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.

I’m a relative newbie at the Rocky, it will be five years if we make it to June 1. Like most of the people who write and craft and create your newspaper every day, I’m largely home grown, an editor first in Loveland and then at the Longmont Times-Call for nearly 20 years. One of the best things about joining the Rocky as its Night City Editor in June 2004 was being reunited with a number of people whom I had hired and taught and mentored in Longmont and then watched move on to the News. That and the good-natured groans that greeted my promotion to News Editor in May 2007 and they realized I truly was their boss again.

That’s a Rocky tradition, to hire people who have honed their skills in Longmont, Greeley, Grand Junction, Fort Collins, Pueblo; people who know this place, this state, its people, its quirks, its secrets. That’s why there’s no one who can touch us at what we do best. Storytelling.

Of course we chronicle the crimes and crashes and political high jinks, the heart-stopping Bronco wins and their heartbreaking losses, with a consistent excellence, and we have a long wall of awards proclaiming we do it best. But storytelling is what we do the very best of all, those stories and projects that draw you close and make you listen, make you take a seat around this community fire we call the Rocky.
It’s Jim Sheeler’s Final Salute, the poignant sharing of the hurt and loss that endures long after the flag is folded on a young warrior’s coffin, of the trials and strength of a Marine whose duty it is to deliver the most-awful news. It’s Kevin Vaughan’s revisiting of Colorado’s most horrible wreck in The Crossing, taking the time to follow the threads and strands of all those lives ended and all those that were forever changed. It’s M.E. Sprengelmeyer crisscrossing Iowa to take the pulse of real folks as the most amazing presidential campaign ever unfolded. And all those incredible photographs that provide a window into moments, events, even souls.

Storytelling isn’t superfluous. If anything, it’s more important now than ever as a touchstone for a society distracted by iPhones and BlackBerries and instant everything, a world obsessed with communicating, but not with listening. That ability to collect bits, to weave pieces into a whole has real-world importance. “Collecting string” we call it and it was Sara Burnett’s patient diligence that helped to gather enough bits to charge Willie Clark with the most notorious Denver murder in this century, the New Year’s Day 2007 slaying of the Broncos’ Darrent Williams. It’s what helped put Scott Kimball – a onetime FBI informant and now suspected serial killer – behind bars.

It’s what you will miss most if the Rocky goes away.

I get to write the front page of the Rocky every day, the big headlines and the little, the photo captions, the blurbs that entice you to look inside. It is so much fun. My bachelor’s degree is in literature and every day I feel like I’m writing poetry, trying to crystallize the emotion and meaning and matter of that day into a few words that will touch you where you live, trying to glaze those doughnuts.

For me, being a part of bringing Rocky readers those stories that matter most has been the best times of a long and wonderful career in newspapers. I’ve never had the opportunity to work with so, so many good and exceptionally talented people who deeply care about their community, their craft and their paper.
I never get tired of saying, “I’m with the Rocky Mountain News.” I’m always, always proud of that. I never get tired of hearing that little girl say, “Make a good newspaper, Daddy!” And I’m truly not ready to stop doing just that.