Rocky Mountain News

This week, the Audit Bureau of Circulations released its dreaded figures. The news for the nation’s papers was pretty much bad all around, part of the ongoing New Orleans-style national funeral march for the world of daily paper-and-ink journalism.
Coming off the bonus circulation it won last year at the death of the Rocky Mountain [...]

Weeks-long rumors of the end of the Rocky Mountain Independent journalism experiment have been confirmed. On Thursday evening the three-month-old website announced to subscribers that it would cease producing content Monday, October 5. The RMI was founded by more than a dozen former editors and writers at the Rocky Mountain News, Denver’s storied tabloid-format newspaper, [...]

After a mostly distinguished 150 years spent delivering daily journalism, the Rocky Mountain News closed this past February. Thirty dedicated staffers took to the web, determined to carry the spirit of that great enterprise forward. They founded InDenverTimes. So what in blazes is now going on over there?
If you’re an older woman who likes [...]

Readers who buy The Denver Post one copy at a time had better start stocking up on those quarters. The newspaper announced Wednesday the price for its weekday and Saturday editions will jump from 50 cents to 75 cents starting Monday. The Sunday Post will continue to cost $1.50 in the metro area.

A few months after the demise of the Rocky Mountain News, another western paper bites the dust. Last week, Gannet shuttered the Tucson Citizen, which hobbled along under bad management for years.

The Citizen’s closing edition has already become an ignominious artifact of the end of the newspaper era, mostly for the classy middle-finger salute it raised to the Internet and online journalism:

Attorney General John Suthers told Colorado residents to be on the lookout for door-to-door scammers selling subscriptions to the “new” Rocky Mountain News, a Denver newspaper that ceased publication in February. According to a warning issued Friday by Suthers and AARP Elder Watch, salesmen have been selling the bogus subscriptions in Colorado Springs, telling victims they can only accept cash.

Mike Littwin, the former Rocky Mountain News columnist who’s now at the Denver Post — one of the few lucky transplants — weighs in this morning on Boulder Rep. Jared Polis’ comment about new media’s killing the News and stating that was “mostly a good thing.” Littwin is justifiably offended. His paper died. Many of his hardworking and talented colleagues and friends are out on the streets, and that is a tragedy.

But Littwin is playing at naif — and that won’t work.

On the day Denver lost one of its major metro newspapers, the Rocky Mountain News, there are signs that even small-town community newspapers in Colorado — once believed to be relatively bulletproof — are starting to struggle.

My first paid byline was in the Rocky Mountain News in 1988 – a college football story that was a minor scoop on the Denver Post.

Six months after Tweeting the funeral of a 3-year-old — a decision that caused some controversy — the Rocky Mountain News Twitter feed covered the death of the Rocky itself.

“Scripps CEO Rich Boehne just announced the last edition of the Rocky Mountain News will be tomorrow, Feb. 27,” the Rocky’s newsroom Twitter announced at noon from the meeting where employees learned their fate.