Rocky Mountain News

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

~ the obituary ~

the final issue of the rocky mountain news came out on friday, 27 february 2009. it was 149 years and 10 months old. the anniversary edition it had been planning for april was already sketched out inside the newsroom. it never ran. e.w. scripps announced the closure the day before, and staff got the news at a meeting in the newsroom that was filmed and later released as a short documentary called "final edition". the paper had been on the market since 4 december 2008 and no bid had cleared. the joint operating agreement with the denver post made a straightforward sale impossible.

this grave sits in a category i did not live through directly. i was on the other side of the atlantic, on ttnet in ankara, when the great recession was pulling the bottom out of the us metro-daily model. what i knew about it came from the same online-media coverage that everyone else was reading in 2008 and 2009, the paul-gillin newspaper-death-watch blog era. the rocky mountain news was the first big-city daily closure of that wave. the seattle post-intelligencer print edition followed 18 days later.

the paper itself went back to 1859, older than the state of colorado by 17 years. it was founded by william byers in a room above a saloon in what was then still gold-rush denver, at the corner of larimer and cherry, with a hand press hauled overland from omaha. it survived the 1893 silver panic that destroyed most of colorado's mining economy and it survived the great depression. it lost the morning-vs-evening war with the denver post in the 1940s and switched to a morning tabloid format in the 1980s that gave it a second life for another twenty years.

the pulitzers came late. under editor john temple the paper won four between 2000 and 2006, starting with the columbine breaking-news photography prize in 2000 and the hayman-fire photography prize in 2003. the pair of 2006 feature awards went to jim sheeler and todd heisler for the funeral-of-fallen-marines work. those are the pieces of the paper's work that stayed in circulation after the paper itself did not. everything else went to the archives at the denver public library and to whatever the denver post decided to hire from the newsroom that was being closed.

~ the case file ~

~ the joint operating agreement ~

the mechanism that killed the rocky mountain news was the joint operating agreement it had been forced into in 2001. the denver newspaper agency handled all non-editorial functions for both papers, a shared production and advertising pool set up under the federal newspaper preservation act. it kept both newsrooms nominally independent while making it impossible to actually sell one without unwinding the whole structure. when e.w. scripps decided in late 2008 that it could no longer eat the losses, a private-equity buyer named brian ferguson tried to take the paper on. the numbers did not work through the agency. scripps closed the paper instead.

~ the refugee papers ~

the ex-rocky newsroom tried twice to relaunch as an online paper. indenver times launched on 23 april 2009 with a subscription pitch aimed at 50,000 paying members. it got about 3,000 signups and folded in the same year. the rocky mountain independent, a second attempt led by steve foster, launched later in 2009 and lasted three months. both are on the rip.so backlog under their own slugs. they represent the first serious effort in american journalism to convert a killed print newsroom directly into a paying-subscriber digital startup, and both failed for the same reason: the audience was not ready to pay for what had been free the week before.

~ what got buried with it ~

the arc of the paper itself, mostly, along with the assumption that a two-newspaper american city was a permanent fact. denver had held that structure for over a century. rocky mountain news dying meant that of the seven us cities that still had two competing metro dailies in 2000, denver was the fifth to fall. the pattern repeated across the seattle p-i print edition in march 2009 and the tucson citizen in may 2009, with the ann arbor news following in july. after that the two-daily american city was effectively extinct.

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