I love to hear about journalists who lob a softball question at a high muck-a-muck - and get an unexpected answer.

That's what happened Oct. 28 when Republican Scott McInnis, a former congressman, told the Colorado Independent that he could beat Democrat Mark Udall in the Colorado Senate race. Coming as Republican Bob Schaffer was trailing Udall in that contest, McInnis' remark arguably drove a nail into Schaffer's campaign coffin.

Speculating on McInnis' motives the next day, fellow Republican John Andrews wrote on his PoliticsWest .com blog that McInnis "is a very smart guy who always engages brain before mouth moves."

But to make McInnis' mouth move, a reporter had to ask the right question.

The reporter was David Williams, who's been a journalist in the Vail area for about 20 years and has written about McInnis extensively.

Williams, a senior fellow at the Independent, an online news site, called McInnis for a story he was writing about energy issues, and in the midst of their hour-long interview, Williams asked McInnis about his "long-term" plans.

"I think he had been ready to say something like that for a long time but nobody called and asked him," says Williams of McInnis' bombshell about being able to beat Udall. He added: "To me, it was something he was sitting on and stewing on for a while."

Williams, who's worked for the Rocky Mountain News, recognized the significance of McInnis' remark, put his original story idea on hold, and quickly filed his piece, which wins top honors among 2008 election stories published on blogs and online news sites.

Williams' story was picked up and advanced by The Denver Post, which ran it on the front page without having the professional courtesy to cite the Independent, and the Rocky, which credited the publication.

The story behind the McInnis revelation shows what online news sites can contribute when they hire professional journalists who are connected to their communities and engage in original reporting.

"It keeps me in the game to have a Web site like this," says Williams, explaining that otherwise he's relegated to focusing almost exclusively on skiing and nonpolitical topics. "It's hard to find anyone to pay you to write about these things."

That's a good thing, because the more journalists we have out there asking questions, not just firing off opinions, the better off we are.

Fair or foul? After a major election, journalists should ask the politicos involved whether they thought the media coverage was fair and accurate.

For example, Dick Wadhams, the chair of the state Republican Party, told me Thursday that he thought the dailies' coverage was generally fair. Wadhams complained about coverage of Rep. Bob Schaffer's alleged ties to jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the Marianas Islands - particularly the Post's articles - but other than that, he didn't have any major gripes. Democratic Party state Chair Pat Waak was more critical, saying that "there was too much editorializing instead of reporting on what was going on."

It's not too late for the dailies to write a few articles airing the journalistic concerns of leading partisans - along with the responses of top editors.

Rich anchors. The Rocky reported on Nov. 4 that 9News anchor Bob Kendrick will be leaving Channel 9, mostly because the station doesn't want to continue paying his $400,000 annual salary at the same time it's paying $500,000 for co-anchor Adele Arakawa.

Citing an anonymous source, the piece also listed the salaries of a handful of other Denver TV anchors, which run as high as $700,000 per year.

Let's put all this in perspective. If the real focus of local TV news was on journalism - as opposed to promoting and retaining celebrity anchors - they would hire more boots-on-the-ground journalists to cover issues and events in the community.

Based on salary figures on the Newspaper Guild's Web site, 9News could hire 13 reporters in Denver (each with five years' experience) for the total cost of Kendrick and Arakawa.

Jason Salzman, president of Effect Communications, is the author of Making the News: A Guide for Activists and Nonprofits. Reach him at salzmanj@RockyMountainNews.com.