Congressman says he whacked the Denver paper

Boy, and they say the MSM can be guilty of hubris…

Some congressman out in Colorado who is apparently overimpressed with himself because he travels the Information Superhighway (golly, how futuristic!), is quoted as saying:

Who killed the Rocky Mountain News? We're
all part of it, for better or worse, and I argue it's mostly for the
better…The media is dead and long live the new media."

Here's what's really ironic about this: After this was brought to my attention, I tried following various links to find any sort of authoritative, original source as to what he actually said, and within what context, and found myself bouncing around among a number of poorly designed, unattractive Web pages that didn't tell me much.

Romenesko pointed me to The Denver Post, which pointed me to an alleged "digital recording of the event" at something called coloradopulse.org, which may be the ugliest (and least helpful) Web page I've seen this year. So I struck out on my own, via Google, and found this Denver magazine site (I think), which pointed me to this item from something called "Denver Young Democrats Examiner," which read like someone's very run-of-the-mill blog post written "from the Netroots Nation speaker series at the DoubleTree Hotel in Westminster," which actually told me less than The Denver Post did.

The congressman's own Web site didn't enlighten me. Finally, I went back to Romenesko, which provided a link to where I could listen to the guy's comments, but when it told me it would take 9 minutes to download (it's still downloading as I speak), I lost interest. (By the way, I did run across an entire site devoted to the question,
"Who killed the Rocky?" It's apparently done by one of the laid-off
journalists, and displays far more Web savvy and accessibility than
those other sites I was led to.)

Welcome to the brave new post-newspaper world, in which we all stagger around groping in the dark for information — and then, when we find it, wondering whom to hold accountable for whether it's right or not. (The answer: Nobody, sucker.)

By the way, as a sort of postscript — the Post says that on Monday, Rep. Polis was a little more "subdued" on the subject:

"It's not just 200 jobs that have been lost;
it's also the silencing of a voice," he said. "The rise of new media
and citizen journalism has hastened the demise of many newspapers, and
we, unfortunately, all share in the blame.

3 thoughts on “Congressman says he whacked the Denver paper

  1. Mab

    Sounds like the congressman needs a dose of humility. Here is how one guy inspires us to find it:
    “…you are of yourself, putrefaction in your birth, a mere bubble in your lifetime, the food of worms in your death.”
    Erasmus, circa 1503
    [That is good stuff.]

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