The Colorado Sun: The annual Colorado Press Association awards ceremony is usually a feel-good affair for the state’s newspapers, a recognition of the quality journalism coming out of publications of all sizes, from the Front Range to the Four Corners.

Normally the event and the association’s annual convention is an occasion for back-patting and journalistic pride. It’s a chance for the association’s 150 news outlets to celebrate the best reporting, writing, photos and design of the previous year. It wouldn’t typically be the venue to highlight a historic newspaper’s destruction.

But that is exactly what is unintentionally on tap for the awards ceremony tonight at Coors Field, where the Aspen Times is due to win nine awards for five journalists. None of the five are working at the Times today. All of us were forced to resign on principle, or fired, since West Virginia-based Ogden Newspapers bought the Times in January along with the rest of Swift Communications’ papers in Colorado, Utah and California.

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