"I'm not doing it for the money," he goes on. "If I was doing it for the money, I'd be starving. It's just something to do a few hours a week. I'm not very good at carpentry, but this is something I've done all my life."
Green's current method is a return to the one he employed at the Post, circa the mid-'90s. Back then, "I wrote a personal opinion column," he emphasizes. "Then, for reasons that I still don't understand, they tried to change what the column was. They tried to tell me what subjects to write about and how to write about them. I think they were looking for a feature story with my picture next to it. But now I'm back to writing what I think an opinion column should be. I'm not finding someone whose opinion I agree with and quoting them. I'm expressing my opinion."
Brett Amole
After leaving two dailies, Rich Tosches is looking
ahead.
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Eyeballing things personally isn't required. In recent months, he's taken the long-distance approach to topics such as the Kobe Bryant trial, the CU sex scandal and the Iowa caucuses. Even if Chieftain headlined this last effort "You May Send Me to Baghdad But Keep Me From Des Moines," the sentiment is debatable. In truth, Green is enjoying column writing again, because he can take on Baghdad and Des Moines from the comfort of his Pueblo home.
Guzzo's put even more distance between himself and Denver, relocating to Jacksonville, Florida, last April. Since leaving the Post, he's worked a few gigs as a consultant and made himself available as an expert witness in respect to several media-oriented legal matters. He's also received a number of feelers about editing positions, but none felt quite right to him. "If I end up back in the newsroom, it'll either be as a top editor of a paper of some ambition or as a journalist working on great stories," he says. "I don't need to have the top job or a prestige title. I just need to feel that I'm making a difference."
To that end, Guzzo has gotten heavily involved with the Committee for Concerned Journalists, an organization co-founded by William Kovach, a New York Times vet and former curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. Under this umbrella, Guzzo's helped stage journalism workshops at a number of U.S. newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, and even traveled to Venezuela, where he advised scribes who face fearsome obstacles in attempting to report about the autocratic regime of the country's president, Hugo Chavez. In late 2003, Guzzo discloses, "the government issued what was essentially a media enemies' list, naming the newspapers, TV stations and, by name, the commentators who are adversarial to the national army."
On a much lighter note, Guzzo has been indulging in a lifetime passion: Strat-O-Matic. It's a baseball-simulation game that "differs from what's commonly referred to as fantasy baseball, because you're using cards or computer images of real players based on the statistics they've compiled," he explains. "You can play using statistics from the most recently completed season or seasons from the past, dating back to 1920." From 1991 to 1999, Guzzo put out a publication called STRAT FAN, and today he contributes to assorted Strat-O-Matic websites and is under contract to write a book about the pastime. He's got a deal to write a journalism text as well. Guess which one he's more apt to relish assembling.
Like Guzzo, Jensen understands how nice it is to shift gears. At the Rocky, he routinely analyzed events in the Middle East and other far-flung parts of the world, and while he continues to offer "some foreign-affairs commentary for European papers off and on," he says, he's spent more time covering hunting and fishing, his longtime hobbies. He serves as fishing- report coordinator and edits big-game brochures for the Colorado Division of Wildlife on a contract basis, contributes to Colorado Outdoors, a division publication, and freelances for the likes of Rocky Mountain Game & Fish and Fishing & Hunting News. In conversation, he can come across as gruff and guarded, but when he's asked how he feels about wildlife writing, his mood brightens. "It's infinitely enjoyable," he enthuses.
Evidently, people who've left the Post and the News have all the fun.
