This week's conversation: Rising from the ashes

Today's New York Times has a story on a journalist from the late Rocky Mountain News who has risen from the ashes, pulled himself up by the bootstraps, and possibly conquered other hackneyed metaphors. He bought a newspaper.

After losing his job with the closing of the Rocky Mountain News in February 2009, former Washington correspondent M. E. Sprengelmeyer moved to New Mexico and is now the "owner, publisher, editor, primary writer and sometime ad salesman, photographer and deliverer of the weekly Guadalupe County Communicator, circulation about 2,000."

Apparently Sprengelmeyer has several part-time employees, and he has some of his former colleagues do freelance for the paper.

"It’s the Tom Sawyer business plan: I’m trying to convince all my friends how much fun it would be to help me," Mr. Sprengelmeyer told the Times.

For those about to stick with journalism even though your former paper folded (pun intended), we salute you.