Does anyone read newspapers on paper anymore? Strangely enough, yes — and publishers hope such folks continue doing so, since they make a lot more money from print ads than Internet equivalents. Underlining this point are two full-page house ads that began appearing in the Denver Post and the Rocky…
Jake Plummer didn’t need any more bad press — but he sure as hell got some anyway. His alleged role in what’s been characterized as a road rage incident filled news pages and airwaves yesterday; thus far, the coverage shows no sign of waning. It does appear to be getting…
Trapped inside a place where people come to die, John Gordy waits and watches. His athletic six-foot-five-inch frame is dead weight. Gordy has just enough use of his contorted right hand to control his electric wheelchair. The slender black man in his early forties is handsome despite his cracked front…
I’m not going to lie to you: I love The Real World. Always have. I loved The Real World when it first blazed onto the airwaves as a semi-noble experiment in documentary television, with an eclectic, not necessarily beautiful cast of people in New York City, all as clueless as…
Nathanial Trotter has never met Oprah Winfrey, but he knows she’s nice. So nice, in fact, that he’d like to make her Queen of America. “I believe God gave me the idea,” the Aurora inventor explains. “I would listen to Oprah, and there’s so many things she’s accomplished. She’s won…
Like all great landmarks of the underground scene, the skateboard bowl at Fallen Warehouse was spectacular, haphazard and not particularly legal. Culled from the remains of “Bruce’s ramp” after uptight Boulder residents persuaded town administrators to force the deconstruction of that unofficial backyard facility in the summer of 2005, the…
On May 17, the main news story plugged on the fronts of the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News revolved around a damning report about University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill — but the papers’ presentations were hardly mirror images. The Post printed a straightforward headline — “Panel on…
GOP of the Heap Send in the clowns: Regarding Alan Prendergast’s “Clowns to the Left of Me,” in the May 18 issue: Who would think we’d all get nostalgic for Ronald Reagan? Kudos to Marc Holtzman for making the Republican Party take a long, hard look at what it really…
The last American Idol faceoff of the season provided all the thrills and suspense of the average episode of Teletubbies — but with lousier music. Several of the predictions made in jest yesterday on this blog actually came true (eeesh), but the joke was on the record companies that will…
Our long national nightmare is almost over… Tonight’s penultimate episode of American Idol means that millions of people who love high phone bills will finally be able to vote for their favorite among the ultra-popular Fox talent show’s finalists. There’s no telling whether Taylor Hicks and Katherine McPhee will ultimately…
The Colorado Rockies’ early-season success — at this writing, they’re atop the National League West — has apparently caused the nation’s largest newspaper to remember that the team exists. Among the guests on today’s edition of “The Press Box,” Z-560’s fine morning-drive show, was a baseball writer from USA Today,…
When MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton and his partners ponied up $1 billion for three California Bay Area newspapers formerly owned by Knight Ridder (and one ex-KR paper in Minnesota), he earned the enmity of a relentless foe: Bruce Brugmann, the editor and publisher of the Bay Guardian, an alternative…
This afternoon, Rico Vecchiarelli stepped out of the sunlight and into the Denver City & County Building, where he was sentenced after pleading guilty to a Class 3 felony securities fraud. Vecchiarelli is the founder of American Championship Fighting (“The Fight Is On!”), a Denver-based mixed martial arts league that…
The hype surrounding the impending departure of Katie Couric from NBC’s Today reached a new low this morning — particularly for Denver-area viewers. Today’s 7:30 a.m. segment led with a clip of Couric interviewing two locals who’d just lost a loved one in the 1999 Columbine High School shootings: Craig…
The ghost of Ronald Wilson Reagan haunts the Marc Holtzman for Governor campaign headquarters on South Broadway. Images of the nation’s fortieth president beam from brochures, and framed photos of him hang on the walls. In most of the pictures, hovering somewhere near the Great Communicator is a mop-haired, bespectacled…
It’s not even 2 p.m., and the police are already after DeVante and Damani. The two have been split up for what seems like hours, and now they’ve met back up under a basketball hoop at 37th Avenue and Franklin Street in the hopes that De’Aries and Santiago will show…
For political junkies in need of a fix, ColoradoPols.com is a spike to the vein. The site is a popular online rendezvous spot where folks interested in dishing about campaigns can mingle with insiders whose candor is enhanced by anonymity. As is typical on blogs, most ColoradoPols users post under…
There will be no Midsummer Night’s Dream in Civic Center Park this summer — nor Cyrano de Bergerac nor any other of the dozens of free plays put on by Theater in the Park over the past sixteen years. The series that started when the French ambassador challenged Sister Cities…
New York City is an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord. The shops, the bars, the shows, the sights — it’s all laid out for you, much like the spread at a Country Buffet. And when you first walk into that Country Buffet, stomach empty, tastebuds curious, this chaotic orgy of options looks like…
The Fight Stuff A sporting chance: Props to Luke Turf for the excellent articles on mixed martial arts in the May 11 issue. It’s about time the sport received some publicity, especially when you consider that mixed martial arts and, more specifically, the Ultimate Fighting Championship began in Denver and…
Back in 1994, Vernon Bellecourt and the national American Indian Movement asked the University of Colorado to investigate whether Ward Churchill obtained tenure through deception, “billing himself as an American Indian writer, scholar and artist,” Bellecourt told Westword. He added that the university should get rid of “this man whose…
May is “sweeps” month, when ratings help determine advertising rates for TV stations — and according to a knowledgeable insider, Channel 7’s newscast numbers, particularly at 5 p.m. and 10 p.m., aren’t pretty. Granted, disaster can be averted if the rate of viewership increases over the next two weeks or…
