Media in the New Millennium

Ed. Note: Metzger account exec Lisa Greim covered business at the Rocky Mountain News in 1993-94 and 1996-2000.

For the longest time I had bruises from kicking myself because I quit a perfectly good union job at the Rocky Mountain News to go to work for a software company.

That job didn’t last. As a freelance writer hustling for my next assignment, as an underpaid trade magazine editor, as an account exec at an agency (not Metzger) that doubled as a sheltered workshop for crazy people, I would think about that Rocky job I quit. Thinking about the weekly check, the health plan and the constant flow of interesting things to write about would get me all nostalgic, and boom, another bruise.

Sometime last year I stopped kicking myself and started counting my blessings.

I am sick, beyond sick, that the Rocky Mountain News is closing.

On the other hand, I remember asking Larry Strutton, the publisher in 1996, why RockyMountainNews.com was so anemic, and what he planned to do about it. I had just been hired as a technology reporter to cover the Internet.

“We are in a newspaper war,” he said, “and I am not wasting money on anything that would keep a reader from putting a quarter into a news box.”

Was that when the Rocky began to die?

I complained every single day I worked there, because that’s what reporters do, but it was the best job I ever had and I miss it.

The people were amazing, even the jerks.

That’s my old boss Joe Rassenfoss, who is not a jerk, in the photo on the News’ home page, standing next to Mark Brown, the rock critic. Joe and Rob Reuteman used to sit across from each other on the business desk and you could have sold tickets to their act. Joe would call our designer every afternoon and sing the closing NYSE and NASDAQ to him, just to keep it interesting.

Gene Amole sat next to Suzanne Weiss, and then Ann Carnahan. Why? “Always sit next to a Catholic girl in the newsroom, because they know how to spell.” When Ann got pregnant with triplets, Don Knox told her she’d get better maternity benefits if she named them Rocky, Mountain, and News.

I remember the day Al Lewis defected to the Denver Post. He was in John Temple’s office when the rest of the business staff arrived. While we waited to hear what happened, we divvied up the stuff Al left on his desk. Dick Williamson got Al’s printer. Dana Coffield snagged the headset. Al had taken his yo-yo.

In the old building, the business section was near the bathrooms, so we saw everybody on a regular basis. Because I covered technology, people would ask me for computer advice, except for Holger Jensen, who would come by and tell me why everything I had ever written about the Macintosh was wrong. And by the way, I misspelled Ulaan Batar. Ulan Bator. Whatever. Holger was big and loud and he intimidated me.

Kevin Flynn thought I was Sandy Graham’s sister. That would have been OK with me. John Rebchook would get in trouble with his wife if he bought a soda out of the machine. Lynn Bronikowski came to a Halloween party dressed as Dawn Denzer. The photos must be around somewhere.

Laura Watt told me the secret of pool cars: Always sign out the one that Al Nakkula just brought back, because it would be gassed up and cleaned out. In 1987, when I first walked into the newsroom as an intern, I knew Nakk as the old guy who shuffled around the city desk on Day GA. How surprised I was to find out that he had been a hotshot crime reporter. There’s a reporting award at CU named after him.

When I started, Dusty Saunders’ byline was still Walter.

My college football bowl picks one year were so abysmal that I almost won the booby prize and got my dollar back. At the last moment, Norm Clarke bombed worse than I had, and he came from sports, for God’s sake.

Dana got a lift to some event in Norm’s Miata. Her report? “Never ride in a vehicle driven by a guy with one eye.”

There were moments of extreme frustration and moments of extraordinary grace. We tore up the business section at 5 p.m. the afternoon Bill Daniels died, and I wrote one of my best ledes ever on a sidebar: “Bill Daniels will be remembered not for how he made his fortune, but how he gave it away.”

John Accola wrote the mainbar. May he also rest in peace.

A church sent flowers to the newsroom during the Columbine aftermath, with a note that they were praying for us. That was unheard of. Praying for us! You get used to being the bad guy, a member of the Evil Media Elite. When somebody actually notices that you do a service to the community, delivering horrible news when you’d rather be home cuddling your own kids, it makes an impression.

Writers from the business staff volunteered for metro duty; Guy Kelly covered teenagers’ funerals, one after another, days on end. My little boy was 8 that year, with some of the same diagnoses and taking some of the same meds that the Columbine shooters had, and it shook me. I told Reuteman and John Temple that I would file a dozen stories a day for the business section, but I could not write about other mothers’ dead children. So I stayed on biz and filed a dozen stories a day.

I remember a phone call from Joe Nacchio at Qwest during that time. We talked about raising sons.

I can barely look at the photos taken today in the newsroom. There’s Deb Goeken, who always talked about writing stories that people would cut out and keep in their Bibles.

I saw Ellen Jaskol, who photographed my wedding. Mary Winter, who told somebody that I was one of the best writers in the building. I heard about it thirdhand via two people in California, one of whom was my sister. When you screw up at a newspaper, you find out immediately; compliments travel across two time zones to reach you.

I saw Jerd Smith, who brought me soup when I had cancer.

Do we lose as a community when a newspaper folds? I hate so much to have to find out.

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