Created as part of a campaign to save the Rocky and re-launched as a news and advocacy site for journalism, IWantMyRocky.com is now a component of a larger project: a nonprofit corporation.

E.W. Scripps said it is finalizing an arrangement with the public library to assume ownership of the voluminous archives, including all digital and print newspaper clips, information files, microfilm, photos, correspondence, books and marketing material.

More than 100 projects, from community-financed reporting and media “test kitchens” at universities to a new journalism institute in India, are part of a $100 million, multi-year plan directed by Alberto Ibargüen. He’s president of the $2 billion John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and he’s out to save the news.

U.S. newspapers have shed jobs at a breakneck pace in 2009. Erica Smith, a multimedia producer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s STLtoday.com, puts paper cuts on the map.

As a handful of major American newspapers close and others barely cling to life, a small but growing body of economics research supports the notion that newspapers make a difference in their communities.

Watergate legend Bob Woodward says Monday’s revelation by The New York Times that two of its journalists had a tip on the Watergate scandal that he and Carl Bernstein later exposed is not as important as what they would have done with the tip.

All this adds up to a loss of decades of experience in the Colorado Capitol press corps. It’s not just the lack of warm bodies at the press table. It’s the lack of authority.

National media-reform organization Free Press outlines policy initiatives in its strategy to shore up journalism.