TEMPLE: Milestones aplenty for city, state, Rocky

By John Temple, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published July 11, 2008 at 11:45 p.m.

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Photo by Matt Mcclain / The Rocky

Media members check in for a walk- through Tuesday at the Pepsi Center.

You keep hearing in the news about this year's Democratic National Convention occurring 100 years after the city's first.

But in the next 12 months we'll be celebrating many more significant anniversaries. Among them:

* Denver turns 150 on Nov. 22.

* The Rocky Mountain News, Colorado's oldest continuously operated business, crosses the same threshhold next April 23.

* The University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine celebrates its 125th birthday in October.

* And Idaho Springs will mark the 150th anniversary of the Colorado gold rush in January.

All of these events obviously offer the chance to tell good stories. And we'll be doing our best to bring them to you.

But first we need your help.

The Rocky plans to publish a special section Nov. 22 to commemorate this historic anniversary for the city of Denver.

We and the city would like to feature the people who make Denver a special place today rather than spend all of our time looking backward. Of course, there'll be some of that. It's a great story to tell. And I'm sure you'll find us looking ahead, too.

But our hope is that you'll help the city identify 150 exceptional residents.

We'd like to make them the core of our section. It's my experience that sections like these are kept for generations. Then Denverites in the future would be able to connect with a cross section of our community that reflects the vibrancy of this place today. It is, after all, the people who make Denver what it is.

Nominees can be of any age or occupation. But they must live in Denver. The main criteria, according to the city: "These residents should be doing something extraordinary, something noteworthy and something that is bettering the city for generations to come."

Nominations will be accepted until Aug. 15. The 150 names will be unveiled on Nov. 22, when the city will host a reception and the Rocky will publish its section. To recommend someone, go to denver150.com for an official entry form or call 720-913- 1637.

On the walls outside my office are incredible front pages from special sections we published for the newspaper's diamond jubilee in 1934. They depict dreams of the city the artist imagined we'd become and scenes from our past. We hope that the reality of today, captured this way, will be even more compelling than the dreams of an inspired artist a lifetime ago.

I'll have more to report on our plans for the city's anniversay and our own anniversary in the months to come. We've got something highly unusual in store that I think you'll enjoy and that I believe will make a real contribution to our understanding of the place the city has become.

I thought of the journalists at Denver's first political convention when a pack of us visited the Pepsi Center this week to be briefed on plans for coverage of this year's historic event.

It's hard to imagine that they could have guessed that instead of newsboys hawking papers outside the main hall, this year there will be boys and girls inside the hall covering the activities.

Four youth reporters will be credentialed on behalf of YourHub.com/NextGen. Two are 11, and two are 12.

This channel of our "citizen-journalism" Web effort is just for young people, preteens who are ready to go on the Internet but should still be playing on their own special field.

It's been exciting to watch this venture take off. Kids seem to take to community publishing much more quickly than most adults.

The other thing attendees at the convention 100 years ago might not have been able to imagine is that in this anniversary year, schools for the first time will no longer be using actual printed newspapers to teach children about current events.

Instead, from now on, teachers will be receiving free electronic replica editions of the Rocky and The Denver Post via an eEdition subscription sponsored by newspaper subscribers and business partners of the Denver Newspaper Agency, which publishes both newspapers.

The agency is calling the program "NIE (Newspapers in Education) Goes Green!" It'll mean less paper consumed and less fuel burned. That's a good thing.

I'm still getting my arms around the idea that we're training our future readers to think of a newspaper as something they read on a screen, but the main thing in my view is that we're encouraging them to read.

That is something, I think, that William Byers, who first chronicled the city in lead type 150 years ago, would agree with me on.

John Temple can be reached at editor@RockyMountainNews.com or by mail at 101 W. Colfax Ave., Suite 500, Denver, CO 80202.

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