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.
 

This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 10:48 am and is filed under Exit Interviews: Conversations with Departing Denver Journos, What happened to them?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.