A friend asked that I meet with a student she mentors who wants to write for newspapers.
All of us gladly have given our share of pep talks to would-be journalists. But having lost co-workers to layoffs last week and knowing that far more job cuts were coming at the Rocky, I figured pep might be tough to muster.
“What should I tell her?” I asked a colleague, panicked.
Then there she was — 10-year-old Zoe Knight, who has been reading newspapers since age 3 and loves the way they look, smell and feel in her hands. She was ready in the lobby with her purple notebook, pink pencil, and loads and loads of questions.
Keep it upbeat, I told myself as I led her through the newsroom.
But upbeat turned bittersweet when Zoe asked what’s the neatest thing about working at a paper.
I’ve never felt older or more like a dinosaur than explaining to a fifth- grader the joys of a news war — the kick of trying to tell the story sooner, smarter and better, of some days scooping the competition and others getting our butts kicked, then going at it again the next morning.
And I’ve never felt prouder, yet sadder, for my colleagues than admitting to Zoe how many would do journalism for free, if only their families would let them.
Photographers willing to camp out in wildfires. Editors fighting open- records battles. Designers. Copy editors. Newsroom assistants. And teams of reporters who’ve covered home runs, home foreclosures, plane crashes, market crashes, murders, candidacies, sit-ins, rip-offs and layoffs in our communities.
And I don’t just mean the folks here on the sixth floor, where a plaque in The Post’s lobby reminds us, “O Justice, when expelled from other habitations make this thy dwelling place.”
I also mean staff on the fifth floor, where the Rocky has followed that creed just as closely by giving voices to Coloradans who otherwise may never have been heard.
The long competition between the papers has been fierce, personal and at times very ugly.
But it was never so fierce that it kept Rocky photographers from sharing rolls of Charmin during the Los Alamos fire. It was never so personal that it stopped a Rocky reporter from showing up at my door when I was nine months pregnant offering maternity clothes to replace those I so obviously had outgrown. And it was never so ugly that we’ll forget whom we were with on Nov. 4, 2008, standing together on Court Place as we watched our city rejoice in the election of a new president.
Since the papers merged their business operations in 2001, staffers at The Post and Rocky have spent years publicly insisting that we’re not the same newsroom, not the same company and definitely not the same content. But privately and as individuals, we’ve spent far longer pulling for each other through tough assignments and even tougher times in our industry.
I once had an editor who returned to the newsroom depressed and despondent after his wife’s death from cancer. I asked what kept him going.
“Need to see what happens next,” he told me.
Such is the affliction of newspaper people — half of whom, at least in Denver, are walking out of work with no newsroom to return to.
It’s good work, I assured Zoe. If you can find it. And if you’re lucky enough to stick around for whatever happens next.
Reach Susan Greene at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
