I think Doc is really onto something with this investigation of Real Cities Network. There is something so utterly insidious about the degeneration of newspaper websites, and I hope he keeps up the exposé.

One of the Real Cities sites is the Denver's Rocky Mountain News, another daily I used to help deliver, with my father. We stocked the vending machines around Fort Collins out of the side of an old VW van in 1980-81. Most nights he did it by himself, but I gave him a hand in the summer, espeically on Sundays. It meant getting up at 2 in the morning for a six-seven shift around town, ending up at the Ever Open café up on North College.

The Rocky Mountain News is a tabloid. It still holds its own as a morning daily in a medium-sized city with two morning papers.

But the web site sucks. I occaisonally visit it when I want some Colorado news, but the pickings are always slim. You'd expect this would be the first place I would turn to find out what's going in back in Colorado, but unless it's a really big story, they probably won't even have even a blurb about. It's so far away from being the "web version of the print edition" that the two enterprises have almost nothing to do with each other.

Much of what they carry is actually national newsfeed stories. My question is who cares about this crap?. If I want national news, even if I live in Colorado, I wouldn't go to the Rocky Mountain News site. I'd go to CNN.com, or the New York Times site.

The Rocky Mountain News web site should focus exclusively on Colorado-only news, for which there is no "guaranteed-to-have-it" web source. It's amazing how the dot-com era came and went and we are left with worse media news sites than we had when they started. They have nicer graphics, to be sure, but the content is lousier than it was back in 1996.

The future does not look very good at all.  1:20:04 AM