An Independent’s Day
By RMI Staff 
| July 1, 2009 | 9:05 PM
Here at the Rocky Mountain Independent, we recommend having your cup of coffee with newspaper and a computer, in no particular order.
In so many ways, this is the worst time to do what we’re doing.
We admit it. Looking around, we see layoffs, closings and mass confusion in the news industry. No one has an answer to the future of journalism. Many have theories or snippets of ideas, and some have encouraging small-scale success, but no one has found the solution to losing a major metropolitan newspaper.
Which is why in so many more ways, this is the best time to do what we’re doing.
News coverage is shrinking at the very moment when the hunger for news is greater than ever. Technology lets us seek out the news we want in the way that we want it, but as newspapers close, contract and cut back, the focus of the journalism gets narrower and narrower. Stories are being left untold.
Not only that, but important stories are being left untold. Our home, Colorado, has become the American nexus of politics, energy and the environment, even as it dries up and grows exponentially at the same time.
That’s a lot of territory to cover, but it’s only the beginning. A state as unique and diverse as ours has stories everywhere you look, from the high plains of the east to the high peaks of the west.
And in the middle of it all is the city where hundreds of thousands of us live.
The great myth of media today is that a single newspaper — should it survive — can cover a city as large and vibrant as Denver. Some of us came here a couple years ago, some of us arrived a decade ago, and some of us were here before the Broncos. But no one finds Denver to be the same now as it was when we arrived. It is changing every day, and the stories it produces are endless. No single news organization can cover them all, nor should it try.
Here and across the country in the past 20 years, we’ve seen a steady erosion of the connection between the members of a community and the journalists who cover them. It’s only become more obvious as the Internet grows into the primary source of news for more and more people. And out of that disconnect, two one-way conversations have emerged. City news goes in one direction, and the response to that news — generally in the form of letters to the editor and Web comments — goes in another. Often, the conversations talk past each other.
This doesn’t have to happen. In fact, with all of the technology we have at our disposal, it’s easier than ever for it not to happen. Just look at the rise of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. These Internet juggernauts have proven to us that our conversation can take on a depth and dimension that the pioneers — newspaper and otherwise — who first arrived in Denver more than 150 years ago never could have imagined.
We here at the Rocky Mountain Independent want to be part of that conversation. We want to remove the wall that has risen around the traditional newsroom. But most importantly, we want to bring the news back to Denver, to tell the stories that are missing in the place we call home.
