Here’s how The Denver Post would look if it really hit the bottom.

On the Center for Western Priorities’ bog Friday, Erin Moriarty spotlighted a special advertising section that looks very much like the actual Denver Post.

Moriarty wrote:

Even the most seasoned Denver Post readers can be fooled by a new advertising ploy from oil and gas front group Coloradans for Responsible Energy Development (CRED), in which fake, industry-sponsored news stories are being published as part of a special “Energy and Environment” section on the newspaper’s website.

Each CRED-authored story uses the same font and layout as real Denver Post articles from real Denver Post reporters, undoubtedly attempting to pass CRED’s message off as real news. But, it’s not. It’s yet another paid effort that CRED is using to validate its now-dwindling credibility.

CRED is no stranger to promoting its message through paid advertising, as can be seen by the television, radio, online, and bus advertisements that the group has been running since its inception in September 2013. This time, the ad on Denver Post’s website boasts “news” about oil and gas development in the state, when really, the group is just peddling its own version of facts. In the “Energy and Environment” section on the Denver Post’s website, CRED’s advertorial features several stories on natural gas exports, local control amendments, and other energy issues Coloradans have been following for months.

The online version of the CRED ad is labeled in large letters across the top, “This Advertising Section is Sponsored by [CRED logo].” And “Advertising Supplement to The Denver Post” appears on top, in small, but not tiny, font.

Post reporter Mark Jaffe did the right thing by tweeting readers a warning about the fake content last week.

“Faux Denver Post. Industry group’s paid article looks a lot a Post story — it isn’t,” Jaffe tweeted April 9.

The six-page print version of the ad supplement, which appeared March 16, doesn’t even have the headline, “This Advertising Section is Sponsored by,”  and is over-the top deceptive, with the by-lined “articles” and news format, even though “Advertising supplement to The Denver Post” appears on top of each page in font equal to the size of the date.

The print supplement states that another “Energy and Environment” Section will be published April 20, next weekend.

The Post should use the same large-font “Advertising Supplement” headline in it’s April 20 print version of its “Energy and Environment” ad supplement as it uses online.

So-called “sponsored content” like this is nothing new, and its use is on the rise, as newspapers struggle financially.

Newspapers could easily die whether they push fake news or not, but at this point, credibility is still the newspaper industry’s most valuable asset, its point of differentiation from blogs, vlogs, Facebook posts, tweets, even local TV, etc.

The Post should take a clue from its own reporter, Jaffe, and do a better job warning its readers about the fake content of its next “Energy and Environment” section.

Political campaigns love to develop a narrative and connect it to everything they say and do. But sometimes they overdo it, and the campaign narrative suddenly looks cramped.

Thanks to reporting by multiple media outlets, GOP senatorial candidate Cory Gardner’s all-consuming Obamacare narrative is already smelling overdone and forced. It’s not just because Obamacare appears to be working.

Take, for example, Gardner’s foundational story about deciding to enter the Senate race.

Gardner: I thought about reconsidering running for the U.S. Senate, but it really picked up last year when we received our healthcare cancellation notice.

If that’s true, and Gardner has said this numerous times, then Gardner’s thoughts about entering the race “really picked up” in August, six months before he told The Denver Post in February that he was launching his Senate campaign against Udall.

So Gardner left his Republican opponents floundering for six months, even though he had publicly announced June 28, three months earlier, that he would not run against Udall in part because he wanted to get out of the way of his opponents who were “making their decisions” about running.

More doubts about Gardner’s foundational Obamacare campaign-origin story surfaced when Politico reported that Gardner decided to enter the race after seeing the results of a poll conducted by Republicans in Washington DC.

That was January, about five months after Gardner got his letter outlining his options for coverage under Obamacare.

January was also the time period when Gardner stepped up his attacks on Udall, as if his campaign against Udall was suddenly in motion. Gardner sent a Jan. 9 letter from his congressional office to the Colorado Division of Insurance asking questions about it’s interactions with Udall’s office. In mid-January, Gardner asked his own congressional committee to investigate. Gardner’s a member of the Commerce committee. And Then the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which, according to Politico, conducted the poll convincing Gardner to run for Senate, sent a Jan. 17 letter to Udall, with more questions.

This timeline, casting serious doubts on Gardner’s story that his Obamacare letter pushed him into the race, was constructed with the record produced by journalists covering Gardner, day-to-day, month-to-month. It’s a small testament to why political reporting is important and how it creates a picture of a candidate for us to contrast with the messaging of his campaign.

Delegates at the state Republican convention will vote Saturday to decide which gubernatorial candidates will face off in the GOP primary election June 24.

But delegates will not have the option of voting for Bob Beauprez, who’s the only Republican GOP gubernatorial candidate who’s decided to skip Saturday’s convention and rely only on petitioning onto the June primary ballot.

The question is, will Beauprez be told not to attend the convention, like failed Senate candidate Jane Norton was in 2010 when she decided to forgo a vote at the assembly? Not only was her presence banned, but so were any Norton banners, signs, and literature. Presumably, Norton could have stood on the public sidewalk outside the convention hall, and indeed her signs were scattered out there in 2010, but Norton stayed away.

Then State GOP Chair Dick Wadhams was clear that no whiff of Norton would be tolerated, telling  The Denver Post’s Allison Sherry at the time:

Wadhams: “Any candidates for statewide office who forgo the caucus assembly process will not be allowed to speak,” Wadhams said. “They will not be allowed to have banners or signs or literature at the state convention. If the convention is not good enough to participate in, it’s not good enough for them to have a presence. That’s their decision.”

Media outlets have yet to determine if the same rules will be enforced, which makes for an interesting angle on equal-pay week. An email to GOP Chair Ryan Call seeking clarification was not immediately returned.

GOP candidates must receive 30 percent of the vote at the state convention to make the June 24 primary ballot. Additionally, they must garner at least 10 percent of votes to be placed on the ballot, even if they’ve collected enough signatures to make the ballot. If no candidate at the convention hits the 30-percent threshold, then the top to vote-getting candidates will make the primary ballot.

By skipping the convention, Beauprez eliminates any risk that his name would be struck from the ballot for getting less than a 10 percent of the convention vote, assuming he makes the ballot via the petition process. It appears that he will make the ballot via signatures.

Tom Tancredo has already petitioned on the primary ballot.

The winner of the GOP gubernatorial primary will take on Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper.  Leading candidates, in addition to Beauprez and Tancredo, are Secretary of State Scott Gessler and Sen. Greg Brophy.

Earlier this year, State Chair Call clarified that GOP candidates are allowed to both petition on the GOP primary ballot and go through the assembly process.

I just went to Safeway after reading Eating Dangerously, by Denver journalists Michael Booth and Jennifer Brown.

I have to admit, the produce aisle was scary. The cantaloupes brought flashbacks from the book’s detailed recounting of the deaths of 33 people who ate Colorado cantaloupe in 2011. The shiny apples didn’t look clean. The bagged greens, which I love, bothered me. But I found a deceptively clean-looking bag and tossed in in my cart.

I moved on, just trying to implement some of the book’s ideas to protect myself.

Over in the fruit area, I decided to put my apples, oranges, limes, and bananas in one of my reusable bags, instead of just dropping them loose in my shopping cart, like I used to do to avoid putting them in wasteful plastic bags.

As Eating Dangerously explains, you don’t want your apples rolling around a shopping cart that’s been slimed with raw chicken and who knows what. It suggests wrapping them in plastic bags. I was glad I read the book for this advice alone.

I skipped the fresh raspberries. I’d been buying them lately for my daughter’s smoothie, even though I know they’re imported from somewhere really really far away with virtually no inspection. But the book helped me recommit to not buying raspberries in April. (I buy plenty of other foods from faraway places, but the raspberries got cut.)

I used to feel good about the organic/local section, but I was deflated because the book points out that organic food can carry deadly bacteria just like conventional food. Still, there are benefits to organic/local food, and I loaded some stuff in my buggy.

I didn’t want to buy meat at all, especially salmonella-laced chicken, but it’s so easy to toss a chicken in the oven. I reminded myself that I’d cook the shit out of the it, and I’d be safe.

I put the bagged bird under the rest of my food, on the platform under my buggy, to separate it from the produce, which will be eaten raw. Good advice from the book, which is subtitled, “Why the Government Can’t Keep Your Food Safe…and How You Can.”

I strolled around a while longer, and at one point, I saw my buggy with the chicken dangling by the wheels of the cart. I realized, shit, the book recommended selecting stuff like chicken LAST, at the end of my shopping experience, not at the beginning, to limit its time out of the fridge.

I ran to my buggy, loaded up on a few more things, and headed to the check-out line.

Everything was going well until the checker dumped my apples, limes, oranges, and other fruit on the conveyer belt after he’d taken them out of my cloth bag and weighed them. If you read the book, you know the conveyer belt at the checkout-line in a grocery store has major potential to contaminate your food, especially stuff you’re not going to cook.

I was doing the bagging, and I lunged for the apples as they hit the moving belt, limiting the exposure to the contaminated area to just seconds.

I didn’t have the guts to tell the checker that he was exposing me, possibly, to deadly contamination by tossing my lemons on his moving black rubber pad.

Eating Dangerously recommends bathing certain foods in a bleach bath, but this is not practical for me. I’ll wash my food, especially the fruits that hit the conveyer belt today, more carefully than I would have before reading the book, and maybe my daughter won’t die, as a result. It could happen, as the book proves with reasoned and credible analysis, carefully cited.

And the sad part is, if someone were to die because their apples got contaminated at the check-out line, it’s likely his or her death would have been completely preventable, if our government could afford to implement simple common-sense regulations that, surely, most everyone would want, given the life-and-death stakes.

Booth, who just left The Denver Post, and Brown, who’s still there, make an irrefutable case that the gaping holes in our food-protection system, carefully documented in their book, reflect a gross failure of government. And, bottom-line, we could be eating more safely if more tax money were available for the food fight. Instead, budget cuts make us eat more dangerously every day.

You can argue about whether improving food safety should be the highest priority of our broke government, given the magnitude of death and destruction in our world at home and abroad. But one in six Americans will get sick from something they ate this year. Three thousand will die.

Correction: a previous version of this post inaccurately stated that contaminated cantaloupe were grown in Rocky Ford, Colorado. In fact, they were grown 90 miles from Rocky Ford.

I wrote a blog post a while back regurgitating rocker Ted Nugent’s appearance on KNUS Peter Boyles’ show, where Nugent said Colorado is the poster child of “moral dereliction” and the Republican Party has “no balls” because someone cut off “their scrotum with a rusty shiv.”

Exciting stuff that logged me 50,000 listens on SoundCloud.

The thing is, Nugent, who also called Obama a “subhuman mongrel,” is featured in at least three fundraising appeals for GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo.

A couple weeks ago, Denver Post reporter Lynn Bartels asked Tancredo about his association with Nugent:

“Every time somebody asks me about it, I always say, ‘The thing about Ted Nugent that I like is he has given me the ability to say something that I have hardly ever before uttered in my life and that is the following — ‘” Tancredo said, but couldn’t finish his sentence he was laughing so hard.

“He has given me the ability to say, ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’” Tancredo said, cracking up.

After he calmed down, Tancredo noted Nugent had apologized for the remark. Critics said it was a half-hearted apology, and Nugent then went on to attack Obama, calling him a lying, law-breaking racist who engages in Nazi tactics. The apology came after Nugent was criticized by a number of Republicans, including Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and John McCain of Arizona.

But Nugent has yet to apologize to Colorado!

Nugent: “If ever there was a poster child for apathy, disconnect, laziness, and abandonment of We the People, and moral dereliction, it is Colorado.” 

I’ve been trying to get Boyles to play Nugent’s Colorado insult to Tancredo on air and get his response. It would make great radio.

Meanwhile, here’s a March 25 conversation between Tancredo and Boyles with Tancredo’s take on the conversation he had with space reporter Bartels.

BOYLES: [inaudible] Only you!

TANCREDO: Oh, it’s just great! — A very successful fundraising activity where we gave away an AR-15, and that raised a really big sum of money for us, more than we’ve ever raised before. And, thanks a lot, of course, to Ted Nugent who sent out [laughing] the little email for us. Uh, but, the fellow that we want to give a shout out to at Gunsmoke is a fellow by the name of Brian Midol [spelling?] who indeed is providing the AR-15 for us. [laughing]

BOYLES: Yeah, that’s great! Tom, do this, real quick, can you do – we have got a little bit of time here. But do this, — about the Lynn Bartels phone call – and we—I love—

TANCREDO: Oh, yeah! Yeah!

BOYLES: I’ve known Lynn a thousand years, at The [Denver] Post, Bartels called you.

TANCREDO: [laughing] She calls me up and she says, “Tom,” she says, “I–“ Is this okay? She said, “Tom, I, uh, we’re getting all these emails. Every time you send out something by Ted Nugent, we get all these emails from Republicans and Democrats, saying, ‘This guy is terrible! He said these horrible things! He called the President a mongrel – a lying mongrel!’” And all this stuff. And I said, “Oh, Lynn! I am so glad you called me because I have this great line to use! [laughing] I thought, — when this first happened, I thought of it. And then I thought, ‘Who am I going to tell this to?’ And then here you are, you’ve given me a call.” And I said, “Why this really works out for me, is that, –and why I really like Ted [Nugent] for doing this,– is because –.”

BOYLES: For the first time in your life –.

TANCREDO: Yeah, “For the first time in my life I’m able to say something, that never before have I been able to utter!” And she says, “What’s that?” And I said, “[citing Nugent’s comment that Obama is a mongrel] ‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far!’” [laughs]

Media outlets are reporting that Rep. Mike Coffman has joined  Rep. Cory Gardner in withdrawing his support of the personhood amendment, which would ban all abortion, but, strangely, reporters aren’t asking Coffman (or Gardner) the logical follow-up question: What is your position on abortion?

Does Coffman still oppose abortion, even in the case of rape and incest? If he still believes life begins at conception, does he still think the government should somehow protect human “life” from fertilized-egg onwards? Does he think women should be given the power to make this choice for themselves, if they are pregnant? Does he oppose still Roe V. Wade? Does he believe a woman has the right to make all decisions about her own body?

Coffman himself has yet to make a statement about his alleged reversal on personhood, leaving the dirty work to his spokesperson, but Coffman’s record, even if you exclude his support for personhood, clearly reflects a true believer’s opposition to abortion

For example, Coffman once wrote the following letter to then KHOW radio-host Dan Caplis, to clear up any possible confusion about his opposition to abortion, even in the case of rape and incest:

Dan,

First of all, thanks so much for your help with my campaign and for inviting me on your show. During the debate, Craig Silverman was questioning me on the issue of abortion. My response was focused on arguing that Roe v Wade was bad law. During that exchange, Craig asked me about the issue of rape and incest. Apparently, my answer came across as supporting abortions under a rape and incest exception. I absolutely do not believe in that.

Dan, I would deeply appreciate it if, during your show, you could state that I wanted to make sure that my position was clear, unequivocally, that I oppose abortion in all cases of rape and incest. I believe that all life is equally sacred irregardless of how it came into being.

Thanks again,

Mike Coffman

Asked about this later, Caplis emailed me he wasn’t surprised that Coffman went out of his way to be clear that he was against abortion in the case of rape and incest. “Mike has always been such a champion of the pro-life cause that I think the issue was quickly resolved,” Caplis wrote.

In a statement after the last election, Personhood USA celebrated Coffman’s “100%” anti-choice stand, and the organization held him up as proof that a politician can hold be stridently anti-abortion and still win close elections. A local personhood leader called Coffman a “statesman.”

With this kind of paper trail hanging over your shoulder, it’s no surprise that Coffman’s spokesman has offered different explanations to The Denver Post and Denver’s Fox 31 for Coffman’s personhood shift, telling The Post Coffman wouldn’t support the personhood amendment this year and offering this to Denver’s Fox 31:

“There’s a reason Democratic Senator Michael Bennet called Speaker Romanoff’s attacks sleazy in 2010 – Romanoff is the Czar of sleaze,” said Tyler Sandberg, Coffman’s campaign manager. “‘Supported it at every turn?’ Mike didn’t in 2012. And he doesn’t in 2014.

“The voters have spoken twice, and the question is settled.  The initiative is over-broad and full of unintended consequences, sort of like Obamacare, which let’s be honest, all of this sleaze from Romanoff is meant to be a distraction from.”

You read this and you think again, what does Coffman really think, and what’s the explanation?

Maybe Coffman would like a more tightly-worded personhood amendment, and he’d be ok with it? That’s another question reporters should put to him.

The Denver Post reported Friday that senatorial candidate Cory Gardner accused the Udall campaign of lying when Udall claimed Gardner opposes abortion, even in the cases of rape and incest.

The Post’s Lynn Bartels reported Friday:

Gardner said he stepped forward because Udall and his allies have spent the last three weeks “distorting my record.” Among the “lies,” he said: claiming that he opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest.

“Mark Udall wants to run a social issues campaign. He definitely wants to run as the social issues candidate,” Gardner said.

Bartels should have stated, specifically, that it was not a lie for Udall to point out that Gardner opposes abortion, even in the cases of rape and incest. That’s been Gardner’s position–even when asked about it outside of the context of the personhood amendment.

Bob Moore of the Ft. Collins Coloradoan reported Sept. 26, 2010:

“I’ve been very up-front on it; I am pro-life,” Gardner, a state representative from Yuma, said in an interview with the Coloradoan.

When asked if he would allow exceptions for victims of rape or incest, or when the mother’s life is in danger, Gardner said, “I’m pro-life, and I believe abortion is wrong.”

Reporters should ask Gardner if he’s had a change of heart not just about the personhood amendment, which would ban abortion for rape, but about his opposition specifically to abortion-in-the-cases-of-rape and-incest.

Gardner told The Post that his flip on personhood was based on its restriction on forms of contraception, but he has yet to explain if he’s also reversed himself, specifically, on opposing abortion-for-rape-and-incest, and, if so, why.

In his farewell column in The Denver Post years ago, the great food writer John Kessler wrote: “You’ve kept me honest through numerous gaffes. You let me know when my Chinese Orange Chicken recipe was missing a key ingredient (chicken)”

Mistakes are part of journalism, but that truism will never stop people from getting mad about them, and rightfully so.

Serious errors, for example,  in a recent Post piece about Obamacare were spotlighted by ColoradoPols, and to it’s credit, The Post quickly made a bare-bones correction and clarification to the article.

The story, written by long-time Denver journalist Art Kane, was the product of a “partnership” between The Post and Kaiser Health News.

I wondered if somehow the partnership, described briefly in The Post piece, was the root cause of the errors.

Asked for details about the partnership and whether the stipulations of the partnership could have led to the errors in Kane’s piece, Post Editor Greg Moore wrote:

Moore: Regarding the Kaiser relationship, we are among a half dozen or so newspapers and outlets such as NPR that accept a grant from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has nothing to do with the health provider of the same first name, to supplement our coverage of health news. The only condition is that it be focused on issues related to universal health coverage. We get a modest monthly stipend that we can use to do graphics, stories, photo work, etc. We are completely free to decide how to use the stipend within that general subject matter. Neither the foundation nor Kaiser Health News has any control over content. We do by agreement allow KHN to post all content supported by the Foundation grant on its website. We can link to all content on the KHN site unless there are some exclusive rights issues.

We have contracted with Art Kane to do health related stories through the period of the grant in June. The grant can be renewed, and we are currently planning to renew our grant application.

We believe this additional resource will enrich our coverage of this important issue.

Moore declined to explain why the mistakes were made in Kane’s piece, saying that “we correct lots of mistakes we make in the newspaper.”

I don’t blame Moore for not wanting to get into the details of the causes of errors in stories. You don’t have to be much of a news consumer to know that staff cuts, including disappeared copy editors, and veteran reporters jumping ship, have made all facets of journalism, including fact checking, more difficult. But, staff cuts aside, errors happen. And so should quick and detailed corrections.

You hear complaints about The Denver Post’s reduced coverage of politics, but the newspaper still has more political reporters than any other news outlet in Colorado. And it’s still the state’s leading source of political news.

So, to show what’s happened to political journalism in Colorado recently, I thought I’d compare the number of Post reporters covering elections and the legislature today to the numbers in recent decades.

The most shocking comparison is the Post’s staffing today versus 2010, when Colorado had senatorial and gubernatorial elections, like we do this year. This November, like 2010, Colorado also has state-wide races for state treasurer and secretary of state, plus state legislative elections and one of the most competitive congressional races in the country.

Just four years ago, The Post had double the number political reporters dedicated to elections and the state legislative session (four versus eight). The newspaper had about eleven in 1960s, 1970s, and mid-1980s.

“I would like to have more resources at my disposal when it comes to covering politics in swing state Colorado in an election year while the legislature is in session,” Denver Post Politics Editor Chuck Plunkett told me via email. “Presently I’m asking Kurtis [Lee] and Lynn [Bartels] to do double duty. Lynn’s tracking the governor’s race while Kurtis tracks the Senate race. For the much-anticipated 6th DC contest, Carlos Illescas, recently assigned to focus on Aurora, is following Coffman and Joey Bunch is following Romanoff. Joey also does a mix of other stories. Obviously, on the national races we lean on Allison Sherry to help out from Washington. [Note: Since I corresponded with Plunkett, Sherry has announced her departure.]

“This is our present configuration. As the races heat up, that configuration could change. Change, of course, has never been a stranger to newsrooms. Being adaptable is what we’ve always been about.”

Curtis Hubbard, who was The Post’s Politics editor in 2010, described the political reporting staff he oversaw.

“Best guess is that, at a similar moment in time [in 2010], I had at least 8 reporters available to cover the statehouse and state and federal elections (though that number increased the closer we got to Election Day),” Hubbard emailed.

“During the primary phase, Karen Crummy covered the governor’s race; Michael Booth and Allison Sherry were pulled from other jobs in the newsroom to cover the U.S. Senate race; Michael Riley covered the delegation and congressional races from our D.C. bureau; Lynn Bartels, Tim Hoover and Jessica Fender covered statehouse races, the state treasurer’s race and congressional races; and John Ingold covered the Attorney General’s race, the Secretary of State’s race and general issues pertaining to elections and turnout.

“In my time there, The Post’s leadership team always understood the important role the publication played in informing voters on the issues and never shied away from adding reporters to the politics team as warranted. Additionally, The Post continually sought out ways to help bring understanding of the issues to voters, whether that was through launching online Voter Guides, which proved to be among the most popular online offerings each election season, or on-camera interviews with candidates.

“Despite the ongoing ‘right-sizing’ that has depleted the ranks of reporters and editors at The Post in recent years, the organization continues to dedicate more people to politics than any other news outlet in the state.“

During the 1960s and 1970s, when former Denver Post reporter Fred Brown started covering the Colorado Legislature, the newspaper assigned six reporters to election campaigns, plus five to the legislature, according to Brown. Brown wrote that the numbers were slightly reduced in the mid-1980s, when he returned to the beat.

“The Denver Post used to assign about half a dozen reporters, or more, to election campaigns,” Brown told me via email. “Senatorial and gubernatorial campaigns had a total of four: One for each major party’s candidate. The congressional candidates usually were covered by suburban or regional reporters. Sometimes suburban reporters covered more than one congressional district, but they always covered both major-party candidates. Other state offices, and the legislative races, typically were covered by the chief political writer (me or others who had that role before and after).

“The dwindling staffing of election coverage reflects what happened to legislative coverage. The first dozen or so years I was part of the legislative team, there were five reporters and one photographer regularly assigned to the session. Leonard Larsen, Tom Gavin and Charles Roos joined me (the regular statehouse reporter) and one other general assignment reporter (assigned ad hoc) on the legislative team during the session. Duane Howell’s full-time assignment as a photographer was to cover the legislature when it was in session.”

Although they’re a useful measure and symbol of the decline of Colorado journalism, The Post’s staffing numbers don’t tell the whole story, which is obviously much more complicated.

So-called “computer-assisted reporting” allows reporters to be more efficient in many ways than they used to be.

And the experience and skill of individual reporters can make a huge difference. One good political reporter, whether at The Post or a regional newspaper, radio station, or other competitor (some of which have good political journalists on staff), can do the work of many lesser journalists.

Also, the long competition between the Rocky Mountain News and The Post affected staff levels at the newspapers and the quality of Colorado political journalism until the Rocky closed in 2009. In an email, former Rocky Editor John Temple described, in broad terms, the Rocky’s approach to coverage in the early/mid 2000s:

“Typically, as I recall, we had a reporter for the House and a reporter for the Senate,” Temple wrote. “I also liked to have a free-floating reporter, but I can’t tell you with any confidence that we did that every session. In addition, Peter Blake spent most of his time at the Capitol. We then would send in beat reporters as required. In other words, we wanted the higher ed reporter to cover education issues and take them out of the Capitol and provide perspective, or the environment reporter. As for political races, typically it is difficult to cover them during the session. But what we did was assign reporters to the different races. So each race or group of races would have someone responsible for it. Typically one of our legislative reporters would be responsible for legislative races, as I recall. Burt Hubbard would cover money and help other reporters with that type of data journalism. Every reporter would be responsible for money in his or her race/races.”

Political reporting on local TV is not filling The Post’s gap. As has been the case for decades, we’re lucky if a Denver TV station has one dedicated political reporter, even though, for example, the stations earned a combined total of $67 million in political advertising dollars in 2012. Only Fox 31’s Eli Stokols offers day-to-day political coverage, like a newspaper reporter, but 9News and CBS4 both have political reporters and contribute quality political journalism.

And new technology allows for the contribution of progressive and conservative journalists. (See the Colorado Independent and the Colorado Observer.) Bloggers and trackers and everyday people with cameras are also part of “journalism” in the state.

I’m not saying that The Post’s staffing levels are the definitive measure of political journalism in Colorado, but they’re a serious indicator of the state’s journalistic health. And so it’s hard to be anything but depressed about the current situation.

I’ve been chronicling the departure of journalists from The Denver Post, and Michael Roberts has done a much more thorough job of it on Westword’s Latest Word blog.

The list of keeps growing, the latest being The Post’s Washington DC chief Allison Sherry, who’s leaving to oversee the three-person DC office of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Others who’ve left The Post include Kristin Arellano, Michael Booth, Tim Hoover, Curtis Hubbard,  Dave Krieger, Tom McKay, Dave Krause, Steve McMillan, Joan Niesen, Kevin Vaughan, and others.

I asked Denver Post editor Greg Moore to comment on the loss of so many respected journalists, most on their own volition, over the past few years. I told Moore it’s a sad situation, from my perspective.

Here’s Moore’s response, via email (You can read more of Moore’s thoughts here in a post by Roberts.):

Moore: “Movement has always been a part of industry and journalism is no different. We are happy for our colleagues who have found new challenges and we relish the opportunity to create new opportunities for those who remain at The Post. Many of the people who have left have been here for a long time and done terrific work. They left for better opportunities or a chance to do something else that would challenge them in new ways. The economy is getting better and so people are feeling confident about making a move. I am sure they bettered themselves financially. The news business has been downsizing, so if one is ready to move on their own terms, why wouldn’t they do it? I think it is absolutely great. I am not sure I understand why you think this is so sad. We are able to go out and hire new people with fresh perspectives and give them a chance to make their mark in the footsteps of some great journalists in a great news town. It would be sad if talented people left and we were not able to replace them or attract talent. But that is not the case. We are hiring new people, promoting others and rethinking ways to reallocate resources that further our mission as a digital operation. So no sad faces here. We will miss our former colleagues. But the challenges remain, great work is to be done and we intend to keep on doing it.”