You’ve probably heard how NYU Professsor Jay Rosen describes those of us who follow the news as, “the people formerly known as the audience.” The reality isn’t a clear cut, because so many news consumers are sooooooooooooo passive, but the phrase definitely reflects the kind of thinking that should be going on at The Denver Post. How to involve US in THEIR journalism?

So you gotta love The Post’s idea to round up news from Tuesday’s caucuses via Twitter and other social media. In a blog post yesterday, titled “What happens in the caucuses shouldn’t stay in caucus–help us cover them,” Political Editor Curtis Hubbard invites you to help The Post “keep readers up-to-speed on the action during our live blogging from 6 to 10 p.m.” (To make citizen journalism easy, The Post included a link to help you find your caucus.)

You can tweet and send photos (using hashtag #caucusCO), and The Post will share them on its gallery. The Post wants to follow all the candidates as well. Its Twitter list is here.

In an interview with me last month, Hubbard talked about trying to use citizen journalists, even partisans from both sides, this election cycle to give The Post access to political events. It looks like this caucus project is one concrete way this is happening.

If this were to take off in a way that The Post could only dream about, a journalistic dilemma could arise: what if campaign strategists bombarded The Post with fake tweets, attempting to show that one candidate was kicking ass. And what if this influenced the outcome of the caucuses in real time? It would be like releasing exit polls or election results on the East Coast before the polls were closed in the West. Some serious journalists stopped releasing exit polls becuase they didn’t want to influence elections. A wholly theoretical problem for The Post’s caucus project, of course, but a thought, nonetheless.

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.
 

You find people on both the far left and right of the political spectrum who couldn’t care less about the health of mainstream journalism or its coverage of stuff like elections.

But most political junkies agree with what Bob Moore, editor of the Coloradoan, told me: “My concern is whether the traditional media is in a position to do the election justice. There just aren’t enough eyeballs on these races to do the critical analysis.”
 

So how are the local journalists who still have jobs going innovate to cover the elections with fewer resources?

Moore, who’s assigned himself to the 4^th Congressional District Race, said he’s had preliminary discussions with Adam Schrager at 9News about working with the University of Colorado and Colorado State University to do quick fact-checks of political advertisements.
 

“We expect a lot of sketchy ads this fall,” Moore said, “and there just aren’t enough bodies to get this basic political journalism done.”
Many of the bodies still practicing journalism can be found at The Denver Post. What kind of coverage can we expect from the state’s number-one newspaper?
 

“For print, for the mother ship, if you will, I really think the way we covered the Udall-Schaffer campaign in 2008 is the kind of model that I would like to continue this time around,” Political Editor Curtis Hubbard at The Post told me.  “By that I mean, really trying to take …bigger picture’ looks and give readers a sense of where the candidates are on the issues and profiling them in that capacity and trying not to get distracted by the miscellaneous objects campaigns will throw up every day.”
 

Hubbard said he’s also considering finding citizen journalists to illuminate political events in new ways. One possibility is to “tap into people who might have access to events that we don’t have access to.”
 

Here’s an excerpt from a chapter I wrote in How the West Was Warmed, edited by Beth Conover and published last year by Fulcrum Press. The title of the Chapter is, “Journalists and the Scientific Consensus on Global Warming.”

You’d expect a newspaper like The Denver Post to give major play to the story about mountain pine beetles devouring Colorado’s lodgepole pines, and it is. It’s no Jon Benét Ramsey…•style media frenzy, but the pine-beetle infestation was the focus of fourteen staff-written news articles from January 2008 through May 2009 in The Post, covering everything from its potential impact on tourism to legislative efforts to fund beetle-related battles. But The Post’s coverage of the possible connection between the dying forests and global warming has been skimpy at most-.

The Post’s news coverage about the pine beetles raises the question of whether journalists should discuss the possible role of global warming when reporting on an event that may…-or may not…-be caused by it. And if they do mention global warming in this context, are journalists obligated to quote skeptics who may not think global warming is occurring at all?

Addressing the first question, Christy George, special projects producer at Oregon Public Broadcasting, told me that when it comes to covering events like forest fires or hurricanes, reporters should explain the possible role of climate change in their stories. (George is the current president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, but spoke to me as an individual reporter, not on behalf of that organization.)

“It’s not that we want bad science, where people say [a hurricane] is caused by climate change,” she says. “But the good science that says you can’t say this is climate change, but this is what we’d expect with climate change.”

The pine-beetle story also deserves this type of journalistic treatment, with different views on the possible role of climate change in the infestation.

And should global-warming skeptics be quoted? George observes that the most hard-core global-warming skeptics have made a shift, previously asserting that there was no such thing as climate change at all but now saying the climate is changing, but humans are not responsible. She thinks the views of these skeptics need not be included in stories. “There’s no value to me as a reporter to continue to throw in that person who says humans aren’t causing climate change at all, because we’re just past that, in terms of the scientific evidence,” she says. “There are tremendous disagreements about the impacts [of climate change] and what to do. We don’t have to look hard to find conflict in the story,” she said.

Here’s an op-ed based on the book chapter.

Learn more about the book here.

The Independence Institute’s Jon Caldara is outraged that the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post covered the “swastika guy” hugging nationally syndicated columnist Michele Malkin at Caldara’s anti-stimulus rally at the Colorado Capitol yesterday.

“The idea that the media would take this spun story, about some guy who stands up next to Michele Malkin, somehow that’s a story?” Caldara told me. “I looked at the photos, and there was a photo of [the swastika guy] standing next to another guy holding a sign that also said Obama but instead of a swastika, it had a hammer and sickle. That one didn’t seem to rile anybody even though many fold more died under the symbol of a hammer and sickle than a swastika. But that doesn’t get the same sort of media rage, and if you’re looking at this from a media point of view, I would hope in all honesty you would criticize the media for biting on such a transparent attack ploy.”

Reporters at Caldara’s rally saw some weird things. They saw a live pig. They saw a roasted pig. They saw a swastika. All these things are of note, and reporters were right to include them in their stories about the rally. That’s what The Denver Post did in its article.

The Rocky, according to Caldara, got its story about the swastika guy later, after ProgressNow Colorado and others posted the Malkin photo. Caldara makes this conclusion because the Rocky reporter tried to reach him after the rally had ended. The Rocky’s story references the Malkin photo on the blogs.

Should the Rocky have written 200 words about the photo? Yes.

I mean, if you see a photo of a prominent person hugging someone with a swastika in his hands, you have to wonder what’s going on. The Rocky contacted Penry, and he gave a response. The Rocky tried to reach Caldara. And the Rocky tried to reach Malkin as well, to find out the circumstances of the hug. It’s a valid question and a valid story, handled fairly and accurately by the Rocky.

Caldara disagrees. “It seemed like a low-blow story and a low-blow tactic of personal destruction that has [ProgressNow Colorado’s] Huttner’s marks all over it. To say, ah, we got a picture of some idiot next to Michele Malkin. Instead of addressing the stimulus package, let’s go after a swastika. It might be working for a certain crowd, but it certainly seems petty.”

I attended the rally with Huttner, and I don’t think it was petty to promote the Malkin photo.

Sure, as Caldara says, you could see ugly things at a rally of progressives, just like you saw at Caldara’s rally of righties. And if a person was holding a swastika and was caught on camera hugging a prominent lefty, reporters would have the right to ask questions about it.

As for the politics of personal destruction, take a look at what the Republicans tried to do to Barack Obama in the last election. Does William Ayers ring a bell?  

The most obvious way that the Rocky could avoid death would be if a buyer emerged.