March 03, 2009 06:44 PM UTC

Actually, We Wanted The Rocky To Live

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: a refreshingly candid mea culpa, as the Denver Post updates:

Rep. Jared Polis released the following statement this afternoon, apologizing for remarks he made over the weekend that new media “killed” the Rocky Mountain News.

“I apologize to the entire Rocky Mountain News family and anyone who was offended by my recent remarks.” the Boulder Democrat said in a release. “I did not mean to offend nor to show anything less than a strong sense of remorse for the loss of the Rocky. Like many Colorado residents, I grew up reading the Rocky Mountain News and its demise and the loss of over 200 jobs is a major blow to our community, especially in these troubled times.”

This was the best thing Polis could have done, for himself as much as the reporters he’ll still need to deal with as an elected offical–some of whom are fresh over from the Rocky and likely appreciated these comments the least. Original post follows.

As the Denver Post reports:

U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, who made his fortune selling greeting cards and flowers online, gave a shout-out to the blogosphere Saturday, giving it – and himself – credit for the “demise” of traditional journalism.

“I have to say, that when we say, ‘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,” Polis said at the Netroots Nation in Your Neighborhood event in Westminster, according to a recording posted online. The group supports progressive politics.

“The media is dead, and long live the new media, which is all of us,” said Polis, a Boulder Democrat.

The Rocky shuttered its operation Friday.

Polis also told those at the event that “since we killed the newspapers” and “own the media,” bloggers and citizen journalists have a responsibility…”to reach out to some of those…on the other side and present the progressive point of view,” he said.

We’ll start by saying that we don’t consider the demise of the Rocky Mountain News, or for that matter any of the major media outlets finding themselves in dire financial straits today, in any way a good thing. Furthermore, we don’t consider what we do–blogging–to be an effective replacement for traditional journalism. In fact the misconception that what we do is a workable replacement for actual journalism is, in our opinion, very dangerous. Colorado Pols is a blog. That’s all.

As much as we feel convinced of the rightness of our spin imparted to the news of the day, and indeed as often as this blog has broken major news stories, we can’t replace the Rocky precisely because our role is to provide context. And large-donor funded new media outlets like the Colorado Independent, for all their ambition, can’t fill this void either. They are bound to the interests that fund them at an inseparable level.

Financially self-sufficient commercial media is the only way to ensure impartial coverage of the day’s events. They provide (in the majority of cases, anyway) the basic information that we bloggers riff off of and amplify, and to forget the dependencies between one and the other is an act of pure hubris.

Our understanding is that Rep. Polis has backed off these ill-stated comments in a subsequent email to the Denver Post. That’s good. Let’s move on then, and remember to always cite your published sources. While you still have them.