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.”

Busy, busy, busy. It’s Cobbles Week over at VeloNews.com, and today that means the Tour of Flanders. You want to find out who won, drop on by. They sell ads and stuff and need the eyeballs.

Editor in chief Ben Delaney is laboring across the pond, as is editor at large John Wilcockson. Euro’ correspondent Andrew Hood is pretty much always there, as is ace shooter Graham Watson, and so we do not lack for postable news nuggets as the hard men bang bars in the sleet and cowshit.

On days like this I drag ass out of bed far too early, grab a cup of mud and plunk down in the office chair to play editor from a distance, fielding e-mails and instant messages from the far-flung VeloGang, which operates in press rooms, pubs and home offices in Europe, Colorado and Wyoming, where longtime web geek Charles Pelkey hangs his ten-gallon hat.

It’s hard to believe that when I first started working with VeloNews back in 1989, a Mac SE with a 1200-baud Hayes modem hooked to a BBS constituted the pinnacle of journalistic technology. I was still FedExing original black-and-white cartoons and faxing stories from Santa Fe to the mothership in Boulder.

There are downsides to a smaller world, of course. Today, colleagues can poke their long, snoopy noses over your shoulder via AIM, iChat or Skype. It’s almost like having them right there in the office with you. Happily, you can always unplug the sonsabitches like Dave Bowman did the HAL 9000, another digital presence famous for erratic backseat driving, and go back about your business.

The Rocky may be no more, but the Gazette is very much with us — and looking for a roving reporter:

Gazette.com, in Colorado Springs, is looking for a morning person in our newsroom. Your job: update gazette.com by 7 a.m.; record a quick vodcast with headlines and promos to upcoming coverage; hit the streets and post breaking news throughout the morning; update your blog; then polish selected stories for the Gazette’s print edition. You’ll be mobile and wired, and will have a police scanner and a camera. You need strong reporting and writing skills. You need to be an early technology adopter, able to pick up on new and better ways to get the news you report to your readers, wherever they may be and through whatever channel they prefer. This is critical: readers will not come to you; your job is to go to them. You need dependable wheels. We’ll give you the tools and space you need to make the beat your own, and to let your personality and authority shine through. Journalism degree or relevant related experience required. Send letter, resume, clips to managing editor Larry Ryckman: larry.ryckman@gazette.com. See us at gazette.com; on Facebook (colorado springs gazette), and Twitter (csgazette).

Well, that sounds like a day’s work and then some. When I was a sprout pounding out the word count for what was then called the Gazette Telegraph, in the late Seventies, it was not uncommon to write a half-dozen pieces a day, massage a few rewrites and then go out and get good and drunk. We were often both mobile and wired, but not in a strictly professional — or even marginally functional — sense.

Happily, that was then, and this is now. Anyone who’s charging around 21st-century Bibleburg with a backpack full of esoteric electronica, grilling the brass as to why the troops dick around with C4 during red-flag warnings and otherwise making themselves unwelcome between Twitter tweets, Facebook postings, website updates and hard-copy journalism is liable to find the pubs shuttered come quitting time — assuming he or she can afford a few glasses of ale on what the G is willing and able to pay in this market.

I think I’ll stick to cycling journalism. I don’t have to teach a seminar on Open Records 101 to any uniformed governmental dysfunctionaries on a daily basis, I can work in my skivvies, and the ‘fridge full of ale is only a few shorts steps away. Say, it must be 5 o’clock somewhere, don’t you think?