Red Ink

From our When Drowning, Grasp the Anvil Firmly Department comes the news that the Bibleburg Gaslight is taking another stab at offering a free paper with a blend of wire-service news, staff reports and dispatches from “citizen journalists,” which is to say anyone with a PC and a craving to see his or her name in print. Oboy, can’t wait.

Astoundingly, this thing, dubbed Ink, will be targeted at a trio of areas I would consider either blue or independent — downtown, the west side and Manitou Springs — where the Gaslight‘s deranged, fire-engine-red, wingnut-libertarian fan base mostly isn’t. We’re all commies and queers and atheists in these parts. Some of us are all three.

The Gaslight‘s previous attempt to masquerade as a zoned collection of “neighborhood papers,” an embarrassing throwaway bumwad called The Slice, died unmourned a couple years ago, if memory serves. It made those god-awful holiday letters you get from acquaintances look like the “Essays of E.B. White.” But it arrived on the doorstep once weekly, packaged in a nifty plastic bag suitable for picking up dog shit, so it wasn’t entirely useless. For those with hamsters or parakeets it was a two-fer.

I suppose I should be gratified that the Gaslight is trying to pay some attention to “downtown” Bibleburg and other pockets of local weirdness. I like to go out for breakfast now and then, and breakfast out means reading the newspaper, but I haven’t seen a copy of the Gaslight in a box downtown for the better part of quite some time. They’ve either cut way back on the press run or abandoned single-copy sales altogether. Either way, I could care less. More trees will grow in the wild wood.

The Colorado Springs Independent seems to be hanging on despite the sagging economy, but two other throwaways with less baggage have fallen upon hard times recently — Newspeak, which has moved online, and Springs Magazine, which has simply gone away. Ink seems destined to follow them down the drain. Remember your Humphrey Bogart, as crusading editor Ed Hutcheson in “Deadline U.S.A.” — “Stupidity isn’t hereditary, you acquire it by yourself.”