Friday marked the one week anniversary of the death of the Rocky Mountain News, a newspaper I never read in a state I have never visited. On the other end of the media spectrum, the recently-launched The New Ledger featured a relevant rumination by Francis Cianfrocca this week, which notes:
There’s a tremendous amount of value to news collection: generating basic data, and massaging it with taste and with an informed editorial viewpoint, into information. A big part of this is cultivating sources. But a big part of it is constructing a narrative out of the data, boiling it down into bite-sized pieces.
Which reminds me of the RMN’s association with one of the most blackly comic examples of old media employees’ new media ineptitude, perhaps one of the worst media moments all of last year:

One could say the same thing for the Rocky Mountain News, if not just yet the mid-size, second-tier city newspaper as a genre. But we may get there soon enough.