Rockies Score Front-Page Saturation

No doubt about that, particularly given the squad's opening-round triumph, and the Rocky has gone to extremes to embrace it. Even though the October 3 edition boasted the aforementioned Rockies wraparound, two of the first four main pages of the news section — the ones immediately following coverage of the Georgetown calamity — were filled with rah-rah ephemera about the Colorado-Philadelphia match-up. The worst moment came courtesy of "Going Toe-to-Toe," an incredibly embarrassing pop-culture face-off between the cities that seemed to (incorrectly) predict a Phillies victory — unless you're the one person who thought Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead was a better movie than Philadelphia. But rather than learn from this mistake, editors devoted a full page of the October 9 paper to an even weaker faux-showdown between Colorado and Arizona, whose respective franchises take the field for the National League Championship Series on October 11. And that's not to mention the page of the October 6 Spotlight section designed to be folded into a rally cap that resembled the world's tackiest fez.

The Post hasn't done anything quite this wrongheaded to date. Indeed, the October 7 Mark Kiszla column about the sons of Mike Coolbaugh, a minor league coach in the Rockies system who was killed by a foul ball in July, which made page one the day after the Phillies fell, was the single finest piece of writing to emerge from the team's current run. The staggeringly moronic Woody Paige effort from the same issue resides at the opposite end of that scale.

Unfortunately, subsequent signs haven't been as encouraging. Consider October 9's "Rivalry on Deck?" The question mark in the offering's headline hints at internal doubts about whether an article concerning a nonexistent blood feud between the Rockies and Diamondbacks was a story at all, let alone something significant. But what page was it on? The first one.

Thank goodness ten or twenty deaths didn't knock that off the cover.

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Word power: Almost lost amid the Rockies hoopla was the resolution of the tale that occupied this space last week: the controversy stirred by the Rocky Mountain Collegian, the student newspaper serving the Colorado State University campus, after the publication of a September 21 editorial reading "FUCK BUSH." On October 4, CSU's board of student communications formally admonished David McSwane, the Collegian's editor, for this abbreviated salvo, but let him remain in his position.

McSwane was happy with the decision, in part because he was able to put the board's action in context. "Was admonishment really a punishment for us using our First Amendment rights?" he asks. "I don't really think so. I think it was just a finger wag from the university. It was their way of saying, 'We didn't like that.'"

In his opinion, the repercussions of the editorial have produced more positives than the mainstream media has reported. He notes that the backlash against him stirred numerous college newspapers across the country to take bold stands in favor of free speech — among them the University of Oregon's Daily Emerald, which published an October 1 editorial labeled, "Fire this... FUCK CENSORSHIP."

Nonetheless, he remains concerned about financial matters at the Collegian. TV stations and newspapers have floated advertising-loss figures ranging from $30,000 to $50,000, but McSwane says, "The media really screwed that up." The firmest amount he's heard is $10,000, and because, according to him, the operation ran a $192,000 surplus last year, the paper's hardly in danger of shutting down. But he emphasizes that "we've got to bring back some of those advertising dollars," and he hopes to do so by meeting directly with businesses to "let them know why we did what we did, why it was important, and who we are as people."

Coverage of McSwane has slowed since the ruling, but it hasn't vanished completely, as witnessed by October 7's "Audacious. Profane. He Won." a point-missing column by the Post's Diane Carman. (By coincidence, Carman's impending departure from the paper was announced internally the next day.) Read McSwane's take on this piece and other comments about coverage at our blogs.