The prospects of Scripps Howard finding a buyer for The Rocky Mountain News by the Jan. 16 deadline are fading fast.
Our colleague Tracy Dingman at the New Mexico Independent offers some been-there, done-that reminiscing of the closing…
Rocky Mountain News contributor Jason Salzman wrote in a column for the newspaper last week that “putting the Rocky on the market for one month over the holidays looks like it’s not a good-faith effort to find a buyer for the newspaper.” But the observation didn’t appear in the Rocky because editor and publisher John Temple rejected the column, Salzman says in a blog post Tuesday. It’s the first time in more than four years the Rocky has refused one of his biweekly “On the Media” columns, Salzman writes.
A Web site aimed at keeping the Rocky Mountain News alive launched Sunday night as part of a campaign by the newspaper’s staff to rally public support a week after E.W. Scripps Co. put the Denver daily up for sale and said it could cease publication if no buyer emerges. The IWantMyRocky.com site urges readers to share memories and propose methods to keep the 149-year-old newspaper — Colorado’s oldest business — from closing. “We meet in this strange place in a noble effort to save the Rocky Mountain News,” Rocky columnist Mike Littwin writes. “And if we can’t save the Rocky, we can, at minimum, make some noise before we go.”
The parent company of the Denver Post disputed a report Thursday afternoon that followed Moody’s Investors Services downgrade of its credit rating to one suggesting “a substantial risk” of default. An Editor & Publisher article noted that MediaNews Group’s debt-to-earning ratio was almost as high as that carried by the Tribune Co., which filed to reorganize under Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday, but the privately held MediaNews Group said the comparison failed to take numerous factors into account and insisted the company wasn’t in danger.
The owner of the Rocky Mountain News notified the owner of the Denver Post it “planned to close the Rocky Mountain News as soon as practical” more than two weeks ago, The Post’s owner, Dean Singleton, wrote in a memo on Thursday. Earlier that day, the Rocky’s owner, E.W. Scripps Co., announced its newspaper was for sale. “As you know,” Singleton wrote in the memo, “an announced sale is usually the first step leading to a failing newspaper’s closure.”
The announcement Thursday that Denver’s Rocky Mountain News is on the block for the next 30 days starts a clock ticking that will “almost certainly” lead to the 149-year-old newspaper shutting down in 90 days, writes Alan D. Mutter, who blogs about the news business in Reflections of a Newsosaur.
Denver’s oldest newspaper — and Colorado’s oldest continually operating business — is up for sale, the parent company of the Rocky Mountain News announced Thursday. “The decision to seek a buyer for the Rocky would have been unthinkable until very recently,” EW Scripps Co. CEO Rich Boehne said in a statement, pointing to a worsening economic climate that has led to $11 million in losses so far this year.
Deputy editorial page editor Bob Ewegen resigned from the Denver Post after 36 years with the paper on Friday, according to an e-mail message sent from his account on Monday. Ewegen penned a weekly column about politics and wrote editorials for the newspaper.
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