Rocky Mountain Independent

» see rockymountainindependent.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

three months and roughly two hundred subscribers is not much of a newspaper. the rocky mountain independent sat in the part of us regional-media history i can read about now but was not close to at the time. by 2009 i was 25, in ankara, following english-language tech news online but not colorado local news. the denver-refugee arc after the rocky mountain news closure happened at a distance i did not track.

the site launched 4 july 2009, roughly four months after the rocky mountain news closed on 27 february 2009. steve foster gathered about a dozen ex-RMN staff and a handful of contributors on the pitch that subscription-plus-ad revenue could support a lean colorado-focused news operation. subscription tiers ran $4/month or $24/year, unusually cheap for a paywall in that era. the twelve website owners committed to working without compensation through september 2009 while foster and partners looked for outside investors.

no funding round arrived. subscriber acquisition stayed thin. by september most of the founding twelve had taken paid jobs elsewhere, leaving four or five people trying to keep the site publishing. foster announced the shutdown on 2 october 2009 with a final publishing date of 5 october. subscribers were refunded.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pitch ~

the independent was not the first rocky-mountain-news refugee project. that was indenver times, which needed 50,000 subscriber pledges by 23 april 2009 and got about 3,000. that team pivoted to an ad-supported thin-newsroom model. foster's independent was the second attempt, deliberately smaller and cheaper on the subscriber side. the pitch was closer to the pro-am indie-newsroom pattern that voice of san diego and minnpost had already been running for a couple of years by then.

~ the failure math ~

about 200 paid subscribers at a $2 to $2 blended monthly rate is a monthly revenue in the low four figures. that number does not cover a single full-time salary, let alone twelve. foster's post-mortem in the westword interview named the two problems every small independent-news project of that era ran into. paid founders drifted to jobs that actually paid, and the outside investors staff talked to in september wanted a bigger audience number before committing.

~ the long tail ~

the pattern repeated across the united states between 2009 and 2013 as metro papers folded. some refugee projects, minnpost among them, survived on non-profit funding. most did not. the substack-era paid-newsletter model that ended up as the working template for the pattern arrived a decade later. by then the specific rocky-mountain-news alumni network had scattered. foster kept the domain parked for a few years after the shutdown. indenver times survived in an ad-supported form with a much smaller staff.

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