The Message

His affection wasn't wanted, either, Taylor stresses. For whatever reason, though, Herdy appears to have wound up with that, too.

Catching flacks: The print version of YourHub.com, the Internet meeting place being given a heavy marketing push by the Rocky Mountain News, is rolling out in more locations, and the editions are fairly substantial in terms of size. Whether there's much of substance in them is another question. The July 7 Denver edition, which stretched to twenty pages, was larded with hefty house ads, jumbo photo spreads and press releases disguised as stories, submitted by the likes of the Denver Zoo, the Kempe Children's Foundation and Evan Dreyer, who left his job as the Post's city editor in 2003 to open his own PR firm. Dreyer's article, about a Denver Public School Board candidate, identifies him only as a "YourHub.com user," and it's easy to understand why folks in his position would want such a designation. Rather than having to pitch reporters about covering subjects they're being paid to promote, they can write something up themselves and get it into the paper anyhow, without hassling with any middlemen. Maybe they should rechristen it YourPlug.com.

George Douglas, a former Rocky editor now working as the media-relations manager for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, recently had a less positive experience with the paper. On July 4, Rocky editor/publisher/president John Temple, who'd urged readers of a recent column about bats to send their wacky animal stories to YourHub.com (can't wait), defended the use of an open-casket photo in his weblog. To that, an ex-Rocky employee dubbed "George" accused Temple of "exaggeration and ridiculous overstatements" in his posted reply. On July 10, Temple struck back with an item labeled "NREL Spokesman Questions Corpse Comments," needling Douglas by name. The problem? Douglas didn't write the first message, and had no idea that Temple had stated otherwise until he was informed by yours truly. "He never talked to me about it, and obviously, he should have," Douglas said -- and he was also unhappy that NREL was mentioned, since it had nothing to do with the blurb. Shortly thereafter, Douglas and Temple finally communicated, and the chastened blogger took down the NREL head and replaced it with one that read "Apology to George Douglas." Below it, Temple wrote, "It's a fundamental of journalism that you shouldn't assume anything. I did. I regret doing so."

Maybe Temple can make amends by publishing some NREL press releases.

On top of the trends: Several months ago, I was interviewed for a 5280 piece about Colorado Public Radio host Dan Drayer. Last week, someone from the mag called to fact-check a quote. The remark was accurate, but when I mentioned that Drayer made a heavily publicized departure from CPR way back in May, the fact-checker was surprised. "That could change the story," she said.

You think?