After 150 years, Rocky Mtn News is done.

[1956Safari]

Denver newspaper, with the latest Colorado news, sports, weather and entertainment : Rocky Mountain News

Sorry to see you go.

[Silvertwinkie]

It's all sad:

US metropolitan dailies that have ceased print publication since March, 2007 Rocky Mountain News
Baltimore Examiner
Kentucky Post
Cincinnati Post
King County Journal
Union City Register-Tribune
Capital Times
Halifax Daily News
Albuquerque Tribune
South Idaho Press
San Juan Star

[moosetags]

It is sad indeed, but I guess times are changing before our eyes.

Brian

[Stefrobrts]

It's sad, but it's the way of things. We canceled our subscription to the local paper this year. They seem to have a staff dedicated to selling advertising, and not much else. So the result was a paper full of ads, a few AP articles that we had already read online (often a week or more before they hit the local paper) and very few local news articles. And then they doubled the price! Why pay for that?

If local newspapers want to survive they need to provide something you can't get online. We have a weekly local paper that is small but provides more local news and features than the big paper ever did, never print AP articles, and they get enough in advertising to hand it out free. Now that's a paper I would gladly pay for - we look forward to it coming every week.

[ROBERT CROSS]

I live far from Denver. But these photo's brought it Home for me.

Check out the second place photograph also.

R.I.P.

Semper-fi


Google Image Result for http://www.poyi.org/63/photos/11/01.jpg

[Silvertwinkie]

I'm just speechless. I know it'll get better at some point, and I know the media sensationalizes things, but day after day, the news is just not getting any better. What we don't talk about when we see business shutter like this is the human toll and job loss. You see that guy in the pics of the linked story. This guy looks like deer in headlights as he's being told, holding this child in his hands and you can't help but think what he's thinking, like "My God, what am I going to do for healthcare for this child, or feed or dress this kid without a job in this job market/economy?"

It's just gut wrenching.

[slowmover]

Articles about literacy are saddening. The preference for videos ("news" on YouTube) is a joke. All the papers seem to have -- as described above -- one staff reporter, a couple of columnists and recycled wire reports. I think we all lost the second daily newspaper in cities some years ago. That was a pleasure, once upon a time, to see the different takes on items. And, how long did it take to read? Twenty minutes? (if you threw away the classified and sports).

Another quaint and remote custom in the movies: handing the other man the newspaper to see his reaction to an article.

Solitary living, solitary drinking, solitary reading. Solitary life in the cubicle. No outside associations.

Obama Generation should have read just one book: Five Arguments for the Elimination of Television. And taken it seriously. Their parents and grand-parents apparently didn't. When was it you first heard people making cultural references from television or the movies (in the entirety)? I remember how surprised I was at college thirty years ago to have run into this.

""Video" just means. "last to know and knows the least".

The Internet just means our reading is that much more fragmented per our idiosyncrasies.

However bad the model that ran these papers, it is certainly true that they no longer did any journalism worth reading. If so, people would have talked about it . . . . but, oh, they don't seem to do that either.

[72BamaStream]

Even though I haven't lived in Denver since 2002, I still consider Colorado my home... it's where I'm from, where I grew up... always will be... it makes me sad to see the Rocky disappear... that was the paper my family read, not the Post. I remember waking up on Sunday mornings, Mom would have Kool105 blaring in the fireplace room and Dad would be sitting at the kitchen table, drinking his coffee and reading the Rocky Mountain News. Since moving away from Denver there haven't been too many days that I haven't jumped onto Denver newspaper, with the latest Colorado news, sports, weather and entertainment : Rocky Mountain News

I wish the best of luck to all of its staff.... man, just more people thrown into the job-hunting-mix that's already overcrowded...

Crazy time in our history... just crazy...

[Zeppelinium]

Originally Posted by ROBERT CROSS

I live far from Denver. But these photo's brought it Home for me.

Check out the second place photograph also.

Google Image Result for http://www.poyi.org/63/photos/11/01.jpg

Robert, as I read the last Rocky this morning, those two photos were so moving. I read the original article when it was published. Very good work on the part of the Rocky.

HBO aired "Taking Chance" last weekend, but I missed it. I need to see it. It's the same story line as the photos above.

Zep

[ROBERT CROSS]

Originally Posted by Zeppelinium

HBO aired "Taking Chance" last weekend, but I missed it. I need to see it. It's the same story line as the photos above.

Zep

Zep,

It's a must see, Check HBO on demand, they just listed it.

Bob

[Lothlorian]

Losing the local news is losing the true feeling of your community, losing the postive articles people write in and especially the kid news. It is almost like losing the free press. The big news is to much controlled by the media Giants who have their own view of the world. Local news papers express the news, opinions and feelings of the americans of that small part of the country. I hope somebody is a pioneer and starts up another small paper

Lothloian

[maxandgeorgia]

I agree with Shari about the local weekly newspapers' interest and values. Our two favorite subscriptions are 1) to our Ashland area local, Boone County Journal, weekly, full of local events, needs, names. I'd pay more than I do if needed to keep it. 2) The same for our loved Cook County Herald, Grand Marais, MN, weekly paper. It recently changed hands and lost some of our favorite columnists, but it still reflects the culture and country where it is produced. Receiving it year round is next best to living there. Local weeklies are much like local regional food spots: find a gem and hold on to it! ~G

[Gene]

When I came to Colorado in 1978 I started reading the Rocky. It was the morning paper and was pretty good. They did investigatory journalism, had the best comics and sports and generally good overall coverage. The editor was Michael Howard and he started there in 1975. He was the grandson of the founder of the Scripts-Howard newspaper chain. In 1981 it was discovered Howard had a serious cocaine addiction and he quit or was fired.

After that, the paper turned from a little left of center to extreme right wing in its editorial pages. This was not good policy in liberal Denver. The afternoon paper, the Denver Post, moved to the morning with a left/center editorial policy. Money was poured into the Post by it's new owner and what had been a mediocre paper became a better and better one. After a while it appeared the news side of the Rocky was getting weaker and weaker.

Between it's editorial policy and strong competition, the Rocky kept losing subscribers and eventually had to enter into a JOA (joint operating agreement) with the Post. It's been a dead man walking for years. I stuck with it until 2000 when we moved from the Denver area and couldn't get a daily paper delivered out here in the boonies.

The other sad thing is the Post has gone downhill in the last few years too. We can get the Sunday paper delivered to a box 3/4 mile away, but sometimes it comes on Monday. Five years ago it would come mid morning Sunday. The cutbacks have been so severe, we and others who get the Sunday Post around here (it's a buck a year—that's desperate) don't even pick it up for days and we rarely read it. Papers are cutting back on content, cutting back on delivery, and raising prices—pretty good way to chase away customers.

I read some analysis suggesting the NY Times figures there will only be several large papers standing in a few years and they are positioning themselves to be one of them. The analysis was in the Times, so I guess the writer has good sources. I guess we'll be down to the Washington Post, Wall St. Journal, Times, USA Today and a few others. Since the St. Petersburg Times (have I got the name right?) is a well funded nonprofit, it may survive and is a good paper. Who will cover local news? Even state news? Where have all the muckrakers gone? In the county where we live, the local papers avoid controversy for the most part and cover weddings, obits and little else. There's little critical coverage of government except the rants in the letters to the editor. The dailies in Grand Junction and Pueblo are pathetic.

So I'm sad to see the Rocky go after nearly 150 years (no, I wasn't there for the first edition), but it's been lost for a long, long time.

I used to live in Buffalo and there were two dailies: the Buffalo Evening News and the Courier Express. I read them both. Eventually the News moved to the morning was a very good paper. After I left for Colorado, the Courier Express folded (seems like papers die after I leave). Last time I saw the News, about 7 or 8 years ago, it was thin and a shell of it's former self. Once competition ends, papers generally get weak.

When I was growing up, NYC had many newspapers—we had the Herald Tribune and the Long Island Daily Press delivered. The Herald Tribune died in the early '60's and the daily Press in 1977. Often my father would bring the World Telegram home in the afternoon. That one died in the early '60's too. We got the Sunday News—best comics and photos—and that one is still around.

I've been watching newspapers disappear for a generation and I think as a nation we are weaker for it.

Gene

[thecatsandi]

Originally Posted by Silvertwinkie

It's all sad:

US metropolitan dailies that have ceased print publication since March, 2007 Rocky Mountain News
Baltimore Examiner
Kentucky Post
Cincinnati Post
King County Journal
Union City Register-Tribune
Capital Times
Halifax Daily News
Albuquerque Tribune
South Idaho Press
San Juan Star

Many more are close to closing or going strickly online only. Print media is suffering circulation since more people have turned to the web for news and info. Why not get it now instead of tomorrow morning. PC magazine went strickly online last month after 30? years of print. Business models need to adapt or they will all die.

[Gene]

The problem for newspapers and probably magazines is that the web generates far less money in advertising that print does, so the quality of coverage has to be far less in the long run. The internet side of papers has been very unsuccessful at getting people to pay for the news. And it's hard to read everything I want to read. I can go through the pages of a paper and see what I want to read (unfortunately most of it, which takes a lot of time), but getting all those stories, even with broadband, on the internet is relatively slow, I can't read my laptop in the car, on the throne, while eating, while watching TV, at least not efficiently.

Gene

[hampstead38]

"I've been watching newspapers disappear for a generation and I think as a nation we are weaker for it."

I disagree. We now have more access to information at lower cost than we ever have before. Some outlets (like one of my favorites, The Onion,) are doing, well. There are also many free daily and weekly newspapers popping up throughout the country as technology advances in desktop publishing and printing have made the barriers to entry far lower. The transactional costs related to information exchange like Craigslist have provided profound benefits for a wide range of people.

Newspaper nostalgia is like train nostalgia or general store nostalgia.

[hampstead38]

This essay appeared today... quite timely.

[Denis4x4]

When something is free, it's usually worth exactly what you pay for it! The only online money makers are the WSJ and porn sites. I suspect that CrawfordGene might lump both of them in the same boat.

The Durango Herald is still locally owned and the full edition is online for route subscribers or web subscribers. The online freebie Herald is a a couple of headlines and some local sports scores.

It's interesting to note that several more papers like the SF Examiner, SD Union and the NYTimes are in trouble. The common thread that seems to be running through the closures is the fact that almost all of them endorsed Obama, so they should be inline for bailout money!

[ROBERT CROSS]

Originally Posted by Denis4x4

.... so they should be inline for bailout money!

Little bitter are we..

[Gene]

Originally Posted by Denis4x4

The only online money makers are the WSJ and porn sites.
It's interesting to note that several more papers like the SF Examiner, SD Union and the NYTimes are in trouble.

There's plenty of free porn, but I suppose porn makes money because things that are considered immoral, always make a lot of money. Maybe the WSJ OpEd pages are immoral and that's why it has print + online subscribers of about 2M. The WSJ website was never free. Other papers made the mistake of starting their websites free and once there, you can't go back. The WSJ has a specialty audience which theoretically has more money than most to subscribe to the internet edition, though that may no longer be true. Newscorp lost a bundle last year—Murdoch paid too much for the WSJ and his NY Post continues to lose lots like it always has.

Like a lot of businesses, some newspapers loaded on debt and now have to pay it off. The Tribune papers—Chicago Tribune and LA Times are the best known—have staggering debt and are in bankruptcy. The NY Times is still profitable, but has short term debt due this year which they may have trouble refinancing and they are working hard to refinance and are fairly likely to work it out.

There are a lot of companies with short term debt problems and if credit isn't available soon, a whole lot of them will crumble and then you will know what the Great Depression was like. But this time, going to California is not a good option.

Gene