The discovery of Blanning’s suicide put a quick end to the mystery of who had concocted the bomb threat. But throughout New Year’s Day, the episode fueled online and television cable news coverage, often accompanied by the Blanning hand-written note and photos credited to the two Aspen papers. NBC Nightly News featured a photo by Curet. The Denver papers jumped onto the story online and splashed it over their front pages a day later, with both the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News (which is up for sale and in danger of closing) using an Aspen Daily News photo and Blanning’s note to The Aspen Times. Stories in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times relied on correspondents reporting from Denver, and The Washington Post used an AP story from Aspen.

“Every now and then Aspen becomes the center of the universe,” said Ward, who recalled the media onslaught ensuing from the February, 2005 suicide of gonzo author Hunter S. Thompson, and the accidental death of former Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s son Michael Kennedy, who struck a tree skiing here on New Year’s Eve, 1997.

This year’s foiled bomb plot, including the suicide note addressed to his paper, “certainly made it the weirdest,” said Ward. The story didn’t draw as much worldwide media attention as the Thompson and Kennedy stories, but it had far bigger local repercussions. The bomb threat fortunately did not harm anyone, but was nonetheless a devastating blow to the stressed Aspen economy on the biggest night of the year.

This vacationing reporter’s plans for a big New Year’s Eve celebration at Aspen’s L’Hosteria Restaurant, located down the block from the threatened Vectra Bank, came to an abrupt halt when police evacuated the area. Instead, our family settled into our rented condo and followed the Aspen papers’ Web sites for news about the bomb threats. And on New Year’s Day, I was among the first to grab a copy of the paper from the news box outside The Aspen Times’s funky blue-and-purple wooden building on Main Street. Its name was proudly emblazoned on the building’s front, along with the date of its founding, 1881. On the wall inside, twenty-four award plaques from the Colorado Press Association proved the value of a local paper.

“Without the local news media in an event like this, information would be hard to come by for everyone,” said Ward. “It’s nice to have something prove our relevance when times are tough. Local newspapers have an important place, thank God.”

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