Newspaper Industry
Newspapers in Colorado owe much to Ed Otte
Tuesday, 25, May,2010
Newspaper people are a notoriously cantankerous bunch. I don’t know just exactly who the author of the over-used phrase, “it’s like herding cats,” had in mind when first uttered it, but newspaper people would certainly have fit the description.It’s tough enough having to deal with them when they’re all under the same roof and working for the same boss. But when you have to deal with hundreds of them, of all shapes and sizes and backgrounds, from papers of just a few hundred circulation to the big Denver dailies and everything in between … well that’s tough. Herding cats might be easier.
Yet that is exactly what Ed Otte has done since 1995 as executive director of the Colorado Press Association. All the problems facing newspapers on many fronts — advertising revenue, readership, freedom of information, the Internet, you name it — come across Otte’s desk in a vintage building in downtown Denver. Just about every problem of every publisher in the state is also a problem for Ed Otte. On top of that he has to run — at a profit — the Colorado Press Service, a cooperative advertising placement service for Colorado newspapers.