Jukebox In My Head

The story didn't even merit the front page.

"Colorado Daily to Move Into Camera's Building," read the headline in the April 24 Daily Camera. Prairie Mountain Publishing, which owns both papers, is selling off the Daily's building on east Pearl street and consolidating both staffs into the Camera building at 11th and Pearl streets.

Camera Publisher Al Manzi says that the move "allows us to realize some operation synergies that were not possible in their current location." Which means that the parent company will make some money off the real estate and that the Daily staff will take up a few of the many empty desks left in the Camera building.

The story followed by only two weeks the departure of Camera Editorial Page Editor Clint Talbott, who left for a position in the publications department at CU. This was a particularly rich irony, as anybody who has read local newspapers the last couple of decades well knows. Talbott had kept CU on his editorial hot seat during that time, roughly half with the Daily and half with the Camera, for the institution's haughty lack of transparency and basic fiscal irresponsibility, especially in the athletic department.

But I'm guessing that more just this reader laughed out loud remembering the days when Talbott was editor of the Daily and we had such fun mocking the Camera as Brand X Newspaper. The Daily's dissolution and Talbott's departure are significant, like tacking a big -30- at the end of the story of a distinct period of newspapering in Boulder.

More than a century old and for many decades the official campus newspaper, the Daily kept its offices on campus but split from CU under the leadership of Tim Lange beginning, I think, around 1971, and he led the paper, more or less, until he left Boulder for Los Angeles in 1985. The Daily didn't make a dime, but under Lange, it was an offbeat, gleefully pro-Sandinista, anti-Reagan newspaper. That era would be a great tale in itself.

The period of which I speak began in the 1980s and ended with the current decline in newsprint readership and revenues as newspapers migrate to the Internet. It was a spurt of growth responsible for USA Today and color weather pages and free-standing sections for business and celebrity gossip into your daily newspaper.

Boulder in the early 1980s was a two-newspaper town. The Camera was a powerhouse, profitable and bursting with staff writers. The features section was heavy with critics in full-time positions, the sports section the envy of every other small paper in the state. There was a Sunday features magazine. The comics pages could be read without magnification.

After Lange's departure in 1986, the Daily was reeling. Audience, its weekly arts and entertainment magazine (which had given me my first local writing gig), had been shuttered, and the Daily itself came dangerously close that summer to closing itself. Publisher Dennis Dube hired Talbott as editor, who in turn hired Paul Danish as layout editor and me as Means & Media editor/news copy editor.

As we assembled the first of many Back-to-School issues, we wondered aloud just what we would be covering and held our breath and waited for the students to return in August. Soon, our reporters were in the middle of student protests that turned violent over CIA recruitment on campus and, as they say, we were off.

Like all papers, the Daily moved into the computer age in the late 1980s. Our city coverage was enough that the sales staff was able to sell the paper as "your campus paper" to Hill businesses and "your alternative to the Camera" to businesses on Pearl Street.

Under Talbott, it was a great time to work at the Daily. We weren't bound by the family-newspaper constrictions of the Camera, revenues grew and we delighted in skewering our much larger competitor two blocks east of us whenever possible.

By the early 1990s the Daily faced more competition for ad dollars, first from the Onion and then the Boulder Weekly. Talbott moved to the Camera's op/ed pages. I didn't always agree with his opinions, but I appreciated his arguments and admired his spare, efficient prose.

The Daily was almost sunk by a felonious employee in the 1990s, but was bought by Randy Miller, who sold it to the Camera's owners last year. This spring it will be dissolved into the bowels of the Camera. Daily editors will claim autonomy, but it just won't be the same.

Perhaps it deserves no more than this, a fond memory on an old journalist's webblog. This is the way an era ends – not with a bang but a whimper.

P.S. Here's the view from the Means and Media editor's desk at the Colorado Daily offices at 9th and Pearl streets circa 1990. That's ace reporter Ron Baird on the left and Mike Sandrock in the center (I can still smell Hannah's hummus on his desk).