Today was a very good day at the Missouri School of Journalism. My colleagues on the Promotion and Tenure Committee say fit to approve the dean's request that my title be changed to assistant professor on the tenure tract.

The next step is for the Journalism School to get the OK from Jesse Hall.

I'm thrilled with the news and got a little red-faced when the other editors clapped for me and Laura Johnston, the other person in the same boat as me, when Tom announced the news. Katie Steinmetz, Missourian columnist extraordinaire, gets credit for the jazzy blog title of assistant professor-elect. I like it.

Today was also graduation day, and I said goodbye to some really great seniors and grad students. It was a bittersweet moment, as it always is, because I hate to see them go, but yet I'm so proud of them for making it.

The graduation speaker, Brian Storm of MediaStorm, did a great job. As he stressed throughout the speech: Look for new ways to tell stories, new platforms, etc. etc. Don't try to connect with a mass audience, connect with the right audience.

I was particularly struck by that last line.

As Storm also pointed out (did I mention that I tried to Twitter the speech?), everyone has a printing press now in the form of the Web. So, what do we have to do to find the right audience?

That's what I'm going to go sleep on.

OK, want to know why I haven't been posting much lately? Besides being incredibly busy?

It's because all of the upgrades Hotmail and Spaces has undergone lately are 1) Not Mac friendly; 2) Take too damn long to load.

So, I'm thinking about taking JakeSherlock.com to a new domain and giving up my hotmail account, which I've had forever (and truthfully is the reason I haven't made the switch to Gmail yet, although I did reserve myself an address there). Not sure if I'll do that yet, mostly because it's a pain in the ass to move all my e-mail files (I'm a filing packrat) and blog posts to new servers. Boo-urns.

E.W. Scripps Co. notified staffers at the Rocky Mountain News today that the newspaper is up for sale.

In just a few short weeks, the Rocky is likely to announce it is shutting down. After all, who is going to buy a newspaper that lost $11 million in the first three quarters of the year in this economy? I hate to say it, but an asbestos factory would be a better buy at this point.

And that is a shame, because the Rocky is a great newspaper in a town lucky enough to have two great newspapers. But, like big papers in other two-newspaper towns, something had to give. And in this case, the Post will live on -- hopefully for a good long while -- but its not exactly raking in the megabucks right now either, I'm willing to bet. Who is these days?

Over the years, the Rocky has tried everything possible to connect with readers. I remember as a kid the Rocky drastically cut subscription costs with the idea it could make it up on advertising. It started bold initiatives on the Web, including a political conversation portal that was a lot of fun. The company eventually struck a deal with the Post to create a joint operating agreement, and thus was born the Denver Newspaper Agency.

One thing about that deal: I thought it was designed from the start to favor the Post, and I think readers really picked up on that. I mean, the "joint" weekend editions under both flags were produced by separate newsrooms -- Saturday by the Rocky, Sunday by the Post. And when you're not producing the city's Sunday paper -- which is always the flagship paper of the week -- you look weak.

The Post and News waged one of the last great two-newspaper-town battles seen in a long time. When JOAs were all the rage, the Post and News refused to talk deal. And when they finally had to, the Rocky was already at enough of a financial disadvantage that it had to take the No-Sunday deal. That weakened the paper even more, in my view, and told me then that when the day came one of these giants was to fall, it would be the senior of the two papers.

Barring a last minute miracle, the senior is about to be laid to rest.