Destination: Starz Denver Film Festival

I regularly pick up and examine small town newspapers, which is a habit I picked up from my father and one I've cultivated as a student newspaper editor. They set, I believe, a better model for student newspapers than a paper like the Denver Post or even the Westword.

In a city as big as Denver, run a report that pisses a few people off and maybe you don't get a comment from them for a while. That's fine—there are half a million other people in town to write about.

But the Chaffee County Times, for example, serves Buena Vista, a community of about 2,000 people. And there are only about two places to get coffee downtown, so if you run a report about someone that's negative, you're fairly likely to run into that person before you've had enough caffeine to successfully deflect their glares.

Which makes it all the more interesting to me that the Chaffee County Times masthead carries the motto: "Newspapers should have no friends." It's a quote from Joseph Pulitzer, former owner of the The New York World, who is often, appropriately or not, credited
with the invention of modern journalism.

It's a heck of a declaration. Particularly if you live in a town where there aren't many people to make friends with in the first place and all your enemies know exactly which mailbox is yours.

A newspaper's obligation is to its readers, and not to its sources. But without cooperative sources in a small community, well, we couldn't run anything but CD reviews.

Occasionally, I encounter sources who respond in a way that says they're a little nervous about the questions I'm asking. Like I'm fishing around for the catastrophes they tried to sweep under the rug. I'm not. I'm just trying to ask the questions a reader would expect to see answered in the interest of providing Advocate readers with a news source that helps them to better understand their community and the forces at work within it.

We can play nice and we can play fair. Even if we can't all be friends.

Elizabeth Miller
Editor in Chief