This is just an amazing video on so many levels. I'm so sorry to see the Rocky go -- RIP Rocky Mountain News.

 
Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Here is an e-mail a sent out to our columnists tonight about the new Missourian opinion page. I'm very happy with the design of it, by the way. Emily Ristow gets all the credit.

Dear Missourian columnists,

I'm very excited to share with you the prototypes for the new Missourian opinion page, which debuts on Sunday. Here's what the new print design is geared to accomplish:

• Bring more voices into print by publishing reader comments from the Web site, from Twitter and from Facebook.
  
• Provide a better overall design to the page that will better take advantaged of our limited space.
  
• Provide teaser positions to online-only content or to columns/letters/etc. that are upcoming.

Incidentally, any early heads-up you can give me on what you're writing about gives me more time to tease it for print.

The other new feature with the page is the daily Today's Question column, which takes a skeptical look at an issue and pairs it with a question designed to spark community conversation. It's much like our now-defunct Five Ideas column, only five ideas spread out over five days of print. I hope to get this up to seven on the Web in the near future.

I hope you enjoy the new prototypes. Please e-mail me with any questions or suggestions.

The Rocky Mountain News is no more after Friday.

I'll miss the Rocky, the wars it had with the Post, and the fact that competition made both papers better in their own ways.

Unfortunately, the Rocky may not be the only paper in a joint-operating agreement that's about to bite the dust. From the Rocky's own obit:

"Today's announcement comes as metropolitan newspapers and major newspaper companies find themselves reeling, with plummeting advertising revenues and dramatically diminished share prices. Just this week, Hearst, owner of the San Francisco Chronicle, announced that unless it was able to make immediate and steep expense cuts it would put the paper up for sale and possibly close it. Two other papers in JOAs, one in Seattle and the other in Tucson, are facing closure in coming weeks."

Too many good journalists are about to be out of work, and that's too bad -- for journalism, for democracy, and for America. But we'll survive, if not in print, in some form. I just wish the Rocky would be around to see it.

So over on Facebook, the big thing is to write 25 random things about yourself, then tag 25 friends to do the same thing.

I wanted to be one of the cool kids, so I did it too. Here's what I wrote about me (self-indulgent, I know):

25 -- The age when I bought my first house. What a great place that was -- lived there for 4 years, and turned a tidy profit when I sold it. Along the way, we threw some crazy parties (New Year's Eve became especially notorious), cooked a lot of tasty food (my old roomies Michelle and Kevin are both great cooks) and, dare I say, created four years of amazing memories.

OK, that was a really cheesy opening. I'll try to do better.

24 -- Never seen one episode. But I hear good things.

23 -- On my 23rd birthday, I broke up with my girlfriend at the time. But she still gave me my birthday present and bought me a drink. 

22 -- I credit two men named George with my love of the English language. George Gladney was my mentor in college and is still someone I look up to today. The other George is George Carlin. I'm glad I got to see him live for my 32nd birthday before he died.

21 -- My 21st birthday started with Ahrey and my dad buying me tequila shots at 4 p.m. and ended with me passing out in the hallway of my apartment at 10 p.m. In between, I became the reason Applebee's in Laramie started having a one-drink-at-a-time rule. I'm no longer proud of that, by the way.

20 -- My best friend has been my best friend for more than 20 years. We became dads at about the same time; I had a girl, he had a boy. We're kind of hoping our kids get married, but we're not going to try to force it. Yet.

19 -- When I was 19, I dropped out of college and worked full time as a DJ at a classic rock station in Casper, Wyo. I went broke within three months and had to move in with my mom for survival (and thanks again for taking me in). You don't know how bad life sucks until your pay checks start bouncing. That's when I decided I was done with radio and was going to try newspapers. The guy I worked for still owes me a couple hundred dollars. 

18 -- When I was 18, my best friend and I schemed a prank for graduation. While the First Lady of Wyoming was speaking, we launched a blow-up doll and batted it around like a beach ball. I had to spend some time in the principal's office after the fact to get my diploma, but it all worked out. I hear now they make the seniors sign a pledge because of that prank. I'm no longer proud of that one either.

17 -- For prom my junior year (when I was 17), my best friend and I decided to boycott it. So the two of us -- along with Meera, our foreign-exchange student friend -- went camping. We drank a lot of rum, and we nearly froze to death camping at Happy Jack in April. But we sure saved money compared to what we spent the next year on prom.

16 -- When I was 16, I I hit a car on my first driving test. I was backing out of a diagonal space and I scraped the car next to me, because I had no idea how to steer my 1963 Cadillac Coup de Ville. Fortunately, the lady I hit didn't really care that I had swapped some paint with her 1978 P.O.S., so it didn't cost me anything except my dignity. My friends weren't exactly merciful mocking me about it. As it turned out, I didn't get my license for another 6 months.

15 -- The number of seniors and grad students whom I will miss terribly after they graduate and leave in May. Little known fact: I get very sad after graduation. I love the celebration that is graduation, getting to meet the parents, getting to see students off to the real world, etc. etc. But afterward, I get really bummed that they're gone and I'll no longer see them on a regular basis. That's going to be especially true of this upcoming bunch.

14 -- The number of months, give or take a year, that I have waited for my promotion to asst. prof. I just found out this past week it's finally happening. Given the congrats I've gotten from colleagues (and that includes students), and the vote of confidence I've received from my superiors, for the first time ever, I feel like I've really arrived as a journalist. Not that there isn't so much more to be learning -- you never master journalism, you can only hope to tame it -- but it's just really nice to feel that validation. In fact, this title for me surpasses my previous No. 2 on the things-I'm-most-proud-of list. It now reads: 1) Audrey and Jenny; 2) Promotion to asst. prof.; 3) Quitting smoking; 4) Thesis; 5) Surviving Jack's bachelor party (see No. 8).

13 -- As in No. 13, a song by my favorite band, the Pixies. I've seen them twice now, both times while on the reunion tour. The first time at the University of Denver was pretty sweet. But the show at Red Rocks was amazing, and I got to spend the show with so many of my nearest and dearest friends. It was also the night I started to first seriously fall for Jenny.

12 -- Speaking of Jenny, her birthday is on the 12th. For her gift this year, I secretly flew her sister in from Colorado so the two of them could hang out this weekend. The look on Jenny's face when she saw that 1) Amber was here, and 2) that I had arranged for her to have a 3-day weekend with her job, was awe-wait for it-some.

11 --One of my favorite sayings for an extremely large amount of money is "eleventy billion." It's something I picked up from Tammy while in grad school.

10 -- I've had my dog Kotie for 10 years now. For those who haven't seen him in a while, he's still pretty much the same -- lovable, hairy, obnoxious, hyper and funny, all in one. Love that damn dog.

9 -- It's been about nine years since I last ate McDonald's.  I had a friend who ate there constantly, and eventually he started to smell like McDonald's. That odor coming out of his ass after knocking back a sixer ruined it for me forever.

8 -- Crazy story for the crazy 8: One of the craziest nights I've ever encountered was Jack Hoffman's bachelor party. About all the restraining order will let me say is this: I was the designated driver; I was in charge of playing the night's theme song over and over (it was Bloudhound Gang's "A Lap Dance Is So Much Better When the Stripper Is Crying."); I may or may not have smoked my first Cuban cigar. Anything more than that, and I'm pretty sure he kills me.

7 -- The number of years I spent in college. For a while, I was a little Van Wilder-like in my approach to school -- I never wanted to leave. I finally did with a bachelor's in journalism and a master's in communications. I missed out on minors in theater and English by one credit each.

6 -- Blossom's best friend! Speaking of Blossom, she went to the prom I boycotted (see No. 17). I have pictures in my yearbook to prove it. That's how life rolls ya sometimes -- from the Laramie High prom, to the heights of Hollywood, to whatever the hell she's doing now.

5 -- I once won a jackpot on a nickel slot in Vegas. I had been down there with some friends for Spring Break, and I was doing OK at the gambling thing. Then I got cocky, lost all my money playing high-stakes roulette, and left Vegas with my head hung in shame. On our way out of Nevada, we stopped in Mesquite to eat and so my buddy Todd could get rid of a few nickels he had left over in a bucket. He gave me some out of pity, and I hit an $80 jackpot with one nickel. That paid for our gas back to Laramie.

4 -- Number of years since my last cigarette. But in the interest of full disclosure, I have contemplated breaking the streak on several occasions. Once an addict, always an addict.

3 -- Total number of dogs we have. Besides Kotie, there are the pugs, Opal and Jewel.

2 -- The number of kids we're pretty sure we're going to have, though we haven't ruled out a third.

1 -- The number of third-nipples I have. No, just kidding. My No. 1 is always Jenny. Fun Fact: The first time she gave me her phone number, she told me 867-5309. And I knew right then I'd found me a cool girl. I was right.

So, I have some big changes planned for the opinion page when the Missourian drops the Monday and Saturday editions at the end of the month. I feel like this could be a real turning point for the section -- we've gotten some attention with the number of local columns we run, and some of the opinions expressed have gotten healthy debate on the Web site. Now, it's time to take that next step, and the turning point is weeding out the rest of the wire and adding some other personality to the page in print while continuing to grow on the Web.

One plan is to convert the Five Ideas column to a daily idea each day in print. Basically, we'll keep the same format -- analyze the issue with a critical eye, then a question at the end. Now, I just need a name for it. So far, the top contender is "Your Turn."

Any other ideas for the name of the daily idea column?

Falcon Editorial, a miserable little piece of software that never delivered all that it was supposed to do, only frustration and heartache, died Monday, Jan. 5, 2009 in the Missourian newsroom. It was 4 1/2.

Originally billed as the content management system that was supposed to allow for such innovations as electronic budgeting and seamless error tracking, Falcon was buggy from the start. It drove many a reporter insane with its ability to freeze on deadline, and the staff of the production desk was constantly asking if another editor or designer had a file open.

Falcon has been replaced by PlanSystem.

A few alums who wanted to pay their respects to Falcon for this story include:

Allison Hull writes via Twitter: "You can thank Falcon for traumatizing the newsroom Sun. and Thu. nights when I would go on a cursing rant because stories/pages disappeared."

Jennifer Amur, also via Twitter, makes reference to old Facebook group "Falcon is a 2-year-old," so named because it threw tantrums without notice, required long naps of inactivity while the server was rebooted for the 400th time that day, and other such acts: "Falcon was the most terrible 2-year-old I have ever met. And generally, I don't like 2-year-olds."

Isabelle Roughol, creator of the aforementioned group, had this to say via Facebook: "Killing a 2-year-old is despicable... but I can't say I'm sorry."

Here is a list of the stuff I wish we'd pay better attention to at ColumbiaMissourian.com:

-- Excerpts on every story. Without the headlines, landing pages are just a collection of headlines with very little context. I'm not sure what I find more frustrating -- reporters who don't write them in the first place or copy editors and news editors who publish stories without excerpts.

-- Django ID's. The django ID becomes part of the URL, and the URL is what gets searched. So when we use vague slugs instead of thought-out headlines for our django ID's, we really fail to take advantage of Google. It's almost like we don't want people to read our stories.

-- Lack of sectioning. I've yet to see a story hit the Rim this semester that had more than one section of the Web site tagged. Most of the time, there is no section tagged at all. No tags means the story isn't published. Again, do we want readers to see the journalism we're creating or not?

-- An inability to post photos. We miss photos -- and graphics -- constantly. Constantly. Especially in sports (sorry guys, but it's true). Again, why don't we want to show readers the photos we take?

-- Along those same lines, we fail miserably at times in our ability to write headlines for photos and edit cutlines correctly.

-- No today, tonight or yesterday on the Web. Ever. Anywhere. It's been years since we've instituted this rule, and it still crops up all the time.

-- We need to think about the presentation of every story and make sure it publishes correctly. We print page proofs of the print paper to make sure headlines are correct, everything looks aestetically pleasing, etc. etc. But how often do we look at a Web page after it's published? I'd contend that most of us don't, which is a big reason why we have the number of error reports we get.

-- Linking. I tried to make a big show of why it's important to link stories in budget yesterday. The crowd yawned. And I thought to myself: "If this is how tomorrow's journalists are approaching their education, they won't be tomorrow's journalists. They'll be tomorrow's burger-flippers."

-- We have to start labeling our multimedia, either visually or with a slug at the start of the description. It's not hard, but it does require some critical thinking, like "how can I best make this accessible to the reader?"

-- EDIT: One more thing that just came to mind: Datelines. Every news and sports story on the Web should have them.

I'm frustrated. I've preached, I've taught, I've instructed, I've offered incentives, I've held training sessions that few people attend. And still, we can't handle a lot of these simple tasks. What am I doing wrong? How can I get us to pay better to the Web site, our primary publication platform? Any thoughts you'd like to share would be most welcome.