another avenue of political news dying

[luckyleftyme2]

this is for those that haven't heard:
Politicker.com shuts down Colorado, 11 other state sites, lays off reporters
By Ernest Luning 12/12/08 11:37 AM
Twelve Politicker political news sites around the country, including PolitickerCO.com in Colorado, were shut down and their reporters unexpectedly laid off Friday morning. The sites, billed as “Inside politics for political insiders,” covered news in 17 states and are owned by the Observer Media Group, based in New York.


Politicker.com sites in New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania will remain operating, according to a source with the company. Sites in Arizona, California, Colorado, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Vermont and Washington state will disappear.

Most of the sites, including Colorado’s, employed a single reporter to cover local political news, which was then aggregated on a national site. Jeremy Pelzer, the lone PolitickerCO.com reporter, has been based out of the state Capitol since January and is among those who learned of the layoffs Friday morning, according to a source with the news organization.

The sites also published gossip and analysis from an anonymous “insider” who went by the pseudonym Wally Edge. National correspondent Alex Isenstadt, based out of Washington, D.C., and cartoonist Rob Tornoe also contribute to each state’s sites but were among those laid off Friday. D.C.-based editor Eric Pfeiffer also lost his job. Remaining editors will take a cut in pay.

The PolitckerCO.com site’s disappearance also means even fewer reporters will be covering Colorado’s statehouse, following a trend that has seen the number of Capitol bureau reporters cut nearly in half in recent years.

The closings come at the end of a tumultuous week in the news business, with a bankruptcy declaration from media giant Tribune Co., 2,000 layoffs announced by the newspaper chain Gannett Co., and the announcement that Denver’s oldest newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, is for sale and could face shutdown. On Thursday, Moody’s Investors Services downgraded the credit of the Denver Post’s parent company to a rating suggesting “a substantial risk” of default, but the company disputed the meaning of that characterization.