A year ago today – Sept. 16, 2009 –Denver was the epicenter of the debate over the future of news in America.

Some 200 people packed the Colorado History Museum downtown that night, in the middle of a workweek, and spent three hours passionately talking about how to save the news.

Some were community leaders or journalists. Most were concerned citizens. Many who attended the event sponsored by Free Press were still reeling from the shocking closure six months earlier of one of the nation’s great newspapers, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News.

I was one of them.