Many Denver journalists have disappeared over the past few years. I thought it would be fun and interesting to hear from them. So I’ve been asking a few what they’ve been up to–and what they think of the state of journalism in Colorado these days.

Former Post metro columnist Diane Carman was kind to take time to answer those two questions. (See below.) She started at the The Post in 1989, working first as features editor and then entertainment editor. She wrote a column once a week from 1991 to 1998 before she became a full-time columnist. Here’s what Diane wrote me via email this week.

My current situation:

I left the Post in 2007 to join the staff at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. For the first year or so, I was working primarily with the Presidential Climate Action Project, a national nonprofit headquartered in the school. That effort trailed off after the 2008 presidential election and I began working full time for the school. I have helped faculty and staff members work more effectively with the local media, organized events on public policy issues, taught a class on the media and public policy, and helped produce the alumni magazine and features for the website.

I am developing a nonprofit health policy analysis operation to be headquartered at the school. Funded by private foundations, the project will feature regular email newsletters, a website and a blog on health policy in the context of Colorado. It will be old-fashioned reporting, writing and analysis, but in an intentional nonprofit model. We hope to have it operating within the next six months.

While I miss the newspaper business, especially the newsroom atmosphere, I have come to enjoy my new colleagues and the opportunity to learn new skills. I feel really fortunate to have found another job working in the world of ideas. Still, I’m amazed at how many total strangers stop me on the street or at the grocery every week to tell me they miss my column. It was a wild ride and I’ll never forget it.

The state of Colorado journalism:
 

The news that Craig Walker won the Pulitzer Prize this year was tonic for those of us who want to see the news business in this town succeed. Craig is a tremendously talented guy who’s really well liked. He shot some amazing photos and really persevered to see that project through. It was so well deserved.

That being said, projects like Craig’s are becoming increasingly rare across the country …• not just in Denver. I’m a big fan of long-form journalism, investigative reporting, in-depth analysis and tenacious searching for the truth …• all of which are expensive to produce on a consistent basis. Given the demise of the Rocky and the reduced staff and savaged news budget at the Post, we are getting a small fraction of that kind of high-caliber journalism anymore. Some days I actually pick up a New Yorker after I finish reading the Post because I can’t find enough to read to occupy myself for a 20-minute bus ride.

My pals in the newsroom are working hard, trying to achieve greatness and they believe in what they do. They don’t know if they’ll ever get another raise or another contribution by the company to their 401k. And they all know the odds are against them given the outdated business model for the industry. I wish them all the best, but I’m not optimistic that we’ll ever see the kind of high-quality journalism that we got during our great Denver newspaper war in the ’90s. At least not from newspapers.

That being said, I really hope they prove me wrong.

During the year, I’ll be asking Denver journalists what they’ve been up to since leaving the Rocky or The Post…-and what they think of the state of Colorado journalism these days.

I previously queried former Denver Post columnists Jim Spencer and Bob Ewegen, among others.

John Rebchook covered real estate and other topics at the Rocky Mountain News from 1983 until the newspaper closed in February 2009. “I believe I have the dubious distinction of having covered business topics longer than any other journalist in Denver’s history,” John emailed me. “(Of course, it is inevitable now that I’ve said that, someone will prove me wrong.)”

Here’s what John has to say (via an email) about 1) his current situation and 2) the state of Colorado journalism:

1. After the Rocky closed, I was approached by Peter Lansing, head of Universal Lending, one of the largest privately held mortgage banking companies in Denver. I had known Peter for about 25 years and had a great deal of respect for him. During the go-go days of mortgage financing, Universal Lending stayed away from the toxic loan products, such as Option ARMS and other subprime mortgages. He left a lot of money on the table, but he refused to sell mortgages that he decided were poison for consumers. By virtue of this, his company survived and prospered, when many others imploded.

In the waning days of the Rocky, Peter said he would like to talk to me about career choices, if the paper closed. He said he enjoys giving advice, and has a knack for it.  After the Rocky was shut, we met for lunch one rainy, cold day last spring. Peter said he would like to sponsor me in some fashion, but he didn’t know how or in exactly what form. He said there are a lot of opinion pieces on real estate on the Web, but virtually no reporting. I asked Peter if we went forward on this, would I be able to speak to his competitors. “I insist on it,” he said. He said he did not want to control or influence the editorial content. I, of course, could quote him, from time to time as I did at the Rocky, when appropriate. For him, it would be a type of passive marketing to get his company’s name in front of real estate professionals and consumers.  About eight months ago, InsideRealEstateNews.com  was born.  Land Title Guarantee also joined as a sponsor. I’ve enjoyed writing the blog a great deal. It keeps me in touch with what is happening in the real estate world, and gives me more freedom to choose my own topics than I had at the Rocky. I also have enjoyed learning about the technical aspects of blogging. I create my own graphics, such as tables; take and post my own photographs; and shoot and post my own videos. My blog has been growing by leaps and bounds. I make a fraction of what I made at the Rocky, however, and economically it can only continue in this form if I get more sponsors and/or advertising. I’m working on both of those options. Hopefully, I will be able to make a decent living writing my blog. I also have completed a number of freelance writing and editing assignments. I am a total free agent. I even appeared on a commercial for Bass Pro, in which I posed as an instructor for a bird-watching class!

2. Without a doubt, I think Denver would be better off with two competitive, daily newspapers. It certainly keeps reporters on their toes when they know that a reporter at the rival paper is competing against them. Competition is good. That said, it is quite amazing that two papers of the same size survived as long as they did, given the economic realities of everything from Craig’s List, declining readership among young people, and all of the news available on the Web. One of the ironies of losing my job at the Rocky is that I now have more time to read the Denver Post and the Wall Street Journal. I think the Post has done an admirable job of covering the news since the Rocky closed. Many of my former colleagues relish finding the occasional bad lede to poke fun at, but the truth is that every reporter from time to time wrote ledes that were stinkers. I hated looking at my stories after I wrote them, at the Rocky, because I knew I would find something I would change, with the pressure of the deadline behind me. I certainly thought all of the reporters at the Post were worthy competitors when I was at the Rocky, and they are still excellent journalists and reporters. When I was at the Rocky, I always looked at the Post long before the sun rose, to see if I had been beaten on a story. Too many days I would go to work in a dark mood because my butt had been kicked. I would also say that when I traveled around the country, I would always look at the local papers. Outside of a few major cities, I never found papers that I thought were as good as the Denver Post or the Rocky Mountain News for local and business coverage. And I thought the business sections of both papers put to shame the business sections of much bigger papers. For example, when I would visit my family in suburban Chicago, where I grew up, I always thought that the business sections at either of the Denver papers were far superior to the business section of the Chicago Tribune. I also think that people tend to expect too much from an individual paper.  Years ago, I was talking to a guy who owned a real estate company in Denver. He had been invited to a focus group of readers at the Rocky to see what they wanted in a paper. Basically, they said they wanted everything. But he felt like they were deluding themselves. Were they really going to read a 20-inch story about Senegal or a 40-inch story about a new Volvo factory in Sweden? The real estate owner each day read Denver dailies, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. Only then, did he think that he received a good overview of what was going on. He felt it was incumbent upon the reader to broaden his or his perspective by going to a wide variety of publications. He did not think any single newspaper could provide “one-stop reading” to fulfill all of your news needs. Now that the Denver Post has won the newspaper war here, I’ve thought back to that conversation often. I think it is as true now as it was back in the day.

Note:  During the year, I’ll be asking former Denver journalists what they’ve been up to since disappearing from the Denver journalism scene…-and what they think of the state of Colorado journalism these days. I previously queried Bob Ewegen and Jim Spencer.
 

Peter Blake was a reporter and then a political columnist at the Rocky Mountain News.
 

I started at the Rocky in August 1968.  I applied first at the Post, but it had no opening, so I went to the Rocky, where Mike Howard had just taken over as city editor.  I was his first hire.
 I left in May 2007.  The News offered a buyout to 20 people, and since I was 71 and the paper was losing money, I knew I’d never get a better offer than that.  I freelanced a weekly column for the Rocky subsequently, during legislative and campaign seasons.  The last one appeared in the penultimate issue in February 2009.
 

I have not worked in journalism since, but am looking at opportunities. Of course I am sad to see only one major daily still publishing in Denver, and it seems to prove the rule that newspapers need competition to flourish.  The lack of advertising means the space available for news and opinion is being squeezed.  But there’s no point in looking back. Web sites abound — some of them produced by my former colleagues at the paper — and since there is still a demand for news, some may prosper.  Or at least survive.
 

Note:  During the year, I’ll be asking former Denver journalists what they’ve been up to since disappearing from the Denver journalism scene…-and what they think of the state of Colorado journalism these days. I previously queried Bob Ewegen.

Jim Spencer, the former columnist for The Denver Post, was kind enough to answer my questions via email yesterday. Spencer came to The Post to write a metro column in 2003. He was laid off in June 2007.

Jason,

Here are my e-interview answers

1.       I hoped to work the rest of my professional life as a columnist at the Denver Post. But Denver Post Editor Greg Moore laid me off in June 2007. I tried hard to get another job in journalism. I was invited to St. Louis to interview for the editorial page editor’s job and to the Indianapolis Star to discuss a political editor’s job, but did not receive offers from either paper. Meanwhile, to keep publishing columns, I started my own website, SpencerSpeaks.com, with technical help from two non-journalist friends, Chris Dunn and Sharon Steadman. I convinced the publishers of Colorado Confidential to pay me a monthly stipend to co-publish my columns on their website. I covered the news in Colorado in much the same way I had while at the Post. Public officials granted me access and information as a working journalist. I guest-hosted on AM760 talk radio, appeared monthly on John Andrews radio show on Backbone Radio and occasionally appeared on PBS talk shows as a guest commentator. But the pay in online journalism could not support me or my wife, and it came with no benefits. So I eventually applied for and got a job as communications director of the University of Colorado School of Medicine. I worked for wonderful people, especially Dean Dick Krugman, who did important work and included me as a strategic adviser, not just as a flack.  It was arguably the best PR job I could have conceived. But I missed journalism. The relationship between journalists and people with power differs remarkably from the relationship between institutional advocates and those same powerbrokers. In my view, independent journalists possess a leverage against abuses of power that serves the public’s interest better than any form of marketing or advocacy. So I continued to look for work in journalism. In October 2009, I found an opportunity at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where I now work as a general assignment writer. I have written about medical research using animals, middle class people on food stamps, overcrowded homeless shelters and attempts to end a health care program for the poor. I recently returned from Haiti and have published the first two parts of three-part series. Your readers can read  those stories and view accompanying videos and photos at

 http://www.startribune.com/world/84858637.html?elr=KArksUUULPQL7PQLanchO7DiU

http://www.startribune.com/world/85276687.html?elr=KArksDyycyUtyycyUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUU

2.       As for the state of journalism in Colorado, I believe it suffers significantly from the closure of the Rocky Mountain News and the shrinking of the Denver Post staff. So-called new media pays for far too little original reporting, settling instead to consolidate for free and redistribute  the work of institutions such as the Post and Rocky that it mocks as “main stream media.” Alternatively, new media too often consists of selective reporting designed to advance the agenda of its owners. Or new media consists of partisan rants supported by no reporting.  When your local website pays livable wages and benefits to independent professional journalists who will report the story wherever it leads and who have access to and respect from newsmakers, then you have a model that serves the public. However, if the public refuses to support that model financially, then society will get what it pays for. Having fewer independent journalists ferreting out corporate, political and bureaucratic abuses of power serves no one but the people who hope to exploit the public to their personal advantage. That kind of greed and exploitation always exists. But it runs amok as journalism struggles. Having watched how things work from the PR side as well as the newspaper side, I believe Coloradans and all Americans are on the brink of being manipulated by people with big money and special interests in ways they hardly comprehend.

In recent years, journalists have had an unfortunate tendency to be on our kitchen tables one day and to vanish the next. Ignoring the impact this has on the journalists themselves, it’s disorienting to those of us who follow the news and the writing of specific working stiffs who produce it.
 

So I’d thought I’d add an occasional “What happened to them?” post on this blog for anyone who cares about where the disappeared journos have landed.
 

One such journalist who vanished abruptly after 36 years at The Denver Post is Bob Ewegen. He left without explanation in November of 2008. ColoradoPols readers may have noticed his reappearance on Pols (as “voyageur”) in January.

Here’s what he has to say (via an email) about the state of Colorado journalism and his current situation:
 

On the one hand, my one-year noncompete clause has now expired.  But the non-disclosure parts of my separation package are probably still in place.  In any event, I want to stay away from the posture of “everything was great on my watch but it all went to hell when I left.”
 

Charles de Gaulle liked to say “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”
 

On the health front, I’m definitely better.  My blood sugar is down due primarily to less stress and more exercise.  I am continuing my paralegal classes at Community College of Denver, where I currently have a 4.0 average, and am on track to certify as a paralegal in May, just a few weeks before my 65th birthday.
 

When not attending classes, I work part-time at The Law Office of Misty Ewegen as Director of Research and Communication. My work there has focused primarily on writing, legal research and editing.  Our practice is picking up and the flexible hours can accommodate outside activities.
 

In Colorado, anyone can call himself a paralegal but you can’t call yourself a certified paralegal unless you’ve been certified.  I find the classes stimulating and figured why not get the certificate?  Of course, I also have my B.S. in Journalism and my M.S. in Labor Relations.  Given the parlous state of both the news business and trade unions, that proves my mastery of lost causes. Perhaps I can now pursue a Ph. D. in Building the Titanic. 😉
 

Seriously, I still entertain thoughts of attending law school in 2011.  Meanwhile, I serve pro bono on the Board of Directors of the Colorado Judicial Institute and am also Journalist in Residence at CJI. We work to preserve fair and impartial courts in Colorado and promote excellence in our legal system, avoiding the kind of horrors that the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Caperton case revealed.  John Grisham’s novel “The Appeal” is admittedly modeled after that case.
 

The reason I am not even thinking about law school until 2011 is that 2010 is an election year.  I remain passionately committed to the goal of restoring the state budget to solvency and have told state Treasury Cary Kennedy I’d like to do what I can for her campaign on a volunteer basis.

Now that I am no longer a journalist, I am free to do such radical things as going to a caucus (effectively banned at The Denver Post). It is possible the election may lead to other opportunities.