It’s no secret that the newspaper industry is in bad shape. Newspapers’ financial woes continued into the second quarter of this year as advertising sales shrank 29 percent—the “deepest downturn yet” from the last three years, according to Marketing magazine. It’s no surprise then that the best opportunities for many young journalists are online.

That rule applies even if you are Ethan Axelrod, the 22-year-old son to President Barack Obama’s senior advisor David Axelrod, one of the political masterminds behind Obama’s election. Axelrod the younger, a Colorado College grad and the editor of the new Denver bureau of the left-leaning Huffington Post, has finally given comments to the local press.

He tells The Denver Post that his father, a former political writer for the Chicago Tribune, “virtually had no influence in me getting into journalism. I make my own decisions, and he didn’t push me one way or another.” The site, which officially opens September 15, aims to aggregate headlines from other news sources and highlight local writers. As Axelrod puts it, HuffPo Denver wants to “provide a one-stop shop for news in Colorado.”