Scores of Rocky Mountain News staff members, alumni, readers and supporters of the paper came together Thursday evening to show their support for the paper. The crowd — 150 of which wore placards representing each year the newspaper has been in business — gathered at the Denver Press Club and made its way to the Denver Newspaper Agency building, where the candles were lit, starting with the year 1859.

Local historian Tom Noel, aka Dr. Colorado, launched the proceedings, speaking in the guise William Newton Byers, who began publishing the Rocky in April of 1859.

This event is open to all: readers and writers, public officials and private citizens, labor and management as well as Post, News and DNA employees both past and present. We’ll gather at 6 p.m. that night at the Denver Press Club at 1330 Glenarm Place. At 6:30 p.m. we’ll walk single file to the Denver Newspaper Agency building at 101 West Colfax.

At the DNA building, the person representing 1859 (dressed in period garb as Rocky founder William Byers) will light the first candle. He’ll then light the candle of the person representing 1860, and so on down the line until we’ve lit up the night. The entire rally will take about a half-hour.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

On Thursday, Jan. 29, we’re going to do her one better, or rather 150 better. We’ll gather that night to show our support for the continued existence of the Rocky Mountain News. There will be 150 of us there, each bearing a candle and a placard representing a year from the paper’s history.

I’m asking you to join us.

This event is open to all: readers and writers, public officials and private citizens, labor and management as well as Post, News and DNA employees both past and present. We’ll gather at 6 p.m. that night at the Denver Press Club at 1330 Glenarm Place. At 6:30 p.m. we’ll walk single file to the Denver Newspaper Agency building at 101 West Colfax.

At the DNA building, the person representing 1859 (dressed in period garb as Rocky founder William Byers) will light the first candle. He’ll then light the candle of the person representing 1860, and so on down the line until we’ve lit up the night. The entire rally will take about a half-hour.

If you would like to take part, please e-mail me at damon_runyon@hotmail.com.

Hope to see you there,
John Ensslin

This isn’t the first time the Rocky’s future has been in limbo. Those who have been following the newspaper’s series leading up to its 150th anniversary on April 23 will know that the paper has been the scrappy underdog in a life-and-death fight many times in the past — almost from the first edition in 1859.

I Want My Rocky will hold a candlelight march from the Denver Press Club to the Denver Newspaper Agency building Thursday, Jan. 29, to show support for the Rocky Mountain News. The event is open to one and all: readers and writers, labor and management, Post and News, public officials and private citizens.

Michael Hirschorn raises that prospect in a story in The Atlantic.

It’s certainly plausible. Earnings reports released by the New York Times Company in October indicate that drastic measures will have to be taken over the next five months or the paper will default on some $400million in debt. With more than $1billion in debt already on the books, only $46million in cash reserves as of October, and no clear way to tap into the capital markets (the company’s debt was recently reduced to junk status), the paper’s future doesn’t look good.

Hirschorn goes on to say that the possibility that the Times, seen by many as a national newspaper of record, will actually cease to exist in any format is slim. But he notes that the slow death that many had predicted for the print product is coming much faster than expected, leaving less time for the business to transition successfully to online news.

Season’s Greetings to our friends and readers from the folks at IWantMyRocky.com. Our Christmas wish for you: many more years of reading the Rocky Mountain News!

For those who did not see or hear about the initial announcement that E.W. Scripps was putting the Rocky Mountain News up for sale, the moment was captured on video two weeks ago by the newspaper’s multimedia team.