Former Rocky Mountain News Columnist Penny Parker Dies

DENVER (CBS4) - Penny Parker, the former entertainment columnist for the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post, died in Denver over the weekend.

Parker wrote a column called On the Town and covered celebrity news, entertainment news and the restaurant industry.

After a series of jobs out of state, she took a job at the Denver Post as a business writer. After that she moved to the Rocky Mountain News and started her long-running column there.

After the closure of the Rocky, Parker returned to the Post for several years before being laid off.

During her years writing for the Denver papers she wrote about her tough battle with breast cancer, in which she temporarily lost her hair.

More recently, Parker had been writing her column for the website of Blacktie-Colorado, a web-service company that "brings people and nonprofits together."

Parker was active with her columns in recent weeks and also made several posts on social media on New Year's Eve. She died on Saturday.

According to The Denver Post, the cause of Parker's death is undetermined so far.