Thursday, November 15, 2007

Rocky revamps

Can't get the front page to load at the moment, but the Rocky Mountain News's website has undergone extensive cosmetic surgery (just click on any other section if the front page is still blank).

Looks nice, but they also went inside and liposuctioned out the equivalent of 20 pounds of unsightly lard: almost all the blogs are gone.

It's very sad. Only a year and a half ago Rocky editor John Temple was boasting about how blogs were "blossoming" at the paper. Every columnist and reporter seemed to have one.

Unfortunately, they all stank. Hardly anybody posted regularly, and what got posted was, often, simply redundant of columns or news pieces. Rocky blogs also (with occasional exceptions) got few comments.

And now they're all disappeared--sports blogs, lifestyle blogs, political blogs--everything, it seems, except their main effort, RockyTalk Live, and a new business blog. (Oddly, each section of the site has a heading for "Columns and blogs," but while they all indeed contain columns, no blogs are evident.)

Temple probably found euthanizing his own blog (not updated--other than two apologies last month for technical problems that delayed delivery of the paper--since May) a relief, if not a positive pleasure, just as I did the liquidation of Mike Littwin's hilarious (kidding!) "Fair and Unbalanced" blog (untouched since September 28).

They've added a few things too, I guess, including the capability for comments on every story. But other papers have created successful blogs. Why can't the Rocky?

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