OJR talked this week with Steve Foster, up until last month the Rocky’s assistant sports editor for interactive, who has launched his own effort [America's Fish] to provide an online home for several other former Rocky reporters and columnists. Foster is a graduate of the University of South Dakota who has done stints at the Longmont (Colo.) Daily Times-Call and Chicago Sun-Times, in addition to the Rocky Mountain News.

Foster has helped build a collection of WordPress-powered sites that are provided a new home for the Rocky’s former sports cartoonist and major-league baseball beat staff, among others. His efforts provide one blueprint for other journalists who soon might be facing the same situation, as other newspapers around the country slip toward closure.

OJR: Tell us about America’s Fish, what sites you are involved with publishing and what other former Rocky staffers are involved.

Foster: America’s Fish is a small publishing company I’m in the process of starting to help my friends and former co-workers make the transition to online publishing. I’m new to Web design myself. While had some basic HTML and CSS experience, I had never worked in Web design regularly before last May [when Foster rejoined the Rocky]. I wanted to do this because I hadn’t learned everything I wanted to learn. I believe totally in online publishing as the direction where media and news is going, but I had only about six months experience when Scripps announced it was going to try to sell the Rocky. I needed to keep doing new things because I had plenty to learn. So I started a blog for myself (which has been woefully neglected by me) called AmericasFish.com. I helped our sports cartoonist, Drew Litton, get settled in a blog for himself at DrewLitton.com. I launched http://www.insidetherockies.com/InsidetheRockies.com, a Colorado Rockies news site, with baseball writers Tracy Ringolsby and Jack Etkin, and am working on a handful of others at the moment.

OJR: When did you start planning these websites? Who sought out whom around the Rocky newsroom?

Foster: The initial idea was borne of panic. What do we now? My initial concern personally was what happens if the Rocky website shuts down? I have spent most of my career as a news designer and I have boxes in my closet full of pages I designed. If the website I had been working on for just a few months shut down, I would have no clips. I started building sites to have something to show around. Drew Litton is a close friend and we had talks about what he would be doing after and I volunteered to build a site for him. In the days before the announcement that Scripps was closing the Rocky, Tracy Ringolsby approached me about starting a site together. We launched that site just seven days after he approached me.

OJR: Did you get any publicity from the Rocky in its final days: e.g. URLs in the paper, redirects, links in Rocky e-mails or from the website? How are you publicizing the sites now?

Foster: No publicity. In fact, up until the e-mail arrived saying to meet in the newsroom for an important announcement, I deeply believed that it was going to end fine, and the Rocky would live on. I believed that what I was building on the side would never be needed and so I didn’t think of publicizing them. I believe Drew added a link to his Rocky blog telling readers they could find him at his new site, but that was all. Most of the linking was done through IwantmyRocky.com, a website I set up with some co-workers in December after the Scripps announcement.

OJR: What is the typical workflow, both for you and the other former Rocky staffers, to operate these sites? How does that compare with what you were all doing on a day-to-day basis before the Rocky closed?

Foster: Oddly, my first week of unemployment was one of the busiest weeks of my life. The site IwantmyRocky.com is being operated all day by former members of the Rocky copy desk, a group organized by my wife Alex, who was a part-time copy editor on the staff. With one exception, that group has primarily dealt with news in the traditional workflow, reporter files, editor reads, copy editor reads, slot reads, proof, publish. Now it’s more backreading copy that has already been posted, or read and post. The workflow doesn’t compare at all, really.

Inside the Rockies is generally handled by whoever is writing for that day. Tracy worked up a schedule for who is responsible for game recaps, and Tracy and Jack post their stories whenever they have them. I do some backreading as a copy editor. The biggest change I suppose is writers need to be more vigilant about their own copy.

OJR: One of the prominent complaints from print-side journalists who get involved in the Web is that they have to work for two publications – the print paper and the website. Obviously, with the print side gone now, that creates at least the opportunity to try some new things on the Web side. Tell us about what former Rocky staffers are doing now, if anything, with these websites that they might not have had the time to do when they had to get the paper out everyday.

Foster: That’s a common complaint and one I was dealing with daily up until a few days ago. Despite the relative success of what we have started here, I wish I was still dealing with that complaint. But it is the fundamental problem with online news production by a traditional newspaper staff. On the Web, the news needs to be there as soon it happens. In the newspaper, the news is there when it’s gone through the traditional workflow, gone to the plateroom and the press, and the delivery trucks to the front door. The immediacy is new for a lot of people. I can’t speak for how they feel about it or how they are approaching it in a new way, but the daunting issue I had to deal with when I moved to the Web a few months ago was that every mistake I made was visible as soon as I made it.

OJR: What’s the initial traffic on the sites look like, and how does that compare with what the equivalent sections on the old Rocky website were getting before it closed?

Foster: Traffic is good. We’ve seen a dramatic rise in traffic on IwantmyRocky.com since we have begun publishing news there in the last few days. InsidetheRockies.com has been really steady since it launched and compares favorably with Colorado Rockies coverage on the old website.

OJR: What’s your long-term plan? Do you and other former Rocky staffers see these sites as long-term publications, or more of a way to keep your names out there while you look for work elsewhere?

Foster: IwantmyRocky.com is not a long-term publication in its current incarnation. It is placeholder, a place to gather while we figure out the next step. Those who have been contributing to the site believe as I do that Scripps greatly undervalued their brand names and talent when they put a price on the newspaper. Gathering here allows us all to continue to report and not be forgotten. For some, it is therapy if nothing else. This is the second straight year I’ve been laid off from a newspaper and keeping myself busy that first week felt good.

The other sites, InsidetheRockies.com and DrewLitton.com and the others I’m working on launching are as long-term as the contributors want to contribute. In all but InsidetheRockies.com, I am merely the designer and hoster.

OJR: What’s the revenue model at this point? I’ve noticed Google AdSense. Are direct ad sales part of your plan? If so, who is working on that? Did you bring anyone from the Rocky’s sales team to help you sell ads on these sites?

Foster: There actually was no Rocky sales team to speak of. Advertising for the Rocky and the Denver Post was handled by the Denver Newspaper Agency under the Joint Operating Agreement, and those in ad sales still have jobs for the moment. We put AdSense advertising on IwantmyRocky.com just to recoup some of the money we spent on the domain name and hosting and some costs associated with our movement to save the newspaper. It has no revenue model because there is not intention to make money from that site. What develops after that, well, who knows? It’s probably too early to speculate. But I believe absolutely that the right model exists to support aggressive reporting on the Internet.

As for the other sites, we are looking to partner with sites in revenue-sharing deals, and if we get big enough look for ad sales help from someone willing to work on commission.

OJR: What do you wish you could have gotten in place before the Rocky went under, but weren’t able to?

Foster: Nothing, really, other than the things I didn’t finish on the Rocky Mountain News website. Up until the day we got the word, I was building out parts of that site and that was all I was focused on. The disappointment for me was that we had really big plans for RockyMountainNews.com this year that just dissipated.

OJR: Who else from the Rocky’s staff (if anyone) do you know of who’s also publishing their own websites, but with whom you are not working?

Foster: I know Ed Stein, the paper’s editorial cartoonist has a blog. [There are] a handful of others — we’re still collecting those addresses for the IwantmyRocky.com site.

OJR: What kind of support (links, coverage, advice, etc.) would you like to see from other journalists, both at surviving newspapers and independent online sites, to help you and the other former Rocky staffers who are publishing online?

Foster: I think this is going to be a brutal year in our industry. More papers will go through exactly what we are going through now. We’re not asking for help other than to keep reading, and if you like what we’ve got, when the time comes, subscribe. We’ll do the same for you. I want to see more reporters not be afraid to try this. And not just reporters. The copy editors and designers who work behind the scenes who are experts, too. This is the turning point in journalism. This is where it all changes, one way or another, and we either take control or lose control.

By now, you’ve heard that the Rocky Mountain News in Denver is publishing its final edition today. Owner E.W. Scripps is closing Colorado’s oldest newspaper, two months shy of its 150th anniversary. I write those words with a deep sigh, as I used to work for the Rocky, and consider my experience there essential to my development both as an online journalist and online entrepreneur.

For a little over three years I edited the Rocky’s website, and I remain darned proud of the work a tiny staff did during that period. But what does the Rocky’s closing have to do with someone getting rich? Hundreds of journalists just lost their jobs!

Yes, and hundreds of local advertisers just lost the publication that they were using to connect with local readers. Those advertisers have budgeted the money they would have spent, some have even written checks and will await reimbursement from the Rocky for ads never run.

With the economy tanking, some of those advertisers, I suspect, will just bank the money and forget about the ads. But smart businesses will not. They still need to reach local consumers.

Like lottery money falling from the sky, that advertising cash will land somewhere. The Denver Post will pick up some, I’m sure. So might local TV, radio and direct mail vendors.

But with thousands of now-former Rocky readers looking for a new daily news source, there’s a huge opportunity here for someone to get rich. Just put some of those readers together with some of those advertisers, using a fresh new online publication, and without the capital and corporate overhead, JOA obligations and debt that’s weighing down so many newspapers across the country.

Perhaps Scripps could have done that with rockymountainnews.com. But, according to Rocky website editor Mike Noe’s Twitter feed last night, JOA partner MediaNews (owner of the Denver Post) wouldn’t let them, undoubtedly eyeing a newspaper monopoly in Denver for itself. Still, Scripps retains its ownership of the Rocky’s masthead, archives and URLs and is offering them for sale to any interested third party, without the entanglement of the JOA that bound Scripps.

A new online news publisher need not capture all of the Rocky’s former readers, or advertisers, to do well. If a former Rocky reporter, or a small group working together, managed to claim just a few advertisers and a few thousand daily readers, they easily could clear more money than they did working at the Rocky. (Heck, I’m making more from my websites than I ever did working at the RMN.)

Yesterday, on Twitter I urged the Rocky to run today in print the URLs of its reporters who will maintain their own blogs and websites, so that Rocky readers can continue to follow their favorite writers, and to help these former staffers start building the readership that they’ll need to create profitable websites. I don’t know yet if they did that or not. But I would urge Guild leaders at other troubled newspapers to think about getting that into their contracts – if the paper goes down, you print our members’ URLs on the last day.

Unfortunately, I fear that most Rocky staffers will not build or become part of profitable Denver-area news websites. But long odds are not impossible. The Rocky has a long history of online innovation, and with Noe’s assistance and the leadership of editor John Temple, that attitude has spread throughout the newsroom, in ways that it wasn’t allowed to when I worked there.

The Rocky was one of the first newspapers in the United States to embrace user-generated content, with reader-driven interactivity in entertainment, features and opinion sections as far back as 1998.

In the late 1990s, the Rocky had what might have been the industry’s first proto-”podcast” – a local studio recorded voice actors reading the paper’s top stories before dawn each weekday, which we made available as an MP3 download on the site. There was no RSS back then, so people had to come to the site each day to download the file. And there were no iPods, either, in fact, we promoted that people could “listen to the paper on their Diamond Rio.” (You may consider yourself a true Geezer Geek if you remember that early MP3 player.)

And in 1999, we live-”blogged” the aftermath of the Columbine school shootings, before we, or anyone else, knew what a blog was. We just posted fresh line-by-line updates to the site’s homepage as we got them from any sources we could find, not waiting for a staff writer to flesh them into a traditional, narrative story.

In the years since I left, the Rocky’s developed rich, reader-driven prep sports applications, as well as gorgeous interactive narratives, driven by a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo staff that has embraced multimedia. (Click around “Best of the Rocky” on rockymountainnews.com.) And it helped build one of the industry’s first large-scale efforts at reader-driven “hyperlocal” news coverage.

There’s a hell of a lot of online talent at the Rocky Mountain News. And a healthy amount of advertising dollars to support it. And readers who want to follow that talent. Just because Scripps, cut loose from its cash-cow cable networks and outmaneuvered by MediaNews in its JOA, couldn’t make enough money off that combination does not ensure that some enterprising Rocky staffer (or staffers) can’t make a go of it.

I’m rooting for them. Someone’s going to land that former Rocky advertising money. Why shouldn’t it be a Rocky alumnus?

And journalists in Seattle, San Francisco and those other newspapers on the brink – ask yourselves this, looking ahead to the day when your paper might close: Why can’t *I* be the one to get a piece of those ad dollars in my community?

Why not?

How many acres have burnt now? How much of the fire is contained? Where’s the worst threat at this hour? For those essential questions, which readers wanted immediate answers, the Times’ breaking news blog delivered.

Newspaper.com managers, take a lesson. If you do not have a breaking news blog ready to go on your website, get started on building one. Today. The blog is the ideal format to deliver information in a breaking news situation. There’s no reason to continue relying on traditional newspaper narrative formats online when editors could better serve their readers with the far more online-friendly blog format.

I discovered the power of breaking news blogging during the Columbine High School shootings in April 1999. At the time, I was the executive producer of the Rocky Mountain News’ website, in charge of its editorial operations. Despite the fact that the Rocky then sold more papers in the Denver metro area than any other publication, we were a small staff, as was typical at newspapers at the time, usually with only one or two online editorial employees on the clock at any given moment.

When the shooting happened, as with any major breaking news story, the demand for information was immediate. The Rocky was preparing a extra edition for that afternoon, but we couldn’t wait for those stories to clear the copy desk. So I blew up our hand-built, flat-file website home page and started using a bullet-point list to provide the latest facts and data we could find, in reverse chronological order.

I was blogging, though no one I knew had ever used that term yet. Nor did we have blogging software; I wrote our updates in HTML and FTP’ed them to our server. But I loved the format. We got updates from Rocky reporters via a helpful newsroom editor (remember back when union issues at many papers precluded reporters from producing work directly for their websites?), watched televised sheriff’s press conferences, listened to police scanners, scoured the wires, made calls to neighbors and I posted every piece of information we found, attributing it to the source where we got it and noting where it conflicted with other information that had been reported on our site or on TV.

When the paper’s extra edition stories were ready, we posted those to the site, but by then, our news blog had even more up-to-the-minute information. Without having to take the time to do a write-through whenever we had new information, we could get that information online faster. And readers did not have to wade through a write-through to find the newest facts and data.

“Using blogs to cover breaking news can be a great benefit to the reader, especially on fast-moving stories,” latimes.com editor Meredith Artley wrote in an e-mail when I asked her about the Times’ recent efforts. “With the Griffith Park and Catalina fires, the developments were coming in so quickly — percentage of the fire contained, evacuation information, anecdotes from people living the experience. In an article format, some of these developments may be lost somewhere in the 3rd, 4th, 5th paragraph of the story. With a blog, it’s crystal-clear what’s fresh.”

With blogging software now so widely available, there’s no excuse for newspaper editors not to turn to blogging when major news breaks. Nor should editors have to invent a reporting process on the fly, like I did eight years ago. Here are some steps that newspaper.com editors should take to prepare their newsrooms to publish a top-quality breaking news blog the next time a major story breaks in their community.

1) Select a blogging tool and have it ready to go.

This step might seem obvious, but there’s more to it than one might envision. Ideally, your blogging tool should support tagging or categorization, so that you can have a unique URL for each breaking news story. What happens if you have two stories that break close enough to each other that they overlap? Or if a person Googling for information about an old breaking news story finds your URL? Tagging or categorizing each post should enable you to create an unique URL for each story, rather than sending all readers to the same newspaper.com/breakingnews URL. You might not think that you’ll need this functionality now. But if you take a little extra time to build it in now, you will thank yourself later.

Part of having your tool ready to go is to decide how the blog will be linked to from your front page, as well as the rest of the site. “A reader… seemed to misunderstand that the posts were from reporters, not readers,” Artley wrote e about the Times’ fire blogs. “And there were a couple of comments from folks who seemed unpleasantly surprised to be clicking on a headline or photo and getting a blog instead of an article. So we’re considering ways to signal that better, but I don’t want to get into overlabeling the site.”

2) Identify and train your bloggers.

It’s not enough to have one or two people assigned to blog breaking news. You need to identify and train enough bloggers so that one of them will be in the building at all times. You also need to ensure that someone else can cover the bloggers’ “normal” routines, since the bloggers will be too busy during breaking news.

You’ll also need a plan for how information will get to the bloggers. Establish a central e-mail address, phone number and/or instant message account to take bulletins from staff reporters and make sure everyone in the newsroom knows them. In a breaking news situation, off-duty reporters and even those not on the metro desk often have the first reports from the scene.

Artley suggests testing your blog reporting process in a controlled environment, such as during a trial.

“We had a test drive with the Phil Spector trial blog,” she wrote. “We knew we would have reporters with Blackberries in the courtroom. We got to set it up and plan. We also tried the breaking news blog again with the immigration march downtown, and, again, we planned how that would work — who would file, who would post, who would approve comments, and who would take care of images. Of course it doesn’t all go smoothly, but if you can plan a little bit, you’ll be much more prepared for when news breaks.”

This is also the time to make an organizational decision on what sources you will report in your blog. Will you cite what TV stations or other competitors report?

3) Have a plan to backread and edit the blog.

You should not insist on posts going through the normal newspaper editing process before hitting the blog. You won’t ever beat TV, radio or other blogs that way. But someone should be assigned the task of reading posts as they go live, to immediately correct typos, misspellings or other obvious factual errors. (I found a few lingering goofs on the Times blog last week.) Don’t assume that someone in the building, or some reader, will tip you to errors. Make sure someone specific is charged with this important duty.

4) Go for broke.

Once you have this system in place, why reserve it for infrequent occasions?

A newspaper reporter at an industry seminar last fall asked me what her organization could do to improve its front page design. I told her, “Make it a breaking news blog.”

I think one of the reasons that Kevin Roderick’s enjoyed such success with his LAObserved site is that many people prefer reading a blog-style narrative to picking their way through the mess of hyperlinks that compose the typical newspaper.com home page. Roderick reads dozens of stories from local Los Angeles media each weekday and selects the best of them to summarize and link on his blog. It’s a broadcast news writing model, really. But it works.

Why not assign sharp editors to be your “anchor” on each shift through the day, blogging your paper by selecting and summarizing the best stories, as they become available? (Readers who want to drill down to other information on the site may still use the site’s navigation to find specific sections’ story archives and other features.) And in a breaking news situation, the front page blog can morph into the breaking news blog.

Either way, the readers in your community will come to see your paper’s home page as the place to go for a friendly, authoritative voice that provides the very latest news about their community. And after all, isn’t that what a newaspaper website’s home page ought to be?

Instead Falco could click onto YourHub.com, the site that covers 44 local communities and is run by the Rocky Mountain News. Falco would upload his release and — zip! — watch it materialize in its entirety on all the community sites, if he hit enough keys on his computer. No editorial gatekeeper would stand in his way, much less a J.J. Hunsecker.

On Feb. 27, YourHub ran a piece of stage-center product placement that Sidney Falco could only dream about. It was headlined, “Wynkoop names 2006 beerdrinker of the year.” It opened: “Tom Schmidlin, a 36-year-old University of Washington graduate student, devout homebrewer and yeast enthusiast, won the 2006 Beerdrinker of the Year title in Denver on Saturday, Feb. 25.” An accompanying photo of the grinning winner, posted at the top of the story, was captioned, “Tom set an unofficial record for most pounds gained between the weighing in and weighing out of the finalists. He picked up 4.5 pounds thanks to his hearty consumption of a growler [pitcher] and a half of Wynkoop beer while on the hot seat.”

The author of the piece was Marty Jones, a former journalist who’s now a publicist. Jones was paid by Wynkoop Brewing Co. of Denver to generate publicity for the Wynkoop-sponsored contest, in which entrants answered brain-twisting questions about beer while quaffing large quantities of the Wynkoop brand.

YourHub liked the story so much it was featured in the No. 1 promo position on the homepage of many communities.

Jones said he originally submitted his release to the Denver Post, hoping the paper would spin it into a breezy feature. The Post didn’t bite, but routed the release to YourHub, with which it has a relationship through the Denver Newspaper Agency. (The Rocky Mountain News and the Post are partners in the agency.)

Jones said he was surprised — pleasantly — to discover that his piece appeared intact on YourHub, under his name. Nowhere in the article was Jones identified as a publicist for Wynkoop.

“YourHub is exactly that: Yours!” exclaims a statement on the site, which was launched in May 2005. “It’s a Web site built by the people in metro Denver with help from the Rocky Mountain News. People throughout metro Denver can access their own community’s YourHub.com Web site, featuring stories, photos, events, blogs and personal profiles posted by others in their community — that means you!” Within the site are 44 sub-sites covering Denver and the suburbs surrounding it. Every Thursday, a selection of postings are packaged in 15 tabloid YourHubs that are inserted in editions of the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post that go to the papers’ subscribers.

YourHub is called “citizen journalism” by the Denver Newspaper Agency. John Temple, the editor and publisher of the News who brought YourHub into being, calls it a “community news initiative.” YourHub Managing Editor Travis Henry calls it a “bulletin board.” What it definitely is, based on the actual content, is a place where publicists like Marty Jones can be sure their releases will be published, with every product placement intact.

Whose hub?

YourHub’s freewheeling policies about its content and how its stories are identified recently sparked attention after the online magazine New West, which mainly covers growth and environment issues in the Rocky Mountain region from its base in Missoula, Mont., carried a Feb. 24 tongue-in-cheek article about YourHub. Author Howard Rothman focused on Denver-area politicians who were using YourHub as a free megaphone for campaign ads or attacks on their opponents. The same day, two Poynter Institute columnists — Steve Yelvington, an Internet strategist at Morris Communications, and Kelly McBride, an ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute — picked up on Rothman’s story.

John Temple’s lengthy reply to the three critics was posted on Jim Romenesko’s Media News letters page on Poynter. Temple emphasized: “[YourHub] is meant to be a wide-open exchange of ideas, experiences and goods. However there is one requirement. To post, people must register … .”

But Temple was disingenuous. While YourHub registration requires name, address, phone number, e-mail address and other information, the user profiles that accompany articles (reached from a clickable byline) include only a name and community of residence. Unless registrants go out of their way to post details in a “biography” section — which few do — there is no contact information for users. Nor is there any hint of a given poster’s business or occupation — which would be nice to know in case the writer were selling something.

And, contrary to Temple’s implication, press releases snail-mailed or e-mailed to the Rocky Mountain News or Post, or YourHub, can and do wind up regularly on YourHub, completely bypassing the registration process. That’s how Marty Jones’ piece on the beer-drinking contest got in.

But many publicists do choose to register, providing just enough profile information to mask what they do.

Between Feb. 24 and March 11, various YourHub sub-sites ran 11 travel stories 31 times under the byline of Toni Barnett, among them “Puerto Vallarta Will Warm Your Soul” and “A 112 Mile Stretch of Paradise,” about Riviera Maya on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Barnett’s profile on YourHub consisted of four words: “Toni Barnett, Boulder, CO.” But Barnett is manager of James TravelPOINTS, a Boulder travel agency specializing in international tours. A general clue to the connection between Barnett’s articles and her employer can usually be found at the end of her pieces, where the firm’s phone number and website are listed, without stating that Barnett is an employee.

On the sudden blossoming of her articles on YourHub, Barnett said, “We were hoping to get the articles [published] because we just started doing print advertising with them [YourHub].” YourHub Managing Editor Henry said, “Advertising and editorial are completely separate. … If we believe a story will be interesting for our readers we will run it, whether they are an advertiser or not.”

YourHub invites users to “share stories and photos about your town.” Exactly what stories about resorts in Mexico or “floating through France on a luxury hotel barge” have to do with life in Boulder or Golden or other YourHub communities is not clear. Barnett said, “I look at it two different ways. I hope people will find it interesting, and that I’ll receive their business.”

Nonprofit businesses and area governments have turned to YourHub as energetically, if not more so, than for-profits. A Feb. 22 story on YourHub was headlined “Dolphins Splash into The Wildlife Experience!” It was written by Keith Carlson, whose profile was as modest as Barnett’s: “Keith Carlson, Parker, CO.” But Carlson is actually communications director for the Wildlife Experience museum in Parker, where the dolphins were doing their splashing. Carlson has contributed six articles to YourHub — all of them about his place of employment.

On Feb. 14, YourHub carried a story whose headline, “County and mayors to honor teens,” suggested the perfect assignment for the local paper’s junior reporter. But the article was written by Mindy Endstrom, a communications specialist for Arapahoe County, Colo. On YourHub, Endstrom was identified only by name.

But not all contributors to YourHub hide under a bushel. Between Sept. 15, 2005, and March 11 of this year, chiropractor Sean Reif contributed 197 stories (counting multiple publications across the 44 YourHub sub-sites). Even more impressive, Reif received 127 comments on his stories that give him an excellent 4.6 rating (out of a possible 5). But it turns out that the most frequent commenter on Reif’s stories was Reif himself. Reif used the comments section to give himself five-star ratings, and also to snipe at medical doctors, as in his comment on comment on Jan. 18: “Few physician attempt to manage the whole range of disorders that can occur in infants, children, and adults, but those who do must have available a broad spectrum of current and accurate information. All need more information for study and examination purposes as well as for patient care … .” Reif gave himself five stars for that dig at doctors.

A few businesses are upfront about who they are in supplying stories for YourHub. A Jan. 20 article headlined “Business owners: How much should you pay yourself?” clearly identified author Bill Werley Jr. as a member of the Werley Financial Group of Lakewood, Colo. Werley’s optional “bio” section on his user profile also made clear his affiliation.

Another example of online transparency is Allison Hefner, a public relations specialist for Adventist Hospital. Hefner is the author of five articles, all about her employer. Her YourHub profile: “Allison Hefner serves as Littleton Adventist Hospital’s Public Relations specialist.” Of course, you’d have to click through to Hefner’s profile page to find that out.

Where’s the community news?

YourHub is a “work in progress,” according to Henry. “I am always looking at ways we can do things better,” he said. Henry adamantly defended the site’s skimpy profiles of contributors. “I don’t think we’ll tinker with that — no,” he said. “On the Web, we kind of have to leave it open.”

The 34-year-old Henry, who wrote editorials for the Daily Times-Call in Longmont, Colo., before helping to start YourHub in spring 2005, said he won’t get into a debate about whether the site meets any of the criteria of the developing phenomenon of citizen journalism. “[YourHub] may seem sloppy or messy, but people can decide what they want to take, and they do.”

Does YourHub give users well-rounded takes on their communities? “Between the stories that are posted, the news updates and blogs — yes,” Henry replied.

I went to the sub-site covering Golden — population 17,550 — and checked the main categories under “news.” Since YourHub launched in early May of 2005, the Golden sub-site has had 133 “general news stories,” seven on “government,” 23 on “politics” and three on “traffic.” Most of the “stories” were handouts on coming charity or other community events. Not one meeting of the Golden City Council was covered. The hot debate over whether a beltway should be built through Golden to connect two major roads was ignored. There was nothing on the struggle to save four historic but unprotected sites in Golden, and zero on a city-sponsored survey on what residents thought of their city (most of them were quite pleased).

The daily news updates included 10 to 12 links to news stories in the News and Post and sometimes to competing papers serving YourHub communities. But on an average day, only two or three of the zoned links focused on news from specific YourHub communities. On Feb. 28, on the Highlands Ranch sub-site, two of the 12 news updates had a Highlands Ranch connection. One was about a Highlands Ranch basketball player at the University of Northern Colorado achieving an academic honor; another was about Republican Lt. Gov. Jane Norton saying she would not challenge Democrat Rep. John Salazar, whose 3rd District includes Highlands Ranch. The remaining stories were about such non-local events as the Colorado House majority leader — who represents Boulder — collapsing on the chamber floor and a controversy over whether to convert HOV lanes to toll lanes on a road that was nowhere near Highlands Ranch.

Rocky Mountain News Editor and Publisher Temple, responding to critics in his Romenesko riposte, said YourHub users “seem to get it.” But what do they get besides a steady flow of press releases? It’s true that most of the PR is about worthy causes — fighting diseases, scholarships for deserving students and fund drives for struggling arts organizations. But can you cover 40-plus fast-growing communities in a large metro area by press release?

Publisher David Lewis of Mile High Newspapers Inc., which publishes four weekly newspapers in communities served by YourHub and a website that was started in response to YourHub, said, “We’re paying attention to them, but I’m not panicking.”

Lewis said his company commissioned a survey of 500 households in one contested community, the city of Arvada (population 100,000), in September 2005. The results showed 53 percent of those surveyed got their news from Mile High’s Arvada Press, 16 percent from the Rocky Mountain News, 12 percent from the Denver Post and half of 1 percent from YourHub.

He said the zoned weekly print versions of YourHub — which run 16 to 20 pages on average, with about 65 percent advertising — have a few ads he wishes his papers had, but that some other ads were simply shifted from the Rocky Mountain News or Denver Post. The Rocky Mountain News’ Temple acknowledged as much in his Romenesko posting by saying only 40 to 50 percent of YourHub ads — print and online — represented new revenue.

Lewis said he’d rate some of YourHub’s editorial content “appealing” and some of it “pap and boring.”

Henry proudly noted that the Rocky Mountain News hired 26 “trained journalists” as community editors to help contributors report and write stories for YourHub. But here are the priorities of the editor assigned to the communities of Golden, Evergreen and Conifer, as he listed them on his YourHub blog:

1. Dogs
2. Kids
3. Everyone else from Golden, Evergreen and Conifer
4. Photos by people from Golden, Evergreen and Conifer.

These priorities may explain why hot civic controversies and threats to historic local sites don’t register on YourHub/Golden — or other YourHub sub-sites. Such issues tend to be complicated, which means they demand detailed reporting — a rare occurrence on YourHub.

Rocky Mountain News owner E.W. Scripps Co. has recently expanded YourHub to metro areas in five other states where it has print properties — California, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. If Scripps can get away with presenting a steady diet of press releases as “community news,” what impact will that have on grassroots journalism, which is still in its infancy?

In his column in the News, John Temple frequently talks about what journalism should mean. On Feb. 25, he wrote: “In my experience, a newsroom that produces great journalism is a newsroom that talks about values and standards.”

When will Temple, a passionate advocate of scrupulous journalism at his Rocky Mountain News, start talking about values and standards for YourHub?