My fingers pounded on the sticky keyboard. It was 2 a.m.; I'd
given up drinking coffee a few hours earlier and was now chewing
coffee beans chased with chocolate chips. In less than five
hours, I'd make the 50-mile drive over two high mountain passes
to the printer's in Durango, in western Colorado, fretting the
whole way about what I'd left out, the mistakes I'd made and who
I'd probably libeled.  It was hour 18 of yet another 20-hour
pre-print-day haul on the Silverton Mountain Journal, the
newspaper I'd started nine months earlier. I covered San Juan
County's 387 square-miles, one incorporated town, fewer than 600
people and, during the six months of winter, approximately 15
potential advertisers. That's not enough to sustain one
newspaper. Yet the Journal was the second paper in town, the
upstart next to the Silverton Standard & the Miner, which had
fought off a half-dozen other competitors during its lifetime
and had survived bust after bust as gold and other hard rock
mines closed.  Launching a second n