If the Rocky folds, I’ll miss its character, its columnists and its collection of the day’s mayhem from around the world, and the public will miss its function as a competitive counterweight to the Denver Post.

A 150-year-old newspaper is too young to die.

My little girl is 4. When she was younger, her mom, who also works at the Rocky, and I would tell her it was “time to make doughnuts” when we headed into the newsroom, and she would reply, “Make good doughnuts!” But, today, she proudly tells people mommy and daddy work for the Rocky Mountain News and sends me off to work some afternoons with the admonition, “Make a good newspaper, Daddy!”
We do make a damn good newspaper every single day. About 20,000 dozen if you’re keeping a Krispy Kreme count.

Two newspapers in Connecticut, the New Britain Herald and Bristol Press, face similar deadlines as the Rocky as they look for a buyer until mid-January, after which their owners have said they will shut the newspapers down. So far, no buyers have surfaced.

One day when I was 4 years old, I announced to my mom that I could read. And not just alphabet letters and Sesame Street words. I could read actual stories. She was understandably a little skeptical, so I picked up the newspaper my dad had left on the breakfast table and began reading aloud the first article I saw. In retrospect, it probably made for painful listening. But by Jove, I read that newspaper story, and it is the earliest memory I have of reading something on my own.

As the new year approaches the New Mexico Independent, the Associated Press and National Public Radio look back at the difficult year that was for newspapers and discuss what lies ahead.

Newspapers aren’t the only media cutting staff. Columbia Journalism Review reports that CNN officials recently cut the team assigned to cover issues in science, a decision met with criticism from several science groups.

I am privileged to work with this group of people at the Rocky, and not just because we have the same bad habit of correcting other people’s whos and whoms. I look around the newsroom and see people who understand what it means to know truth and have the freedom — the responsibility — to speak it aloud.

I love being a photojournalist more than anything else in the world, and the Rocky it has been a perfect fit for me. In the past nine years, I have been blessed to be part of one of the greatest photography staffs in the country. I have had the privilege to work and compete with some of the very best photojournalists in the World. I have been proud to speak all over the country to colleges and at workshops touting who signs my paycheck, the Rocky Mountain News.