometimes a witness to a crime needs it. A reader with a bone to pick about comic strips does not. I'm willing to listen to any reader who has a complaint, and I won't hold it against you.

Homegrown talent

We've hired a reporter who may be familiar to some folks here: Carlyn Mitchell, a Liberty High School and CU grad, most recently a reporter for The Monitor, one of our sister Freedom Communications papers in the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas.

Carlyn was our intern at the 2006 Colorado General Assembly, where she was in the middle of our coverage of the statewide smoking-ban legislation that became law in June of that year. Since graduation, she's been covering a bit of everything in McAllen and the surrounding small towns. Now that she's here, she'll be part of our team covering local government.

It's all about us

Every fourth Wednesday, the "Midweek" page in the metro section examines a civic corner of Colorado Springs. Sometimes it's a public place each of us must encounter, such as the Division of Motor Vehicles, or the jury waiting room. Today, Midweek takes you inside The Gazette newsroom.

Each day's Gazette is the work of more than 100 journalists, to say nothing of the advertising account managers, press operators, delivery carriers and others who make our business run. Journalism is a business unlike any other, however, because it is the only private commercial enterprise granted constitutional protection from government interference. That is a public trust, and the way I see it, our end of that bargain includes an obligation to make our processes as transparent as possible. That's why we have The Newsroom blog, too.

On today's Midweek page, and on a web page that today takes up permanent residence at gazette.com, you can see how news stories are created and presented. The mysteries of page design and copy editing are made a little less mysterious. Online, you can meet nearly all of our journalists, and take a 360-degree tour of the newsroom. One thing you'll discover: It really is one big room, and a fairly disheveled one at that, which is one of the charms of this work. You know what they say about a neat desk . . .

There's also practical information: Names, phone numbers and email addresses you might need to suggest a news story or to discuss something we've already published. There are instructions on how to stop delivery while on vacation, place an ad, write a letter to the editor, and how to publish your own news and information at Your Hub.

Is the Gazette a public building? Strictly speaking, our business is private property, just like any other private business. But we invite anyone to visit the newsroom, and even to attend our daily news meetings, where we decide what goes into the paper -- and what doesn't. Just call our newsroom reception desk at 636-0266 to schedule a day and time to sit in. We hold our news meetings at 10 a.m., 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.

UPDATE 6/4/07: For a few weeks, our news meetings will be held at 10 a.m., 2:30 p.m., and 4:30 p.m.

How many ads are too many?

You'd think a country that watches the Super Bowl as much for the advertisements as for the game would have a fairly high tolerance for ads in, of all places, the newspaper. After all, newspapers practically invented mass-market advertising. The earliest papers in Colonial America were full of announcements of the arrivals and departures of merchant ships, and of their contents. Colonists didn't encounter full-color American Furniture Warehouse ads, but their newspapers had ads for household furniture just the same.

I received a note today, however, that indicates some readers are sensitive to what they regard as creeping commercialism in their newspaper. And while it warms an editor's heart to know at least one citizen wants the newspaper for the news, the note is an opportunity to answer a common question about advertising – namely, how much of it we publish and why.

About the Gazette, the anonymous note said, “I've found that ads are its priority. Have you divided out a Sunday paper recently between news and ads? Compare the inches.”

It's true: On Sundays, there is more space devoted to paid advertising than to news stories. When you include classified sections such as Peak Homes, the disparity is even greater. I'm leaving the slick-paper inserts out of the equation, because we don't print them and they don't compete for space in our news sections.

Here and everywhere, readership is highest on Sundays. Advertisers, who are smart, therefore want their messages to be included in the Sunday paper, where there is an excellent chance they will be seen. The amount of space devoted to ads on Sundays usually is greater than the space devoted to news, but it's also true that the Sunday “news hole” is the largest of the week. No other paper of the week has more news in it; it's just that the amount of ads is even greater.

Conversely, readership is lighter on Tuesdays, so advertising is lighter, too. The usual pattern works this way: midweek papers tend to have more space devoted to news than to advertising, and the Friday-Sunday papers generally have more advertising than news, although the Friday-Sunday news holes tend to be the largest of the week.

Over the course of an entire week, the ratio works out just about even. We measure news hole down to the line every day, and for the first 129 days of 2007, news has consumed 49.4 percent of all available newsprint we have rolled off our presses. That's a shade more than paid advertising space for the same period. We also donate a few percentage points to charity and to other unpaid uses, bringing the total to 100 percent.

Keeping the amount of space for news equal, over the long term, to the amount of space for paid advertising is standard practice in the newspaper business.

Empirically, then, ads are not our “priority.” They take up no more space than does news content.

In addition, we reserve some pages for news only. The front page has no ads. The same is true for most other section fronts. We don't permit ads on page A3, or on the State & Local page in the Metro section. We've begun to publish an ad on the cover of our Sunday sports section, and maybe someday we'll even permit an ad on our front page (America's largest daily paper, The Wall Street Journal, already does), but on our most visible pages, the emphasis will continue to be on news.

It may be obvious, but it's important to remember that advertising pays most of the bills, and not only in the news media. Google may be the world's best search engine to you and me, but Google's owners and investors aren't in the search business: they're in the advertising business. Our searches don't generate a dime; it's those sponsored Web links that are related to our searches that are making Google rich.

Sure, but Google searches are free, while a Gazette subscription costs money. True, but even if every Gazette subscriber paid for a full seven-day subscription for a full year at the full rate of $152.88 (not everyone does), the millions of dollars of revenue that would generate still would be orders of magnitude shy of the amount of money needed to meet payroll, buy newsprint and run what amounts to a manufacturing plant – let alone make a profit.

It's not in our interest to drive readers away by annoying them with advertising. As with much of our job, we aim to strike a balance: Enough news to make us attractive to readers – and thus to advertisers -- and enough ads to pay for gathering that news without driving readers away.

The photo

What could make someone do this?

That has been the question on everyone's minds since the news bulletins began streaming out of Blacksburg, Va., on Monday morning.

Yesterday, part of the answer came, from Cho Seung-Hui himself. His videotaped rants dominated TV screens last night. And this morning, his flat stare -- and his gun -- bore straight out of the front pages of newspapers all across America.

It was a front page many readers found disturbing. Our sports editor, who has two young boys, tucked it away this morning before they sat down to their Cheerios and let them pore over the sports page instead. If you have kids, perhaps you did something similar.

Newspapers do no favors when they hide the ugly truth. As always, though, the real question for editors isn't whether to hide something unpleasant; it's to figure out an appropriate way to display it.

Judging from the newspapers around the country, The Gazette was right in line with most papers in medium and larger cities. Most of those that ran photos of Cho at all used a photo of him brandishing one or more of his pistols.

Unlike most papers, however, The Gazette also prominently displayed a lengthy excerpt of Cho's most telling words, and linked them directly to the photo. Importantly, we placed those words on top of the photo -- a position of greater prominence. The question, after all, was "what could make someone do this?" The words answer that question, and the tight linkage of those words with the photo take you about as directly into Cho's mindset as the printed page can.

By contrast, some other papers played up the image without as much supporting context, going more for shock than for understanding.

And there were several papers that kept the photo small or used an image that didn't include a gun. I suspect a big reason they took the softer approach was that they didn't prominently display the killer's words. Without those words, a big menacing photo would have made their pages look more like the New York Daily News.

We make our own decisions, though, and utlimately we have to answer: Were we justified publishing this photo in the way we did?

Yes. One reason why we struggle so much with senseless violence is our inability to fathom how the killer makes sense of it. On the assumption that it's better for a mature citizenry to deal straight-up with tragedy than to avert our eyes from it, any insight we can gain to the twisted rationale weakens the power of that mystery. The killer's rant and image provide us with something (admittedly unpleasant) to process, but it also therefore gives us something to reject. What was unfathomable becomes tangible. It no longer has a hold on us. We can move on.

There's another, less philosophical, reason to have published the photo: It's news. Big, bad, scary, repugnant news. The kind of news that serious newspapers need to deliver - with care and thought, to be sure, but deliver nonetheless, on the front page. On some days, sadly, the news is for grown-ups.

For more on how newspapers handle disturbing photos, check out this post about a 1957 Gazette front-page picture on our staff photo blog, "Speaking of Pictures." You'll discover that this issue has been around a long time.

We got schooled . . . and liked it

From the front lines comes this dispatch from Deputy News Editor Carmen Boles:

Copy editors write headlines and edit stories for grammar, punctuation and content. We're known for being real sticklers about grammar, but sometimes we get schooled by our readers, who seldom fail to let us know when we might have gotten something wrong. Although we hate to be wrong (I mean, really hate it), we actually feel a sort of kinship with these readers - often retired schoolteachers or writers. Their devotion to the language is refreshing in this age of text messages with no vowels in sight.

Sometimes what we didn't say is as important as what we said. Recently we got a note from Lynn Peterson that referenced a headline on a story about Banning-Lewis Ranch. The headline said, "Homes to go up slower," and Ms. Peterson suggested it should be "slowly," the adverb form of slow. The copy editor meant to write, "Homes will go up slower than planned." She's right, of course: If there wasn't enough room the headline should have been rephrased.

Another note we got recently was from a reader named Donna Bauer, and the features copy desk was tickled - and enlightened! - by her approach. Her gentle admonishment came on a postcard called a "SPELL Goof Card" - from the Society for the Preservation of the English Language. We didn't even know such a thing existed! But we'll be joining soon...

The new gazette.com

We flipped the switch on the new-look gazette.com Monday afternoon. Since then, our small-but-mighty web crew has been fixing links, updating the look of pages deep in the site, and generally getting all the lights turned on. Click here to read more about the changes.

If you've got questions, general feedback or a good ol' whipping to deliver, this is the place. So far, the feedback on in the story comments at gazette.com is heavily negative. The main complaints have to do with the general look of the new layout; size and fit on the screen; and some links and buttons that don't work as advertised -- yet. They will.

The fact that negative comments dominate the feedback forums is to be expected. After all, it's human nature to speak up when annoyed. Rare is the person who takes time to write a note when something goes right.

I'll say this for the new page design: the lighter background makes it possible for me to view the page on my Blackberry. That alone is a big improvement, in my book.

Nothing's perfect, even the new gazette.com. So let us have it, and we'll work on making the improvements.

Say "cheese" . . . or "pepperoni"

Of all the photos you'll encounter in a newspaper, this one is about as unlikely an image as can be arranged. Getting 31 people, from various walks of life, into one place at one time for a photo is challenge enough. Getting them all to wear Groucho getups is unlikelier still. I'm pretty sure photographer Brienne Boortz had to laugh when she looked through her Nikon viewfinder and saw this.

(There's a 32nd Groucho in the photo -- Go! editor Warren Epstein. Like Waldo, he's hiding among the crowd).

A couple weeks before the shoot, Warren popped his head into my office and said to managing editor Larry Ryckman, "Zeezo's. Two cases of Groucho glasses. Bulk rate," then left in a hurry to Zeezo's Magic Castle, the magic and costume shop downtown. It will be one of the more unique expense reports to cross my desk, I'm sure.

Warren is trying to find our next restaurant reviewer, to replace the wonderful Tom Karpel. He's turned the hunt into something of a reality show, subjecting each applicant's tryout review to the scrutiny of readers. You can read the reviews, and leave your comments about them, at gazette.com, where we have an interactive ballot set up for you. Ultimately, Warren will use your votes to select one Groucho -- er, person to become the regular Gazette restaurant reviewer.

Looking at the photo, one question sticks out: Of the 30+ people who want to be a restaurant critic, why are so many of them women? After all, everyone eats.

Cat coverage

There's been a lot of discussion here at The Gazette about how we handled coverage of the cats that survived the recent Castle West apartment fire. Last Saturday, we reported that the cats were stranded in the burned-out building because authorities deemed a rescue too risky. By Monday, the story had a happy ending with the rescue of two of the three cats. Both stories ran atop Page 1.

Some argued that the cat stories overpowered the pages and were far too prominent given all of the other stories from around the region and world that might have occupied those spaces. Others argued that the cats had captured the hearts and minds of the community and deserved prominent play. Please let us know what you think.

A story you won't read

A New Orleans family is wiped out by Hurricane Katrina, and starts over again in Colorado Springs, where they set up a new home in, of all places, the Castle West Apartments.

Yes, those apartments. The ones that burned to the ground Jan. 16.

To be reduced to the clothes on your back twice in 17 months is either cruel fate, or an immense test of one's faith for which, one hopes, there is a great reward. Either way, it is a powerful -- and true -- story of the human spirit.

But you won't read that story in the Gazette. Not because we don't want to tell it, but because the family has asked they be paid by the newspaper in return for their story.

If any family needs and deserves cash right now, it's this one. They have every right to look out for themselves, and I can't say I wouldn't make the same demand of the Gazette if I were in their shoes.

We wish this family all the best, but the Gazette does not pay for news. Never has, and as long as I have something to say about it, never will. The Gazette does use its news pages to drum up financial support for the Empty Stocking Fund, which supplies money to 14 local agencies that serve our neighbors who are in crisis. Being devastated by a hurricane and a fire qualifies as a crisis, and I'm hopeful one of the 14 agencies will come to the aid of this family.

Helping this family is important, of course, yet there's something else that's important in Colorado Springs: the trust between the newspaper and the community. You can trust that no news in our pages appears because money has changed hands, in either direction. Once we trade cash for the privilege of asking questions, the next person we approach will, justifiably, demand the same trade. Eventually, pay-for-access journalism gets you the National Enquirer, not the daily life story of Colorado Springs.

The irony in this case is that, even without our reporter and photographer having the opportunity to visit with the family, we know the story is a natural for Page One. This community has a history of responding generously to those in need; there would be no shortage of offers to help this family once their story appeared in the paper.

I'd like to think our community will continue to respond with such genuine concern whenever the need arises. It would be a crime, therefore, for the Gazette to turn that altruism toward cynicism by planting a seed of doubt in the community's mind about the motives of the people in the stories we write.

The Daily Miracle

Blogs. Text messages. E-mail and .pdf attachments. RSS feeds. It's come to the point that the truly exotic way to communicate is with one of these:



This wonderful letter dropped out of an actual paper Christmas card addressed to me. (Disclosure: I've digitally erased the author's name, address and phone number, as well as the name of her Gazette delivery person, from the image above). It was written on a kind of translucent, waxy paper that I didn't know was still being made. And dig the little jab she gets in at the end -- everybody's a comics critic!

Yet some people still do write letters the old-fashioned way, and this one reminded me how the whole newspaper enterprise continues to depend upon the low-tech work of hundreds of newspaper carriers.

As with running water when you turn on the tap, you expect your Gazette to be on your driveway, or your doorstep, each morning without fail. What's amazing is that failure doesn't occur more often.

I began to deliver the Columbus Dispatch when I was 11, and had to talk the Dispatch man into hiring me. The usual starting age was 12. For several years, my buddy and I were expected to make sure 80 or so subscribers got their Dispatch seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. That's a lot of trust to put in a couple of easily distracted kids.

The days of using kids to deliver papers are long gone. The demise of afternoon papers forced children carriers out onto their neighborhood streets at dark early-morning hours to deliver the morning papers, and that was an unsafe practice that was wisely ended. Needing to rely on adults for delivery, newspapers needed to give each carrier enough subscribers to make the job pay enough to be worthwhile to an adult. That, in turn, required the use of cars, not only to carry the larger number of papers, but to cover the larger routes quickly enough to hit every doorstep by sunrise.

But dragging yourself out to a Gazette warehouse distribution point at 3 a.m. still takes a good dose of willpower, and getting through last week's snow was nearly heroic. It was just such determination that prompted Ms. Miller to put her pen to paper:

"Just want you to know what a wonderful job our carrier is doing," Ms. Miller wrote. "We get our paper early -- near or on the porch & not in the gutter."

These days the Gazette newsroom is posting more news online than ever before. You can get business news updates via e-mail. We're creating more than one multimedia presentation per week. We're up to 18 blogs. We continue to tweak the printed newspaper, adding this, subtracting that, remaking something else. When a blizzard hits, reporters, photographers and editors knock themselves out to cover the news.

But none of it matters unless the newspaper makes it to your door. Nearly all of our subscribers have internet access and could read an exact replica of the paper on their computer screen every morning. Still, nearly all of them also want the actual paper in their hands.

"Seems to me you could give some recognition to your 'carriers,' " Ms. Miller wrote. "A bonus, maybe & a thank you in the paper -- just something."

Separately, we received this note via good old-fashioned e-mail, from Tom Andenno of Colorado Springs:

"I have a very simple solution to the next blizzard
'delivery' crisis. The United States Postal Service,
UPS, FEDX, and the local trash service should
seriously look at hiring the person who delivers my
Gazette Telegraph every morning. Without missing
a beat or a delivery, my paper was there each and
every morning during the Great Shutdown Blizzard
of Christmas 2006. I am sure that this person is not
nearly compensated as well as the above mentioned
Company employees, but he or she did what they
needed to do to make sure our paper was here. I
applaud this person and wish that the above mentioned
Companies possesed this type of committment."

So many moving parts have to work in order for your Gazette to land on your driveway. The last, crucial, step of 7/365 dead-of-night delivery is what transforms the daily newspaper into The Daily Miracle.

The unruly public square

Via Romenesko comes word that the Arizona Daily Star is contemplating whether to limit the opportunities for readers to deposit online comments on its news stories.

"Star editors are rethinking the whole idea because of the coarseness of those online postings," reader advocate Debbie Kornmiller writes. Other newspapers, including the Washington Post, have, at one time or another, temporarily suspended reader comments in order to figure out ways to keep discussions from devolving into kindergarten taunts.

Gazette editors have, from the first day we began offering "comment on this story" links at the bottom of many local news items, debated how much latitude we should give people who take the time to write a comment. We've always anticipated that some knotheads would abuse the privilege by yanking discussions off-topic or by lobbing hate-filled comments meant only to get a rise out of someone else.

And with today's story about a New Life Church young-adult pastor resigning after admitting he had an improper sexual encounter several years ago, the "comment on this story" feature is, once again, bringing out some of the loons. On a day like today, it's easier to understand why other newspapers are reconsidering whether it's worth it to provide anonymous forums.

It's getting so you can predict which stories are ripe for mayhem. Since before dawn today, Tom Roeder's news story about how growth patterns at Fort Carson are not unfolding as originally expected has sat on the gazette.com homepage, attracting not a single reader comment. The New Life story, posted late in the morning, had attracted nearly 20 comments by 4 p.m. Many of them are of the "neener, neener" variety. And some are quite thoughtful.

Responding to Kornmiller's column, readers of the Arizona Star are pleading with the newspaper to keep the comments function. Among the more convincing arguments is the idea that readers and contributors to the forums seem to be willing to put up with a certain amount of nonsense and even outright hostility, so why shouldn't the newspaper? Beyond that, there are basic anti-profanity filters (which we use) and general content policies that can be enforced (which we do when we disable someone's e-mail address from being able to deposit a comment). I've said this before, but it bears repeating, especially on a day like today: Our rules are pretty simple. Keep it clean, keep it on topic and go somewhere else to pick a fight. This is our house, and we have the right to set our own standards of behavior. You may create your own Internet space, where you can permit any behavior you choose, elsewhere.

We're happy to provide you with a place to respond to the news, share ideas with others, maybe even learn something. We hope you'll do so responsibly.

"Instant" news needs time to become "complete" news

We published news about the shooting death of Colorado Springs Police Officer Ken Jordan early Tuesday morning on gazette.com, even as some of Tuesday's printed editions of the newspaper -- which went to press before the shooting -- were being delivered. Our reporter and photographer were on the scene of the shooting before the sun came up Tuesday.

These days, people expect news to be reported immediately. What they sometimes forget, as some did today, is that real-time news isn't always the complete story. When we publish news almost as quickly as we capture it in our reporters' notebooks, what you get is "the latest," but it isn't necessarily the whole story. It can take much longer than a couple of hours to round up all the relevant information. This is a small lesson about journalism in the internet age.

As you can imagine, Gazette journalists have been working on the story since soon after it broke. As soon as new facts, new quotes, new developments have become known, they've been added to the current version of the story at gazette.com. We learned early, from a relative of the suspect, the name of the suspect in the shooting. Naturally, we began learning what we could about the suspect, by talking to whomever we could find that had a connection to him, and by checking official records such as court documents.

Some readers complained, at our online comment forum, that the Gazette was doting on the suspect while ignoring the victim.

Posted one reader: "How about we get an article on the Officer, HUH? How about we hear about how he did a job that most people are too scared to do. How about a story about a man, an Officer, who lived day in and day out protecting the Commie Gazette reporters right to report only the negative side of everything."

Understandably, the tragedy of yet another CSPD officer paying the ultimate sacrifice, the second in a year, has pushed emotions toward the ragged edge. We never intended to ignore Officer Jordan. But we couldn't write about him without information. And for much of Tuesday, the only accessible source of authoritative information about Jordan and his career was his employer, the Colorado Springs Police Department, and no one at the department was talking. The department scheduled a 4 p.m. press conference, and that was our first opportunity to ask questions about the fallen officer. And by 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, the information about Jordan, obtained from the press conference and from interviews with other officers, was added to the story at gazette.com.

It's been said journalism is the first draft of history. In the internet age, the journalism you read online sometimes is the first draft of a single story, let alone of history. We understand our obligation to report news as quickly as we learn it. Readers, though, have their own obligation: to understand that it can take hours, days or longer for complete, accurate information to become available.

Remember the name

The featured speaker was CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston, but the man they'll be talking about in years to come was Mr. Arraun Anderson, who stole the show Saturday night at the NAACP Colorado Springs Branch 88th Annual Freedom Fund Gala, held at the Sheraton Colorado Springs Hotel.

Pinkston's story is a compelling one: a boomer boy of the South in the early 1960s who was forced to sit at the back of the bus, but for whom small acts of kindness by neighbors and acquaintances have proven much more powerful influences on his life.

Anderson's role in Saturday's gala was to deliver, just after the invocation, the "historical moment," a remembrance of the events and people that gave birth to the NAACP in 1909 and a homily on the organization's contributions to the advancement of freedom and equality for all Americans.

At the appointed moment, Anderson rose from his seat, walked briskly to the stage and planted himself at the lectern.

Then he reached above his head to grab the microphone, and curled it down to his level. For the next several minutes, the young Mr. Anderson, a sixth-grader at James Irwin Charter Middle School in Harrison School District 2, proceded to deliver, without the aid of notes, without a single oral misstep, and without a trace of self-consciousness, a thorough survey of the NAACP's trajectory through the past century that held the ballroom full of 500 strangers in the palm of his hand. I'm working from memory here, but strings of pearls such as "we would be living separate and unequal lives if not for the NAACP" emanated from this little big man, who barely could see over the top of the lectern.

Arraun Anderson left the stage to a standing ovation.

What does this have to do with The Gazette? Nothing. Just remember you heard about Arraun Anderson here first.

Deep into journalism's navel

Common Sense Journalism: Thoughts from Greensboro

Some challenging thoughts from Douglas Fisher on the profound challenges in front of journalists, newspaper journalists in particular, following his visit to ConvergeSouth. It's a message not only for journalists, but for citizens who care about the health of their communities. A sample:

. . . I never fail to be amazed at the amount of caring communities have for their newspapers. . . . What they want is some respect and to be heard in return -- something this business is struggling with mightily for reasons from arrogance to just plain structural problems in the way it is set up, its mindset, and the equipment and software it buys.

Different Animals

Many editors and reporters here at The Gazette monitor reader comments on stories we post to gazette.com. They can be amusing or informative, petty or irrelevant; but even when we get our eyebrows blowtorched, we appreciate that readers took the time to share their thoughts. We like feedback.

Every now and then, however, a commenter totally misunderstands. Here's the posting of Kathy, commenting on our front-page story on Wednesday about delays in the completion of Cheyenne Mountain State Park:

How can this article possibly be a front page story on the day after Bush signed the "Military Commissions Act of 2006," an act that eliminates habeas corpus? Is "habeas corpus" too hard to understand? Do people not understand that the government - OUR government - can now imprison ANYONE without ever having to tell that person WHY they have been imprisoned? Why is it that basic human rights for which our ancestors fought and died are of so little interest to us now?-Kathy 10/18/06 04:01:34 PM

Kathy evidently did not know that the habeas corpus story was The Gazette's lead story on Wednesday, with a big banner headline reading, "Interrogation measure now law." Presumably Kathy wasn't reading The Gazette, only gazette.com, where the habeas corpus story appeared on Tuesday in that part of the Web page reserved for Associated Press wire stories.

I'm not trying to pick on Kathy, but I want her and all other viewers of gazette.com to understand that the online version presents only a selection of Gazette stories, not the whole nine yards that we run in The Gazette every day. The Gazette and gazette.com are different animals. We favor local stories for gazette.com; thus the online display of the state park story. But just because a story is featured online shouldn't lead anyone to think that we consider it the top story of the day. For that expression of Gazette editors' news judgment, please see the newspaper version.

Headline debate

There's an interesting -- and not too complimentary -- assessment of Gazette headlines on political stories over at High Plains Messenger, which I visit frequently. Some of the arguments don't hang together, and there's a healthy dose of conspiracy theory in the air. Still, criticism is a good thing, and I'm glad that the local paper is important enough to some people to argue about.

"Comments" function restored

I think I've fixed the problem with the comment tool. If you are so moved, you should be able to post your thoughts immediately to any post at this blog. My apologies for the outage.

This seems like a good time to remind everyone that The Newsroom is like someone's living room: You're invited in, but it's not your house and your host decides what the rules are. We encourage lively, even angry, discussion, but inappropriate material will be deleted and violators added to the "may not comment" list.

Too little Iraq coverage? Or too much?

Sunday's column:

I’m accustomed to hearing criticism from the right about the “mainstream media’s” coverage of the Iraq war. Recently, we got some of that criticism from the left. The argument is equally incoherent in stereo.

The latest critique comes from Media Matters for America, a Washington, D.C., group that attempts to demonstrate that the media, rather than being liberal, actually are purveyors of conservative misinformation.

It’s delicious to be vetted by conservative and liberal media watchdogs and to be characterized as too much of the opposite. Such conflicting diagnoses say at least as much about the leanings of the people parsing our news coverage as they do about the coverage itself.

Anyway, here’s the argument from Media Matters: Premise one: “There is . . . evidence that the American media . . . have lost interest in the chaotic saga, with . . . Page One newspaper dispatches from Iraq growing sparse.” Premise two: “[T]he MSM’s pullback from Iraq is paying dividends for the White House, which badly wants the attention away from the war.” Conclusion: The MSM are aiding the November electoral chances of Republicans.

Frankly, it’s not a journalist’s job to care whether the news helps or hurts any political party. The conclusion doesn’t concern me.

Nor do I care whether the administration benefits from any perceived “pullback” in Iraq news. Media Matters notes a correlation between less Iraq news and less war opposition as measured by polls, but correlation is not the same thing as cause, and in any case, it doesn’t concern journalists. Our job isn’t to manufacture fervor.

What does concern me is the assertion, because it sweeps up all “the American media,” that Iraq news coverage is waning.

The Gazette is part of “the American media,” and our Iraq coverage hasn’t faded.

Media Matters bases much of this assertion on the amount of airtime nightly TV network news has been devoting to the war inside Iraq. I’ll set that aside; I don’t run a TV network and what Katie Couric says each night has next to nothing to do with the contents of The Gazette.

The group also examined 13 large U.S. newspapers, in New York; Washington, D.C.; Boston; Chicago; Seattle; St. Louis; San Diego; Miami; Columbus; Charlotte; and Hartford, as well as USA Today. Media Matters says five of those papers published no front-page news about “events inside Iraq” between Sept. 1 and Sept. 21. Six have published one to six stories; and two have published at least a dozen.

During those same three weeks, The Gazette published 17 front-page items involving the Iraq war. Seven involved onthe-ground developments in Iraq. Others involved the controversy surrounding the detention of terrorism suspects, the involvement of Fort Carson troops, and the war’s political fallout. Scores more Iraq stories appeared inside the paper.

Media Matters claims the media gave the Bush administration a hand in 2004, too, when they lightened up on Iraq coverage in the 10 weeks prior to the presidential election, then played Iraq big for seven weeks after the election.

Not here. During the 10-week runup to the 2004 election, The Gazette published 95 front-page stories about the Iraq war and its manifest impacts. In the seven weeks following, we published 71.

Consider, too, that Media Matters samples 13 big-city newspapers for evidence whether all of America is starved for Iraq news. Taken together, those 13 papers reach one of every five American newspaper readers. Competitive congressional elections are taking place in dozens of districts, including places where these papers don’t circulate. Without evidence about the volume of Iraq coverage in the papers picked up by the other 80 percent of American readers, an assertion that “the American media . . . have lost interest in Iraq” is suspect.

The majority of American newspaper readers get their news from local papers, which emphasize local news not because the Iraq war is unimportant but because their franchise is local news — something the networks and the Washington Post can’t provide. Local papers won’t survive trying to be mini versions of the Post.

And yet, despite that, The Gazette has published a healthy dose of Iraq news. So, we appear to be an exception to the exception. What is to be made of that? Anything? I’ll wager a beverage that the Colorado Springs Gazette is among the last papers in America that Media Matters would accuse of being too hard on the Bush administration. (And now, I will brace for the e-mails from readers who will take this as an indication that The Gazette is, as they suspect, a liberal house organ. This stuff just goes ‘round in circles).

Perhaps Media Matters doesn’t intend to include local newspapers in its critique. Fair enough, but it should say so. Whether from the left or right, media criticism would be more valuable if it were painted with a finer brush.

A little housekeeping

Not sure why the "comment" function is misbehaving. All the settings appear to be in order, so your comments should go straight to the blog. I'll check it out during the weekend. Meantime, feel free to use the various e-mail links on the page to send your feedback directly to editors, and we'll be sure to get them onto the blog.

A lesson in confidence

Assistant City Editor Richard Wiens was in Kansas City last week with a bunch of other newspaper editors. You can't hold a meeting of newspaper people these days without the Internet and all its implications dominating the discussion. Here are some of Richard's thoughts, which are important because in the long run, they will become part of The Gazette's overall approach to news in Colorado Springs.

-- Jeff Thomas


It was supposed to be a break in the action.

The journalists had spent all morning talking about how to survive a brave new world in which more and more of their work will go on-line rather than onto the printed page or over the airwaves. Now it was time for some Kansas City barbecue and lunchtime entertainment from Bill Self, head coach of the tradition-rich University of Kansas bask