"There's this trumped-up difference between we trained journalists ..." -- uh, actually, that's "us" trained journalists. You could look it up.

HE was still employed by the Rocky Mtn News????? After all these years!?!?!?!?!

Okay, that's all the info I need to understand why the Rocky Mtn News mgmt failed. If they kept that useless occupier of column space for that long they obviously haven't any clue.

Oh, let me guess. They kept him because he was "controversial". If by "controversial" you mean "column after column was such mindless drivel without a shred of a factoid of info you couldn't have found in the previous day's paper". Yes he got lots of hate mail, if that's your measure of a "good" columnist.

Lincicome is to Paul Zimmerman as anti-matter is to matter. Yeah, he's that bad.

At some point during most Rockies games on FSN, they show Tracy sitting in the press box, usually looking at his laptop - which as a UWyo sticker on it - the announcers say hello and he tips his cowboy hat. So he has a laptop. And he may know horses even better than baseball.

Canned reporters never die ... they work for free on a web site.

Tracy's lack of knowledge about the internet, blogging and technology is endemic amongst the old guard in the newspaper industry. Sure, there's plenty of younger technology wizards working for the newspaper companies, but the decisions are being made by older corporate management types who can't see the forest for the trees. They should have saw this day coming 10 years ago, but didn't, or wouldn't, and now they've milked the cash cow dry, and there is no turning back. Journalism will live on, but newspapers and their wasteful, inefficient distribution system are irrelevant.

"So we can't always sit . . . and think that everything's supposed to be done the way that it's been done my whole life."

You mean, like the Republicans? [rim shot]

For the life of me, I can't figure out why I found this interview so incredibly uninteresting. Good subject matter, good interviewee, good questions, thorough answers...but I couldn't even finish it.

?????

Journalism is dying. Newspapers kick ass and I wish Americans still valued them.

Critical thinking and reporting is passé.

Lotta Haterade® in these comments today.

Somewhere lost in the Tracy nitpicking is a good point to raise - historically, newspapers have served to finance serious journalism (Woodward & Bernstein, anyone?). If all of them fall by the wayside, leaving nothing but the Blogosphere, who will pick up the slack?

Do we really expect the next Watergate to be discovered and outed by someone from HuffPo or Salon that most people don't pay a cent to read? I don't.

Play ball!

Just like the music biz, the whole problem is that no one has any idea how to make money when people are used to getting the product for free. A previous poster slammed newspapers for not having seen this coming years ago, but to what end? You think they haven't been sweating this trend for years? A large portion of what we call Journalism is going to die off because you simply can't make a paycheck from it any longer.

I still don't understand why the blog generation is cheering the death of the newspaper. Just how much longer do you think companies like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, that haven't ever made a dime of profit, are going to last?

I hope there are some reporters still around in a few years to write the stories about how nobody saw the Social Network Bubble burst coming.

Agree with the poster above. Blogs are almost entirely based on reportage done by newspapers and other MSM outlets. You have to actually leave the house to do real reporting. With that going by the wayside, what will the blogs aggregate and repurpose? What will we comment on? Certainly some enterprising bloggers will hit the streets, some of them may even flourish. But I don't think that's going to be enough.

I have no idea what the solution is though. As a regular freelancer for a major daily I certainly have a horse in the race, and I'm most likely fucked in the end. Work has dried up big time in the last few months.